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On Oct. 11, 2016, Michael Foster and two companions rose before dawn, left their budget hotel in Grand Forks, N.D., and drove a white rental sedan toward the Canadian border, diligently minding the speed limit. As the driver, Sam Jessup, and a documentary filmmaker, Deia Schlosberg, recorded events from the back seat. For months, he’d imagined his next actions: He would snip the padlock that secured the gate and approach the blunt length of vertical pipe in the center of the enclosure — the stem of a shut-off valve for the 2,700-mile-long Keystone Pipeline. What neither the sheriff’s department nor...

"Save Tuvalu, save the world" was the battle cry at the 2015 climate conference in Peru.  The prime minister of that tiny Pacific island nation begged the conference to keep his country from "disappearing." Independent: Enele Spoaga arrived in Brussels on Monday to call on [E.U.] leaders for support ahead of the next [U.N.] climate change summit in Paris in December. The group of islands, home to just 10,000 people, is under direct threat by rising sea levels due to climate change as it is no more than 4m above sea level at its highest level. "If this island disappears...

The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is getting bigger, but I don’t expect most environmentalists to celebrate On the one hand, this report from phys.org is good news for anyone who has been truly worried that the land area of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu was getting smaller due to the rising sea level caused by global warming. Although the sea level is indeed rising due to global warming, wave patterns and sediment dumped by storms have actually caused the land area to get bigger. The study was conducted by the University of Auckland.On the other hand, for environmentalists who...

The most cataclysmic scenarios for global warming have been ruled out, according to a new report from the University of British Columbia. But the report also warns that the climate will still destabilize, wreaking havoc on the planet. According to the report, it all comes down to a reduction in the use of coal. Bloomberg: The researchers contend that current goals of reducing coal, oil[,] and gas consumption may be closer than we think, thus allowing us to set the bar even higher in our efforts to reduce pollution.  The bad news is that this is good news in the way a...

... Climate change isn’t just about the planet. It’s about justice: racial, social, socioeconomic, reproductive, and environmental. It’s about immigration reform, LGBTQIA+ rights, and religious freedom. I know this interconnectedness, and fervently believed in it when I wrote my initial essay submission last year. However, in this moment, I find myself unable to think of climate change on its own. When Trump’s policy is climate destruction, it doesn’t take place in silos. If anything has changed in my mind since last year, it is that my connection to so many struggles for social justice are even more strongly at the...

A Princeton physicist has shared an inconvenient truth of his own--climate change models are based on an alternate reality. "And I know they don't work," Princeton University physicist William Happer says in a video produced by Prager U. "They haven't worked in the past." "They don't work now. And it's hard to imagine when, if ever, they’ll work in the foreseeable future." "In the video, Happer argues that even supercomputers used to predict the weather and forecast future global warming aren't strong enough to capture the complexity of Earth's atmosphere, including cloud cover and natural ocean cycles," Michael Batasch, who...

Add this to the list of decisions affected by climate change: Should I have children? It is not an easy time for people to feel hopeful, with the effects of global warming no longer theoretical, projections becoming more dire and governmental action lagging. And while few, if any, studies have examined how large a role climate change plays in people’s childbearing decisions, it loomed large in interviews with more than a dozen people ages 18 to 43. A 32-year-old who always thought she would have children can no longer justify it to herself. A Mormon has bucked the expectations of...

The White House plans to withdraw Kathleen Hartnett White's nomination to head the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House official confirmed to CNN Saturday. Hartnett White, who would have overseen environmental and energy policies across the government, had described the belief in "global warming" as a "kind of paganism" for "secular elites" during a September 2016 interview on "The Right Perspective," an online conservative radio show. She has also said the goal of climate activists and the United Nations was an all-powerful, one-world government and "planetary management," KFile reported. President Donald Trump announced Hartnett White's nomination in October and...

A free-market think tank is asking the Securities and Exchange Commission for an investigation into possible bond fraud by local and municipal governments that claim they will be harmed by climate change. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) says a number of municipalities, most of them in California, are suing oil and gas companies for future damages because of climate change, and in doing so are often explicit in their forecasts of predicted sea-level rise and monetary damages. However, when those same cities sell bonds to investors, they're being far more generic in their claims of future catastrophe. "In their suits...

The U.S. is still on schedule to meet its obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement despite its decision to pull out of the accord, Gore said Thursday"Several governors of our largest states, hundreds of cities and thousands of U.S. businesses are now ensuring that the U.S. will not only meet but exceed the commitments it made under the Paris Agreement," Gore, who was speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said Thursday. Under the agreement, reached at the end of 2015, world leaders committed to making sure global warming stays "well below" two degrees Celsius...

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is settled science, proclaim the predictors of weather doomsday. Settled Science? Science evolves continuously and can never be settled, unless, of course, the ‘settled’ subject is dogma, not science. Is it just a ‘my way or the highway’ attempt by vested interests to close discussion on their terms? Consider the term “peer reviewed”. Science evolves through the contribution of new ideas which are published so that their peers (other scientists) can review, validate, contribute, or argue with them. If we had accepted Niels Bohr’s version of the atom as settled science, there would have been no...

Is climate change losing its luster as an issue for the Hollywood left? Or have so many "Inconvenient Truths" about global warming been debunked that it has forced Hollywood into an embarrassed silence? The sequel to Al Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth released in 2017 and titled An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, failed to pick up a single Oscar nomination. The 2006 film won "Best Documentary" and "Best Song."

France failed to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in 2016, the government said Monday, just a month after President Emmanuel Macron warned that “we are losing the battle” against global warming. The environment ministry said the country emitted 463 tons of greenhouse gases, measured as carbon dioxide equivalents, or 3.6 percent more than its goal. It attributed the slip in part to lower oil prices, which can prompt people and businesses to consume more in areas such as transportation or heating. But emissions were down 15.3 percent from 1990 levels. […] … [T]he disappointing 2016 results show...

Earth’s surface will almost certainly not warm up four or five degrees Celsius by 2100, according to a study released Wednesday which, if correct, voids worst-case UN climate change predictions. A revised calculation of how greenhouse gases drive up the planet’s temperature reduces the range of possible end-of-century outcomes by more than half, researchers said in the report, published in the journal Nature. “Our study all but rules out very low and very high climate sensitivities,” said lead author Peter Cox, a professor at the University of Exeter. How effectively the world slashes CO2 and methane emissions, improves energy efficiency,...

Recently a rash of lawsuits have been filed by California municipalities targeting energy companies. The claim these lawsuits make is that these California communities face imminent adverse environmental impacts due to climate change, caused by energy producers, which will force them to spend billions on infrastructural projects to mitigate weather- and sea level-related disasters. They claim, in fact, that the magnitude of these impending natural disasters is predictable, based on scientific modeling of the effects of climate change. Thus, these energy companies should fork over vast sums to the affected communities, to compensate them for their prospective woes. The holes...

The Pentagon scrubbed its latest National Defense Strategy of all references to climate change, an Orwellian rhetorical shift away from a scientific reality at an agency that has long avoided the issue’s politics. A summary document released Friday morning makes no mention of “climate,” “warming,” “planet,” “sea levels” or even “temperature.” All 22 uses of the word “environment” refer to the strategic or security landscape. The 11-page memo, signed by Defense Secretary James Mattis, is the first update to the policy in a decade. It’s unlikely the Department of Defense will release a full National Defense Strategy report; instead, the...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Winter is off to a late start in parts of the nation’s largest — and usually coldest — state. Months of higher-than-normal temperatures in parts of rural Alaska have opened dangerous gaps in frozen rivers that residents use to travel from village to village and to hunting grounds, since there are no roads. One troublesome ice highway is the half-mile-wide Kuskokwim River, where a man died New Year’s Eve after he and five family members — traveling on a snowmobile and sled — fell into a gaping hole. The others survived.

TUCSON — Wildfires, extreme storms and major weather events can seem like a distant threat, but for those whose lives have been directly impacted by these events, the threat hits much closer to home. As reports of such incidents continue to rise, researchers at the University of Arizona set out to learn more about how people's perception of the threat of global climate change affects their mental health. They found that while some people have little anxiety about the Earth's changing climate, others are experiencing high levels of stress, and even depression, based on their perception of the threat of...

Manmade climate change is now dwarfing the influence of natural trends on the climate, scientists say. Last year was the second or third hottest year on record - after 2016 and on a par with 2015, the data shows. But those two years were affected by El Niño - the natural phenomenon centred on the tropical Pacific Ocean which works to boost temperatures worldwide. Take out this natural variability and 2017 would probably have been the warmest year yet, the researchers say. The acting director of the UK Met Office, Prof Peter Stott, told BBC News: "It's extraordinary that temperatures...

In the mountains of western Iran, the province of Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari is known for mile-high lagoons, flowing rivers and wetlands that attract thousands of species of migratory birds. But years of diminishing rainfall have shriveled water sources. Conditions worsened, residents say, after Iranian authorities began funneling water 60 miles away to the lowland city of Esfahan, sparking protests as far back as 2014. The uprising — in which at least 21 people died and thousands were arrested before authorities reimposed order — had many sparks: rising prices, persistent unemployment, bank collapses, a wide wealth gap, corruption in the theocracy. But an...