Global Warming

Climate change is increasing the risk of U.S. crop failures, depleting the nation's water resources and contributing to outbreaks of invasive species and insects, the Department of Agriculture said in a report released Tuesday. Those and other problems for the U.S. livestock and forestry industries will persist for at least the next 25 to 50 years, said the report compiled by 38 scientists for use by water and land managers. "I think what's really eye-opening is the depth and breadth of the impacts and consequences going on right now," said Anthony C. Janetos, a study author and director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland.

With a simple statement on Tuesday, State Farm Insurance became the latest company to withdraw its support from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think-tank which claims a “realist” position questioning that humans are responsible for climate change. “State Farm is ending its association with the Heartland Institute. This is because of a recent billboard campaign launched by the Institute,” said the entirety of the statement, which ran on the State Farm Facebook page.

NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium. The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb.

Dinosaurs' gassy guts may have contributed to global warming tens of millions of years ago, according to a new study that finds a group of plant-eating dinosaurs could have produced about as much methane as all of today's natural and man-made sources of the greenhouse gas. British researchers reported in Tuesday's edition of the journal Current Biology that the methane emissions from sauropods far outstripped those of today's cattle, goats and...

Something is rotting in the state of Denmark. Lots of things, actually, and it's a bit of an embarrassment for this Scandinavian nation as it prepares to host a widely anticipated global environmental summit this week. Denmark is proud of its image as one of the greenest countries in the world; it's probably why it was chosen as the site of the 15th United Nations Conference on Climate Change. But beneath the gloss lurk some inconvenient truths, including the fact that, pound for pound, Denmark produces more trash per capita than any other country in the 27-member European Union.

High in the Himalayas, above this peaceful valley where farmers till a patchwork of emerald-green fields, an icy lake fed by melting glaciers waits to become a "tsunami from the sky." The lake is swollen dangerously past normal levels, thanks to the global warming that is causing the glaciers to retreat at record speed. But no one knows when the tipping point will come and the lake can take no more, bursting its banks and sending torrents of water crashing into the valley below.

The heat was unreal -- so blistering that a windowsill thermometer overlooking Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles blew its top when the mercury hit 130 degrees. People consumed so much water that parts of the city briefly ran dry. Four people died. Dozens were hospitalized. It was still 89 degrees at 1 a.m. The record hot spell did not occur in 2006, but 1955, long before scientists raised the prospect of global warming and climate change.

Renewable energy is surpassing fossil fuels for the first time in new power-plant investments, shaking off setbacks from the financial crisis and an impasse at the United Nations global warming talks. Electricity from the wind, sun, waves and biomass drew $187 billion last year compared with $157 billion for natural gas, oil and coal, according to calculations by Bloomberg New Energy Finance using the latest data. Accelerating installations of solar- and wind-power plants led to lower equipment prices, making clean energy more competitive with coal.

Dinosaurs' gassy guts may have contributed to global warming tens of millions of years ago, according to a new study that finds a group of plant-eating dinosaurs could have produced about as much methane as all of today's natural and man-made sources of the greenhouse gas. British researchers reported in Tuesday's edition of the journal Current Biology that the methane emissions from sauropods far outstripped those of today's cattle, goats and...

California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.

Forecast the Facts, the activist group that first confronted GM about its support of climate change doubters the Heartland Institute, now plans to muster a public campaign targeting the Discovery Channel. The purpose: to get Discovery to acknowledge the scientific consensus on man-made climate change in its programming. The flap follows the recent airing of the final episode of Discovery's lush exploration of the polar regions, “ Frozen Planet .” The last of the seven-hour series, “On Thin Ice,” was devoted specifically to presenting evidence of climate change - including discussion of the challenges facing polar bears, collapsing ice shelves, diminishing habitat, and naturalist David Attenborough (Alec Baldwin is the narrator and host of the series)

This year's late winter heat wave over much of the United States, dubbed "March Madness," has been cited as evidence that human-induced global warming is causing the climate system to stray far outside its normal range of variability. The thousands of all-time high temperature records shattered during last month's climate rampage have been likened to home-run records shattered by a baseball player on steroids. It is true that the signature of human-induced global warming is clearly apparent in the increasing number of new high temperature records, which are currently outnumbering low temperature records by a factor of about 3 to 1. Just as a rising tide lifts all ships, a rise in global mean temperature is bound to raise the levels of the highest temperatures.

Whether an electric car such as the Nissan Leaf protects the atmosphere from greenhouse gases depends on where it's charged, according to a new study. Electric vehicles are no better than a standard gasoline-powered subcompact such as a Hyundai Elantra in cities such as Denver and Wichita, Kan., but far exceed even the best hybrids in Southern California. That's the finding of a study of electricity generation, greenhouse gas emissions and electric vehicles by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Apparently, location, location, location is the latest twist on electric vehicles and the environment: Whether an electric car such as the Nissan Leaf protects the atmosphere from greenhouse gases depends on where it's charged, according to a new study.  Such a car is no better than a standard gasoline-powered subcompact such as a Hyundai Elantra in cities such as Denver and Wichita, but far exceeds even the best hybrids in Southern California....

"The Island President"is heartening and unsettling by turns. The heartening segments of this powerful new documentary are intentional, the unsettling elements illustrate what happens when your protagonist gets caught in the cogs of history. "Island President's" leading character is 44-year-old Mohamed Nasheed, at the time the film was made the democratically elected president of the Maldives, a nation of some 1,200 coral islands scattered jewel-like in the Indian Ocean. A cross, as the president himself says, "between raradise and paradise," the Maldives are a prime vacation destination for those privileged enough to afford it. But all those gorgeous beaches (stunningly photographed by director-cinematographer Jon Shenk)

ForecastTheFacts.org has put up an advertisement spoofing the new TV ads created for the Chevy Volt - but this one congratulates GM for ceasing to fund the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that questions the science behind global warming. The spoof ad is running only on the group's website. However, it was originally designed as part of an advertising campaign to lean on GM to stop its annual funding for Heartland. Another Happy Volt Owner Thanks GM from ForecastTheFacts on Vimeo . “This was going to be our next tactic in the campaign to put pressure on GM,” says Daniel Souweine, director of the climate and energy organizing project at Citizen Engagement Lab, which recently launched ForecastTheFacts.org.

President-elect Barack Obama sent an explicit message Tuesday to international negotiators of a new global warming treaty that, under his administration, the U.S would move to slash its own greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80% by mid-century, and "help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change."

An oxygen-depleted "dead zone" the size of New Jersey is starving sea life off the coast of Oregon and Washington and likely will appear there each summer as a result of climate change, an Oregon State University researcher said Thursday. The huge area is one of 400 dead zones around the world, most of them caused by fertilizer and sewage dumped into the oceans in river runoff. But the dead zone off the Northwest is one of the few in the world -- and possibly the only one in North America -- that could be impossible to reverse.

Words matter. Take the term "red tide," which is the popularized way of talking about blooms of harmful marine algae. This common terminology is a misnomer because the blooms are not always red and their movement is largely unrelated to tides. Also, many species of algae that cause red discoloration are not harmful. I am a biological oceanographer, so naturally I focus on my own discipline. But I worry that throughout the sciences we are using inaccurate terminology to describe serious environmental issues.

“Conservatives lose faith in science,” trumpeted the headline on a story in last week's Times.   “A study … in the American Sociological Review concludes that trust in science among conservatives and frequent churchgoers has declined precipitously since 1974, when a national survey first asked people how much confidence they had in the scientific community. At that time, conservatives had the highest level of trust in scientists.” Though the article ran inside the paper on a weekday, it certainly didn't go unseen by Times letter writers.