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OSLO - Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a “gold standard” level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday. “Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” the U.S.-led team wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change of satellite measurements of rising temperatures over the past 40 years. They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming. Such a...

OSLO - The $8 billion Green Climate Fund, set up to help developing nations tackle global warming, named Yannick Glemarec of France as its new executive director on Monday after his predecessor quit. Former leader Howard Bamsey of Australia stepped down in July after what the fund described as a “difficult” board meeting marred by disputes between rich and poor nations about how to select projects in developing nations. “Yannick Glemarec brings 30 years of experience in climate change, development, finance and their inter-relationships,” the fund said in a statement. He has previously had senior jobs at U.N. Women and...

Don't watch the Oscars tonight.

WASHINGTON, DC – You might recall the films, The Invisible Man, starring Claude Rains, and The Invisible Woman, starring Virginia Bruce. These works of fiction entertained audiences in the 1940s. But, it’s the 21st Century and it turns out invisible people really exist. “They live among us in the guise of senior citizens,” according to Dan Weber, president of AMAC, a powerful senior advocacy organization. San Francisco-based psychologist and psychotherapist Tamara McClintock Greenberg put it this way in an article for Psychology Today: “Why people are increasingly treated as if they’re invisible as they age (more prevalent it seems, for...

"Today #MaduroRegime killed unarmed civilians of their own country to keep food & medicine from entering They they celebrated murder & burning of trucks carrying aid as a victory The world & those inside #Venezuela will reflect on what happened today & it will give rise to action" US Senator Marco Rubio On Twitter 2/23/2019 From the moment that Interim President Juan Guaido designated today, February 23rd, as the day for humanitarian aid to be brought into Venezuela it was obvious that this day was going to be a day of confrontation between the opposition forces and the Maduro government....

The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development is in the process of revamping its science standards. It hopes to have a draft released by March. But for the past 13 years, teachers have been working with a curriculum that gives little guidance on how to explain the science behind one of Alaska’s most pressing problems: climate change. This week, we’re going inside two Alaska classrooms to learn how teachers and students are navigating these difficult conversations. Bryan Smith is the kind of teacher who goes by his first name in his classroom at Polaris K-12 School in Anchorage. You...

Northwestern tribes and the University of Washington climate group have joined forces to help protect salmon, roots, trees, and other important resources. Historically, snow from the Cascade and Blue mountains would melt slowly over months, releasing a flow of cold water that sustained salmon and other wildlife in the Columbia River. Today, there’s less snow, and the spring thaw is hitting earlier. “I felt sickened by the death of these salmon,” says Don Sampson, climate change project manager for the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, a group of 57 tribes in six western states. The disaster will linger, he adds,...

New homes should be banned from connecting to the gas grid within six years to tackle climate change, UK government advisers say. They want new-build homes in the countryside to be warmed by heat pumps - and cooking done on induction hobs, rather than using gas boilers and hobs. In cities, new housing estates and flats should be kept warm by networks of hot water, says the report. The water could be heated by waste heat from industry. An alternative approach is to use heat pumps, which draw warmth from the sea or lakes; or burn gas from waste. The...

Climate change was responsible for the majority of under-reported humanitarian disasters last year, according to analysis of more than a million online news stories. Whole populations were affected by food crises in countries ravaged by by drought and hurricanes such as Ethiopia and Haiti, yet neither crisis generated more than 1,000 global news stories each. In Madagascar, more than a million people went hungry as corn, cassava and rice fields withered under drought and severe El Niño conditions. Almost half the country’s children have been stunted, but their suffering sparked few headlines. Sven Harmeling, the climate change lead for Care...

PICO RIVERA, Calif. -- The Whittier Narrows Dam stands like a guardian between the San Gabriel Mountains and the towns downstream from them. Its job is to make sure storms don't become floods. But recent government studies said the dam may not be strong enough. "That's frightening. I had no idea. That's terrible," resident Mary Louise Garcia said. Garcia has reason to be concerned. She's lived directly beneath the dam for the last 60 years. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the odds of a megastorm that could wipe out the Whittier Narrows Dam, as well as the Santa Fe...

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.” Global warming was once a worry about too much heat. It implied that man-made carbon emissions had so warmed the planet that life as we knew it would soon be imperiled without radical changes in consumer lifestyles. Yet in the last 30 years, record cold spells, inordinate snow levels and devastating rains have been common. How to square that circle? Substitute “climate change” for global warming. Presto! Any radical change in weather...

With data and modelling from almost 8,000 coal power plants, researchers present the most comprehensive global picture to date of climate and human health impacts from coal power generation. To estimate where action is most urgently required, the research group led by Stefanie Hellweg from ETH Zurich's Institute of Environmental Engineering modelled and calculated the undesired side effects of coal power for each of the 7,861 power plant units in the world. "More than half of the health effects can be traced back to just one tenth of the power plants. These power plants should be upgraded or shut down...

Ottawa city councillors approved nearly $800 million in annual spending on garbage, water and the environment on Tuesday, but still came under fire from residents who say the city isn't devoting enough attention to combating climate change. The City of Ottawa plans to spend $77 million in 2019 to run its garbage, recycling and compost programs, up $2.5 million from the 2018 budget. Because the city has so much infrastructure to maintain - thousands of kilometres of water mains, two drinking water purification plants and a sewage treatment plant - it also comes with a hefty capital budget: $264 million...

Hoosiers will heat homes and businesses less but rely more on air conditioning as Indiana’s climate warms, said a group of Purdue University researchers. Indiana residents will also get more of their energy from natural gas and renewable sources as those become more cost-effective throughout the rest of the century, according to a report by the Purdue Climate Change Research Center. For energy utilities, the impact could mean adding storage capacity for additional demand and planning for brown-outs. “They just need to be on their toes and shape the energy supply with the timing, the amount, the locations where they’re...

Growing meat in the laboratory may do more damage to the climate in the long run than meat from cattle, say scientists. Researchers are looking for alternatives to traditional meat because farming animals is helping to drive up global temperatures. However, meat grown in the lab may make matters worse in some circumstances. Researchers say it depends on how the energy to make the lab meat is produced. In 2013 a Dutch team of scientists produced what they claimed was the world's first burger grown in a lab. Since then, there's been a lot of hype and noise but some...

A scientist who raised early alarms about climate change and popularized the term "global warming" has died. Wallace Smith Broecker was 87. The longtime Columbia University professor and researcher died Monday at a New York City hospital, according to a spokesman for the university's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Kevin Krajick said Broecker had been ailing in recent months.

India has great disparities when it comes to food access: while 194 million people go hungry to bed daily, another 30 million are battling obesity. And now, a new challenge has been added to the mix: climate change. Rising temperatures, variable rainfall, extreme weather events and loss of agricultural land due to droughts and floods are impacting food production, availability and access around the world. A 2011 FAO report quotes research predicting a 20% increase in global child malnutrition, compared to a world not weighed down by the burden of climate change. But what does climate change have to do...

International targets to cut emissions and limit climate change will be missed due to rises in deforestation and delays in changing how humans use land, a new study warns. Nearly 100 countries pledged to make their use of land less damaging to the climate, mainly by limiting deforestation rates and boosting forest restocking, when they signed the Paris Agreement in 2015. But those commitments were unrealistic and need to be stepped up dramatically, according to researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology who pointed to inaction by richer countries and a rise in deforestation in several countries since the treaty...

Dramatic rises in atmospheric methane are threatening to derail plans to hold global temperature rises to 2C, scientists have warned. In a paper published by the American Geophysical Union, researchers say sharp rises in levels of methane - which is a powerful greenhouse gas - have strengthened over the past four years. Urgent action is now required to halt further increases in methane in the atmosphere, to avoid triggering enhanced global warming and temperature rises well beyond 2C. “What we are now witnessing is extremely worrying,” said one of the paper’s lead authors, Professor Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway, University...

Time to Panic The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us. By David Wallace-Wells Mr. Wallace-Wells is the author of the forthcoming “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” Feb. 16, 2019 The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along the way melting the tires and the sneakers of those trying to escape the flames. Pacific hurricanes forced...