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Selina Meyer might not have faith in Americans, but the woman who plays her, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, absolutely does. “The American people are go-getters,” she says in the new issue of PEOPLE. “When there’s a problem, they roll up their sleeves.” The star, 59, who is isolating in California with husband Brad Hall, 62, and sons Henry, 28, and Charlie, 23, has been watching the coverage and witnessing the determination shown by people as they power through the coronavirus pandemic. It’s one of the reasons she believes climate change can also be overcome. For example, she cites, simple changes make a...

WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State John Kerry charged Thursday that the Trump administration was using the coronavirus pandemic as a cover to weaken key environmental regulations that will “kill more Americans.” “It’s a tragedy. It’s stupid. It’s absolutely counterproductive,” Kerry said during an interview on Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast when asked about the Trump administration’s controversial decision that day to loosen rules on the release of mercury and other toxic chemicals from coal and oil-fired power plants. “George Orwell never conceived of quite such a topsy-turvy situation,” he added. “And I don’t think anybody’s ever dreamt we’d have a...

Earth is off to a hot start in 2020. On the heels of the warmest January in recorded history and the second-warmest February, the planet has now logged its second-hottest March on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday. It’s just the latest milestone in what NOAA says is a clear, long-term warming trend. And though there are nine months left in the year, the agency’s models are already suggesting that there’s a good chance that 2020 could end up as the warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880. “It does look like there’s a better-than-half probability that...

Opening windows in buildings, including our homes, may prevent the spread of the coronavirus, scientists believe Experts in health, the built environment and microbiology at the University of Oregon and the University of California, Davis, made the recommendations by reviewing existing studies on germs including SARS-CoV-2 (the virus which causes COVID-19 disease). They also looked at data on other members of the large coronavirus family of bugs which trigger severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). They published their findings in the journal mSystems

BRUSSELS - European politicians, CEOs, lawmakers and activists called on Tuesday for green investment to restart growth after the coronavirus pandemic, saying fighting climate change and promoting biodiversity would rebuild stronger economies. “After the crisis, the time will come to rebuild,” said a joint letter signed by 180 political decision-makers, business leaders, trade unions, NGOs and think tanks urging a green stimulus for growth. “The transition to a climate-neutral economy, the protection of biodiversity and the transformation of agri-food systems have the potential to rapidly deliver jobs, growth ... and to contribute to building more resilient societies.” Calling fallout from...

Every year, 150 climate scientists fly far into the wilderness and bore deep into Greenland’s largest glacier. Their work is complicated and important. The EastGRIP project is trying to understand how ice streams underneath the glacier are pushing vast amounts of ice into the ocean, and how this contributes to rising sea levels. But this year the drills will be silent. The ice streams will go unmeasured. The reason is the coronavirus. The fallout from measures to contain the outbreak have made the research impossible. Greenland is closed to foreigners. Its government is worried any outbreak could be particularly dangerous...

The coronavirus crisis calls for an urgent review of Germany's climate targets under goals set by the European Union, the leader of the economic council of the conservative Christian Democrat party (CDU) said on Saturday. The COVID-19 pandemic is "putting the German economy to the test," and the EU should consider a "deferment of climate policy targets," Wolfgang Steiger said in comments published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Steiger said the fallout from the pandemic on the economy could amount to a new "de-industrialization" of Germany. Experts are predicting a global recession as a result of the business shutdown...

Paris (AFP) - Global warming will cause "catastrophic" biodiversity loss across the world if greenhouse gas emissions aren't curbed, with some ecosystems liable to collapse as soon as 2030, according to new research into where and when die-offs may occur. Earth has never in human history warmed so quickly or uniformly as currently, but a variety of factors affect temperatures in individual regions, with significant seasonal and geographic variation. Scientists predict that at the current level of manmade carbon emissions, Earth is on course to heat up to four degrees Celsius by 2100. Instead of looking at global trends, researchers...

... Various experts and intellectuals forecast warnings of things to come if we don't change our ways. These are mostly people from academia... "You must do as I say to avoid this catastrophe." If that were all there was to the manipulation, it would be a little thin and might not work. The element of time is critical here.... Take, for example, global cooling. It is not effective to claim that if we don't do X or refrain from doing Y, life as we know it will end tomorrow morning. We can't change things much in part of a day,...

COVID-19 is not a climate-change pandemic - as far as we know, nothing about the emergence or spread of the coronavirus bears the recognizable imprint of global warming. But if the disease and our utter inability to respond to it terrifies you about our future staring down climate change, it should, not just as a “fire drill” for climate change generally but as a test run for all the diseases that will be unleashed in the decades ahead by warming. The virus is a terrifying harbinger of future pandemics that will be brought about if climate change continues to so...

SEATTLE - A statistical model cited by the White House generated a slightly less grim figure Monday for a first wave of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. - a projection designed to help officials plan for the worst, including having enough hospital staff, beds and ventilators. The only problem with this bit of relatively good news? It’s almost certainly wrong. All models are wrong. Some are just less wrong than others - and those are the ones that public health officials rely on. Welcome to the grimace-and-bear-it world of modeling. “The key thing is that you want...

Jane Fonda claims she received preferential treatment when she was arrested during a climate change protest because she is white and famous. The 82-year-old actress was detained four times last year during weekly demonstrations in Washington. She revealed that on one occasion she spent a night in jail and used her £700 red wool coat to bed down. […] “I’m white and I’m famous and I think orders came down from the attorney general to handle me with kid gloves,” Miss Fonda told Elle USA. […] “There was a woman who was very cold and I loaned her my coat....

Geneva (AFP) - Though factories have shut, planes have been grounded and cars left in the garage, the coronavirus pandemic is having very little impact on climate change, the World Meteorological Organization said Wednesday. Any reductions in pollution and carbon dioxide emissions are likely to be temporary, said Lars Peter Riishojgaard, from the infrastructure department of the WMO, a United Nations agency based in Geneva. "It does not mean much for climate," he told a virtual press conference. Riishojgaard said there was a lot of media speculation about what impact the global pandemic might have on the climate, greenhouse gas...

Rising temperatures may be having a profound physical impact on one of the world's favourite songbirds. Researchers in Spain found that over a 20-year period, nightingales had evolved smaller wingspans. The scientists say this is linked to a changing climate in the region which has seen the early onset of spring and increased drought. They are concerned that this could affect the bird's ability to migrate in winter. Famed for its ability to sing, the nightingale has a very rich repertoire as it is able to produce over 1,000 different sounds, compared to just 340 by skylarks. Although common in...

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump is expected to relax ambitious Obama-era vehicle mileage standards and raise the ceiling on damaging fossil fuel emissions for years to come, gutting one of the United States’ single-biggest efforts against climate change. The Trump administration is expected to release a final rule Tuesday on mileage standards through 2026, watering down a tough Obama mileage standard that would have encouraged automakers globally to ramp up production of electric vehicles and more fuel-efficient gasoline vehicles. Trump’s Cabinet heads have continued a push to rollback public health and environment regulations despite the coronavirus outbreak riveting the world’s...

We've been living in a dream. We climb into jet planes and fly across continents, never giving the accomplishment a second thought. We drive to grocery stores, assuming the shelves will be stocked with endless boxes of food. And every day we plug our devices into the wall, sure that electricity will flow from the outlet. It's time to wake up. The international COVID-19 pandemic is many things, but its deepest impact may be fostering a recognition that this machine of civilization that we built is a whole lot more fragile than we thought. And that is why, in the...

It’s unnerving, and perhaps instructive, that the arrangements that elites have been prescribing for dealing with what they call our most dangerous environmental threat (climate change, formerly known as global warming) are almost precisely the opposite of the arrangements deployed to deal with the more immediate threat of the coronavirus. To reduce the carbon dioxide emissions thought to produce catastrophic climate change, Americans have been urged to cluster in large, densely populated cities. Large apartment buildings with small dwelling units, it is claimed, consume less energy and emit less carbon per capita than 2,500-square-foot houses spread out on suburban cul-de-sacs...

The number of people worldwide struggling with extreme heat and humidity by the end of the century could be more than four times as many as today if planet-warming emissions continue to rise, hiking economic losses and health costs, scientists have warned. Spending on mental health, in particular, could soar as more families have trouble sleeping and working, and heat aggravates existing mental health problems, one of two new studies found. "Heat and humidity extremes have real impacts on health and productivity," said Bob Kopp, director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University, and an...

Both the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are global crises with the power to derail economies and kill millions of people. Society has moved far more aggressively to address the coronavirus than it has the climate crisis. But some experts wonder if the unprecedented global mobilization to slow the pandemic might help pave the way for more dramatic climate action. Leah Stokes, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara, pointed out that aggressive steps to reduce planet-warming emissions — such as investing in solar and wind power, switching to electric cars and requiring more efficient buildings — wouldn’t be nearly...

Louis Rosemont called Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood home for almost 40 years. He was part of one of the first waves of immigrants to build the community after fleeing a violent dictatorship in his homeland. But he has recently found himself exiled again — priced out of his home by rising rents as climate change rearranges the Miami real estate market. Little Haiti is a historically low-income neighborhood that sits inland, on land at double the elevation of wealthier neighborhoods along the beachfront. In Miami, a city often considered ground zero for the impacts of climate change, sea level rise...