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.

The politically touchy topic of climate change will be taught more deeply to students under proposed new national science standards released Tuesday. The Next Generation Science Standards, developed over the last 18 months by California and 25 other states in conjunction with several scientific organizations, represent the first national effort since 1996 to transform the way science is taught in thousands of classrooms. The multi-state consortium is proposing that students learn fewer concepts more deeply and not merely memorize facts but understand how scientists actually investigate and gather information.

The fallout from Mt. Rainier's shrinking glaciers is beginning to roll downhill, and nowhere is the impact more striking than on the volcano's west side. "This is it in spades," U.S. Park Service geologist Paul Kennard said recently, scrambling up a 10-foot-high mass of dirt and boulders bulldozed back just enough to clear the road. As receding glaciers expose crumbly slopes, vast amounts of gravel and sediment are being sluiced into the rivers that flow from the region's tallest peak.

In March, the State Department gave the president cover to open a big spigot that will hitch our country to one of the dirtiest fuels on Earth for 40 years or more. The draft environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline acknowledges tar sands are nasty stuff for the environment, but concludes that the project is OK because this oil will get to market anyway - with or without a pipeline. A public comment period is underway through April 22, after which the department will prepare a final statement to help the administration decide whether the pipeline is in the "national interest.

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.

In its 2007 report on the effects of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that glaciers could vanish from the Himalayas by 2035. As has since been widely reported, with ill-disguised glee by many blogs and right-wing news outlets, this was a blunder. The prediction didn't come from a peer-reviewed scientific study but from a prominent Indian glacier expert who was quoted in a British popular science magazine -- and who now claims he never gave such a date.

Global warming and a resulting rise in sea levels present a direct threat to the world's seaports -- and many of California's harbors are nowhere near ready, state officials say. Sea levels in California are expected to increase 16 inches over the next 40 years, causing flooding and endangering facilities throughout the state, according to a report by the California State Lands Commission. By 2100, the ocean could rise as much as 55 inches, the report said. Most of the 40 ports and shipping hubs surveyed by the state said they were not prepared for the rise in sea levels.

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.

After several years of finding that fewer and fewer Americans believed in climate change, pollsters are now finding that belief is on the uptick. The newest study from the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which is a biannual survey taken since fall 2008 and organized by the Brookings Institute, shows that 62% of Americans now believe that climate change is occurring, and 26% do not. The others are unsure. That is a significant rise in believers since a low in spring 2010, when only about 50% of Americans said they believed in global warming, but still down from when the survey first began, when it was at around 75%. The pollsters talked to 887 people across the country.

It wasn't that long ago that Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman turned the spotlight on his belief that global warming is real with a tweet aimed at differentiating himself within the crowded GOP primary field. “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming,” Huntsman wrote on Twitter in late August. "Call me crazy.” But when the former ambassador to China and former governor of Utah faced a crowd of bloggers at the conservative Heritage Foundation on Tuesday, he seemed to have softened his stance on the issue.

Re "Most in U.S. worried about sea level rise," March 30 Building sea walls and other measures to protect coastal developments address the symptoms of climate change, not the cause. We need to support legislation to counteract global warming, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) Climate Protection Act of 2013. Insurance companies should think twice about offering storm insurance for coastal areas; or if they do, the premiums should be comparable to what Californians have to pay for earthquake insurance.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration Tuesday announced a nationwide plan to help wildlife adapt to threats from climate change. Developed along with state and tribal authorities, the strategy seeks to preserve species as global warming alters their historical habitats and, in many cases, forces them to migrate across state and tribal borders. Over the next five years, the plan establishes priorities for what will probably be a decades-long effort. One key proposal is to create wildlife "corridors" that would let animals and plants move to new habitats.

Having given his film a title like "Greedy Lying Bastards," director Craig Rosebraugh is clearly out to take no prisoners in his timely documentary tracking the politics, inconvenient truths and alternative "realities" of the endless global warming debate. Yet, despite his cogent finger-pointing, nifty graphs and succinct highlighting of recent climate change history, longtime followers of the hyper-partisan topic may not find much terribly new or revealing here. Rosebraugh, doing his Michael Moore thing both in front of and behind the camera (though he's hardly as commanding a presence)

Sometimes, headlines alone can tell a story. Start with this one from The Times: “Baby boomers may live longer, but their elders were healthier.” And while you're pondering that, check this one out: “Sperm count low among couch potatoes, study finds.” And finally, there's this, well, punch-line headline : “Gov. Christie eats doughnut with Letterman; talks Sandy storm aid.” Yes, boys and girls and boomers, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Of course, I'm not talking about you , specifically.

Last year was the hottest year on record for the contiguous 48 states, marked by near-record numbers of extreme weather events such as drought, wildfire, tornadoes and storms, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In its annual report, State of the Climate, NOAA reported that the average annual temperature was 55.3 degrees - 3.3 degrees greater than the average temperature for the 20th century. It was also a full degree higher than the previous record-high temperature, set in 1998 - the biggest margin between two record-high temperatures to date.

Societal change usually happens slowly, even once it's clear there's a problem. That's because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in leisurely currents. Change often requires going up against powerful, established interests, and it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses. Think civil rights, gay marriage, equal rights for women. Even facing undeniably real problems - say, discrimination against gay people - one can make the case that gradual change is the best option.

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...

Global warming: voodoo environmentalism. JOHN JAEGER Irvine

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the most scrutinized of scientific bodies. Each report, each sentence and sometimes even a footnote can bring on a rousing online debate between scientists and the skeptics who love to bedevil them. Once again, the IPCC's upcoming report has kicked up a kerfuffle months before its scheduled release. An online blogger, who loathes the idea of regulating carbon emissions, leaked a draft of the IPCC's fifth assessment now under review until its release in September.

A fast-changing Arctic broke new records for loss of sea ice and spring snow cover this year, as well as the extent of the summertime melt of the Greenland ice sheet, federal scientists reported Wednesday. The latest report about the melting Arctic comes as frustrations flared in Doha, Qatar, over the slow progress at United Nations climate talks to reach a global agreement on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. The buildup of the gases is elevating average global temperatures, with the most pronounced changes in the northernmost latitudes.