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A warmer world makes for nastier hurricanes. Scientists say they are wetter, possess more energy and intensify faster. Their storm surges are more destructive because climate change has already made the seas rise. And lately, the storms seem to be stalling more often and thus dumping more rain. Study after study shows that climate change, in general, makes hurricanes worse. But determining the role of global warming in a specific storm such as Hurricane Florence or Typhoon Mangkhut is not so simple — at least not without detailed statistical and computer analyses.

Continents and oceans in the northern hemisphere began to warm with industrial-era fossil fuel emissions nearly 200 years ago, pushing back the origins of human-induced climate change to the mid-19th century. The first signs of warming from the rise in greenhouse gases which came hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution appear as early as 1830 in the tropical oceans and the Arctic, meaning that climate change witnessed today began about 180 years ago. Researchers in Australia found evidence for the early onset of warming after trawling through 500 years of data on tree rings, corals and ice cores that together form...

President Obama’s recently announced energy and environment policies have been tried in many countries, always with the same result: abject failure. Yet when critics point this out, explaining that “the U.S. economy will lose millions of jobs and billions of dollars in growth,” Obama simply waves their objections away: “Let’s face it,” the president answers. “That’s what [critics] always say. … Every time… the warnings of the cynics have been wrong.” Other leaders, especially those in Europe who are further down the green path than is America, know better.The deputy leader of the German Green Party in the Bundestag, Oliver...

TAN AN TAY VILLAGE, Vietnam (Reuters) - As John Kerry's boat winds its way along the turbid waters of the Cai Nuoc river in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, the U.S. Secretary of State is taken back to the time he spent here as a commander of an American patrol boat during the Vietnam War. But it is not only the past that brings Kerry to this remote part of the Mekong, the 12th largest river in the world. He is here to deliver a message about the growing threat of climate change and the impact it will have on the delta...

Image from Tundrabuggy.com – comedy added by WUWTFrom NPR: The Inconvenient Truth About Polar BearsIn 2008, reports of polar bears’ inevitable march toward extinction gripped headlines. Stories of thinning Arctic ice and even polar bear cannibalism combined to make these predators into a powerful symbol in the debate about climate change.The headlines caught Zac Unger’s attention, and he decided to write a book about the bears.Unger made a plan to move to Churchill, Manitoba, a flat, gray place on the Hudson Bay in northern Canada accessible only by train or plane. For a few months out of the year,...

The Met Office Bullhockey Posted on January 4, 2011 by Anthony Watts METODART - Met Office Digital Advanced Reckoning TechnologyWe all know they are caught up in the warming meme, but the Met Office in the UK is now trying to spin the idea that they had truly forecasted a cold and snowy winter, but they just didn’t tell anyone. The rationale? We skeptics here (and elsewhere) are a bunch of meanies for making fun of the BBQ summer that never happened, so we’ll keep it to ourselves.The spin you are about to witness is Maytag quality spin. It is shameless,...

What Mark Scott admitted as the managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was really what everyone knew anyway: the ABC aims to please the gatekeepers of the pay-checks (which is, after all exactly what we’d expect from most organizations in the long run).What makes it telling is that he could forget that he’s never supposed to admit this. I mean, they promote themselves in ads as “our ABC”. It’s supposed to serve the people, not the government. The key problem is that although the people pay for the ABC, they don’t hold the purse strings. And to some extent,...