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A Maryland man is doing well after surgeons and clinicians from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the University of Maryland Medical Center performed the first successful transplant of a genetically modified pig’s heart Friday to save his life, officials from the health system said Monday. After being diagnosed with terminal heart disease, the patient, 57-year-old David Bennett, had been deemed ineligible for a conventional heart transplant at the University of Maryland Medical Center and other transplant centers around the country. Doctors will monitor him in the hospital over the next several weeks or months to ensure that...

Former VP Al Gore on his message to Donald Trump: "I would say please do the right thing. Acknowledge reality. Stop hurting this country. Stop undermining democracy." Clip...

Scientific American magazine announced Monday that it would stop using the term "climate change" in articles about man-made global warming and substitute "climate emergency" instead.

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next...

Gore said, “Not much joy in answering your question because, you know, I try to navigate away from a partisan dimension of this. We’re in an election year, and I’m in a different political party than the president. So you can take what I say with that as background. Really what’s at stake here is so much more important than that. And honestly, he has failed as president, particularly on this challenge. The warnings were ignored. I spent eight years starting every single day with a lengthy report from the intelligence committee, and there are very few occasions where there...

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with more than $6.8 trillion under its control, becomes the latest signatory to Climate Action 100+, an influential big-money pact that’s pushing - although with spotty results so far - many of the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitters to take action on man-made climate change. BlackRock joins more than 370 global investors, including pension giant CalPERS and HSBC Global Asset Management, already participating in the initiative, which aims to sway companies ranging from fossil-fuel producers to consumer-product conglomerates to be carbon neutral by 2050. With BlackRock on board, total assets under management represented by Climate...

JOHANNESBURG - Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and veteran of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, joined former U.S. vice president Al Gore on Tuesday to call on nations and companies to ditch fossil fuels to head off climate change. Tutu, who is 88 and has been in hospital over the past few years owing to ill health, met Gore in Cape Town on Tuesday. “Any organisation committed to operating responsibly in this new decade has a moral imperative to stop participating in financing the destruction of human civilization’s future,” the pair said in a statement. “Corporations, governments and...

Orlando is closing out 2019 at about a tenth of a degree behind the hottest year on record for the city, which was 2015, according to the National Weather Service. Overall, Central Florida temperatures this year are tracking along with much of the Florida peninsula, where cities from Jacksonville to Gainesville to St. Petersburg to Miami are likely to record their hottest or second-hottest years on record. “Since 2015, we have been warmer than normal consistently,” said Derrick Weitlich, climate-program leader at the National Weather Service office in Melbourne. “The majority of sites in our area have been in the...

TEN YEARS AGO TODAY AL GORE PREDICTED THE NORTH POLE WOULD BE COMPLETELY ICE FREE IN FIVE YEARS On December 13 & 14, 2009, professor, prophet, and soothsayer Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap could be completely ice free within the next five to seven years Gore made his prediction at COP15 Copenhagen which ran from Dec 7 – Dec 18, 2009, where he repeatedly referenced “state-of-the-art” computer modeling to suggest that the north polar ice cap may lose all of its ice by 2014. “Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire...

Two chimera piglets containing monkey DNA have been born in China. Although both died within a week and appeared to be normal, the baby animals had genetic material from cynomolgus monkeys in their heart, liver, spleen, lung and skin. Scientists said the research, which required more than 4,000 embryos to get the piglets, aims to find ways of growing human organs in animals for transplantation. “This is the first report of full-term monkey-pig chimeras”, Tang Hai at the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing told New Scientist. Five-day old piglet embryos had monkey stem cells...

Well-known climate alarmist and retired actor/director Robert Redford continued his assault on President Trump on Friday by calling the GOP official “one unqualified authoritarian” whose “depraved indifference to the climate crisis” does not define “Americans' commitments or the character of our nation.” “The clock is ticking so loudly” that “the rest of the world can hear it,” he stated. “With enough outrage, enough action and enough voices rising together, we just might have a chance to compel a reversal of this nonsense.” His opinion article was posted on CNN's website, where Redford claimed that "millions" of people were "shocked" by...

Tuesday on MSNBC’s “All In,” former Vice President Al Gore said while he understands the political concerns, he believes the only “remedy” for President Donald Trump’s “obscene behavior” is impeachment. Gore said, “I deeply respect Speaker Pelosi and her calculation of the risks and benefits and the way she’s been handling it. And I think Chairman Nadler is doing a superb job. Where I come down on this is I get the political calculus, but it can’t end there because of the risks that we end up normalizing the most obscene behavior I’ve ever seen from a president of the...

City students who skip school for the national Climate Strike walkout next week won’t be punished, Education Department officials said Thursday. “I’m thankful that DOE made the decision to support our students’ powerful path towards change by excusing absences for the Climate Strike," said City Council Member Rafael Espinal, Jr. who urged the move at a rally with kids at city hall. “The climate crisis is not slowing down and our students aren’t either by leading the fight against it and we should be doing everything we can to encourage their leadership,” Espinal, (D-Brooklyn) said. Students across the city will...

Six New Icebreakers To Be Built For Canadian Coast Guard By: Xavier Vavasseur August 13, 2019 10:54 AM The Canadian Coast Guard will be procuring six new program icebreakers to replace its current aging fleet of icebreakers. The announcement was made on Aug. 2 by Canada’s Minister for Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, Jonathan Wilkinson. Minister Wilkinson also announced that the Government of Canada is officially launching a competitive process, through an Invitation to Qualify, to add a third Canadian shipyard as a strategic partner under the National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS). This new shipyard will build the new...

We think of air conditioning as a “first world” luxury, but it’s really more of an American one. In Europe, fewer than 5% of households have air conditioning, according to the International Energy Agency, and even in hot regions like Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, only 8% of households have it. In the US, nearly 90% of households are air conditioned. In New York, where the summer reverberates with the hum of air conditioners, that percentage seems even higher. Along certain avenues, you walk in a sprinkle of condensation dripping from row after row of window units above,...

Former Vice President Al Gore said his predictions from 2006 about climate change over the next ten years have come true and claimed part of the damage has been irreversible. "You said back in 2006 that the world would reach the point of no return if drastic measures weren't taken to reduce greenhouse gases by 2016. Is it already too late?" ABC News' Jonathan Karl asked during "This Week with George Stephanopolous" on Sunday. "Well, some changes, unfortunately, have already been locked in place," Gore replied. "Sea level increases are going to continue no matter what we do now. But,...

‘We had expected more melting’: Thick Arctic ice forces Norwegian climate research icebreaker to turn back ... Global warming research ship forced to retreat due to 'massive' Arctic sea ice! "The ship will monitor the environmental and climate conditions in marine areas in the Arctic and Antarctic," according to its website. The ship is designed to "perform a range of research missions, including climate change." The research vessel and icebreaker "Crown Prince Haakon" turned almost 85 degrees north. They went northeast of Svalbard on their way to the North Pole, but met thicker and more massive sea ice than expected."...Thick...

Since its debut in June, the Florida Climate Reporting Network has sparked interest from a growing number of media outlets — even beyond Florida. The network is emblematic of a trend that's been seen throughout the cash-strapped news business: A collaborative streak. Competitors are teaming up on certain projects while still competing on other stories. The editors hope that readers are the beneficiaries. Right now the Tampa Bay Times, Miami Herald, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, and WLRN Public Media make up the network, and they are banding together to increase local reporting about the climate...

A glacier in West Antarctica, known as "the world's most dangerous," could completely melt away and cause a rapid and "catastrophic" sea-level rise, a new study warns. The study, published in the scientific journal PNAS, notes that the Thwaites Glacier is at a proverbial "tipping point" that could cause a neverending flow of ice into the world's oceans. “If you trigger this instability, you don’t need to continue to force the ice sheet by cranking up temperatures. It will keep going by itself, and that’s the worry,” said the study's lead author and Georgia Tech professor Alex Robel, in a...

**SNIP** It depends. Some carbon-offset projects – which are supposed to compensate for the heat-trapping gases you release to the atmosphere by taking a plane trip, for example – are scams. In one notorious case, the Vatican was presented with offset certificates for millions of trees that were never planted. Even if a project actually exists, offsets have the potential to go wrong in other ways. Say you’re promised that your purchase will help pay for a new wind farm, but then you learn that the wind farm was going to be built even without the help of offsets. You’d...