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More than 6 in 10 Americans believe that climate change is a problem that the federal government needs to address, according to a new poll...

Local residents wait in line during a water distribution in Bayamon following damages caused by Hurricane Maria in Las Piedras, Puerto Rico, October 1, 2017 REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Federal and local authorities were working together to keep 50 hospitals operational...

John Oliver understands the importance of communicating the expert consensus on human-caused global warming. Photograph: Youtube

Some have argued that consensus messaging is counter-productive. Here’s why they’re wrong...

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Since President Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the world has been looking towards other countries to pick up global leadership on climate change action...

Firefighters battle a wildfire near Mariposa, California. JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images

The increase in forest fires, seen this summer from North America to the Mediterranean to Siberia, is directly linked to climate change, scientists say. And as the world continues to warm, there will be greater risk for fires on nearly every continent... 

DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI via Getty Images

Blaise Pascal was a brilliant 17th century French philosopher. Rather than try to prove the existence of God, he chose instead to prove to skeptics why they should believe in the existence of God and live their lives as if God existed, even without proof...

Cheery Blossom: KL Image Jalalaludin Baba

Since decade’s human kind on the planet earth has pursued unending war with Mother Nature, in particular with earth and its surrounding atmosphere, which has caused enormous environmental complications. The carbon emission footprint on earth’s biosphere is threatening to create greenhouse effect of monumental consequences across the continents regardless of socio-economical status, development and advancement in science and technology...

Hurricane Maria (NASA)

The 2017 hurricane season has certainly been one for the record books. Whether it be Harvey’s scale-tipping rains, Irma’s off-the-chart winds, or the sheer number of storms that have spun up, this year is clearly anything but normal...

Will we retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure at the required rates to limit global temperature rise to well below two degrees? (Photo: Shutterstock)

Yes, but only in a model. We have essentially emitted too much carbon dioxide already, and the most feasible pathways to stay “well below” two degrees all require removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at an unprecedented scale...

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Introduction

This second essay in a series introduces another key concept that explains why all of us in the USA are failing to address the climate crisis, ignoring ecological and population overshoot, shutting our eyes to the coming collapses attendant to massively excessive resource extractions, and related issues.

Toon of the Week...

Story of the Week...

Arctic sea ice summer minimum

see video above...

Also see: 

Arctic sea ice summer minimum in 2017 is eighth lowest on record by Daisy Dunne & Robert McSweeney, Carbon Brief, Sep 20, 2017

We Charted Arctic Sea Ice for Nearly Every Day Since 1979. You’ll See a Trend. by Nadja Popovich, Henry Fountain & Adam Pearce, New York Times, Sep 22, 2017

A selection of new climate related research articles is shown below. The graphic is from Lamsal et al. (paper #32).

Jersey cows in field, Wiltshire, UK. Credit: Juice Images/Alamy Stock Photo

A study released today finds that global methane emissions from agriculture are much larger than previous estimates have suggested...

A flooded street in San Juan, Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Warmer temperatures are increasing the energy and moisture available to hurricanes...

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria hit U.S. communities and farms as powerful storms within weeks of one another, causing extensive damage to public and private property. Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty

A new report starts adding up the damage from the past few weeks of western wildfires and Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. It sees climate costs rising...

Debris from a damaged home in Spring, Texas, serves as a reminder of Hurricane Harvey's fury. Such storms may be spurred by a changing climate, with expensive consequences. Photograph by Luke Sharrett, Bloomberg via Getty Images

A new report warns of a high price tag on the impacts of global warming, from storm damage to health costs. But solutions can provide better value, the authors say...

Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flig | CC BY 2.0

It was only five years ago that Scientific American published this article: Climate Armageddon: How the World’s Weather Could Quickly Run Amok, d/d May 25, 2012. The subheading to that article read: “Climate scientists think a perfect storm of climate ‘flip’ could cause massive upheavals in a matter of years.” Well now….

Lorraine Moorehead was reflected in her flooded living room floor on St. Thomas. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Time

As islanders wait for doctors, medicine, fuel and manpower to rebuild, the economic toll from the storms is only starting to come to light...

La Perla resident Maria Antonia Perez Rivera looks on from her battered residence after Hurricane Maria,in Puerto Rico. Image: AP/REX/Shutterstock

It's been one week since Category 4 Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, destroying the entire island's communications infrastructure, power grid, and leaving thousands homeless. The humanitarian crisis in the storm's wake is growing by the hour...

Justice League

President Donald Trump has made it clear his administration isn't planning to allow any additional outside aid to get into Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria...

People whose flights were rescheduled for one week more are seen in Luis Munoz Marin International Airport, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on September 24, 2017. Getty

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Tuesday said there was no need to waive shipping restrictions to help get fuel and supplies to storm-ravaged Puerto Rico, because it would do nothing to address the island’s main impediment to shipping, damaged ports...

Columbia University scientists are testing evaporation-to-power devices. ExtremeBio/YouTube

Imagine evaporation from lakes and reservoirs providing the majority of U.S. electricity at little cost and without heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions or intermittency problems.

That might sound too good to be true, but a Columbia University research team says it just might work...

Could declining world energy result in a turn toward authoritarianism by governments around the world?

Villagers fight a wildfire in an orchard as nearly 80 large fires burned across Portugal in early August 2017. Credit: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images

The extreme heat, which fed wildfires and a heat wave so fierce it was dubbed 'Lucifer', was made 10 times more likely by climate change, scientists find...

The slogan “1.5 DEGREES” is projected on the Eiffel Tower as part of the COP21, United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, France, Friday, Dec. 11, 2015. Photograph: Francois Mori/AP

As usual, conservative media outlets distorted a climate science paper to advance the denialist agenda...

A woman named Maria prepares food next to her home, destroyed by Hurricane Maria. The island has no electricity. Congress approved a massive hurricane relief package six days after Harvey hit Texas — yet appropriators appear weeks away from an aid request devoted to Puerto Rico. | Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

The administration contends that much of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands is so damaged that officials can't even begin damage assessment...

Hurricane Maria swept mud and debris down streets and into homes across the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, home to 3.4 million people, about 44 percent of whom live below the poverty line. Credit: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

As the full scope of Hurricane Maria's devastation emerges, leaders are calling for urgent help. Many of the risks were spelled out in a 2013 climate assessment...

President Trump taking a question from the press in front of the White House after meeting with people impacted by Hurricane Irma in Florida. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Ahead of what would turn out to be a potentially record-breaking hurricane season, the National Weather Service had 216 vacant positions it could not fill due to a governmentwide hiring freeze imposed by the Trump administration, according to a recently released document...

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Sea ice around Antarctica has shrunk about 2 million square kilometres in just three years, swinging from a record large maximum area covered to a record low, in a shift that could have implications for the global climate...

The Pine Island Glacier calves 100 square miles of ice. (Stef Lhermitte)

An enormous Antarctic glacier has given up an iceberg over 100 square miles in size, the second time in two years it has lost such a large piece in a process that has scientists wondering whether its behavior is changing for the worse...

Live more simply so that others may simply live...

Hundreds of millions of global elites feast upon the finest delicacies a diminished Earth has to offer, as billions struggle to meet basic needs, and oligarchs amass unheard of wealth and entire governments. Each in their own way destroys our one shared biosphere that makes earth habitable...

Carmen Marrero takes a rest while she cleans debris from her house after the area was hit by Hurricane Maria in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico.Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

The administration’s feeble response to Hurricane Maria rivals Bush’s after Katrina...

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The renowned psychiatrist and historian makes a case for hope for humanity's grasp of the dangers of climate change...

A selection of British newspapers - some more factually accurate and reliable than others. Photograph: Alamy

Right-wing media outlets like Breitbart, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh echoed the Mail’s “significantly misleading” and now censured climate story...

Bahamas Minister of Foreign Affairs Darren Henfield. (CMC)

UNITED NATIONS – The Bahamas says it is deeply concerned about the dangers of environmental degradation and climate change, stating that they threaten the region’s very survivability...

As I write this, Americans in Puerto Rico are grappling with one of the greatest natural and humanitarian disasters to hit the United States in years, after a supercharged Hurricane Maria slammed the island...

Plantain trees flattened by Hurricane Maria in Yabucoa, P.R. In a matter of hours, the storm destroyed about 80 percent of the crop value in Puerto Rico, the territory’s agriculture secretary said. Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

YABUCOA, P.R. — José A. Rivera, a farmer on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, stood in the middle of his flattened plantain farm on Sunday and tried to tally how much Hurricane Maria had cost him...

A Japanese rescuer works with a sniffer dog during the search for survivors at a flattened building in Mexico City on September 22, 2017 three days after a strong quake hit central Mexico. A powerful 7.1 earthquake shook Mexico City on Tuesday, causing panic among the megalopolis' 20 million inhabitants on the 32nd anniversary of a devastating 1985 quake. ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images

Shifting tectonic plates cause earthquakes, and several human activities cause shifting tectonic plates—however, the effect is indirect...

Irma destroys the Florida Keys. CNN

Property owners in some Florida counties were in a lather over restrictions on new coastal construction after Hurricane Eloise took dead aim at the Panhandle in 1975, leaving rubble where older structures had stood...

Ellen McKnight / Alamy

More and more, we are learning that climate change can lead to some pretty strange and counterintuitive effects, especially when it comes to the wintertime...

Sailors stand-by to load jugs of purified water into an approaching SH-60B Seahawk, assigned to the "Saberhawks" of Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron Light Four Seven (HSL-47), on the flight deck aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), January 11, 2005. Helicopters assigned to Carrier Air Wing Two (CVW-2) and Sailors from USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) are supporting Operation Unified Assistance, the humanitarian operation effort in the wake of the Tsunami that struck South East Asia. The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is currently operating in the Indian Ocean off the waters of Indonesia and Thailand. Picture taken January 11, 2005. REUTERS/U.S. Navy/Tyler J. Clements-Handout Photo: HO, U.S NAVY PHOTOGRAPHER

"National security and climate change? My students just don't see the connection"...

Gideon Mendel photographs the aftermath of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, while Oliver Laughland meets those whose lives have been upturned

• Dave Eggers: ‘As the hurricane bore down, Trump tweeted his excitement’

Electricity poles and lines lay toppled in Humacao, in northeastern Puerto Rico, in the wake of Hurricane Maria on September 20, 2017. AP Photo/Carlos Giusti.

Hurricane Maria continued its destructive rampage on Friday morning, bringing torrential rains and high winds to the Dominican Republic and Turks and Caicos Islands. Heavy rains from the hurricane also continued to affect Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and were spreading into the southeast Bahamas...

A selection of new climate related research articles is shown below...

A global map of the August 2017 LOTI (land-ocean temperature index) anomaly, relative to the 1951-1980 August average. Part of Antarctica is gray because data from some stations there were not yet available at the time of this posting.

August 2017 was second warmest on record

From NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Veerabhadran Ramanathan.Rueters

There’s a very small but distinct possibility that rapid global warming could pose an “existential threat” to the survival of humans by 2050, UC San Diego said Thursday in one of the most dire forecasts yet about climate change...

Cars form a giant ‘1.5C’ to support the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.  2016 World Advanced Vehicle Expedition (WAVE) rally held outside the gates of the UN European headquarters in Geneva in June 2016. Photo: CVF / UNDP

There has been a bit of excitement and confusion this week about a new paper in Nature Geoscience, claiming that we can still limit global warming to below 1.5 °C above preindustrial temperatures, whilst emitting another ~800 Gigatons of carbon dioxide. That’s much more than previously thought, so how come? And while that sounds like very welcome good news, is it true? Here’s the key points...

A new visualization highlights areas where C02 has soared. PIK/FHP

This unusual animation gives an architectural twist to the history and possible dark future of climate change...

Image: Higgy/STFC/Flickr Creative Commons

The science news media has a pretty simple job: Find facts, and report them. Typically, this entails reading a scientific study, talking to the study’s authors and outside experts, writing, and fact-checking the confusing bits with experts again. But sometimes, the narrative the media wants isn’t actually supported by the study, or the experts. Such is the case with a new paper on climate change...

Photo by Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images.

With seemingly no one in the White House steering the U.S. into an environmentally sustainable future, who's going to take the wheel?

Leonardo DiCaprio has an idea who....

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Climate change is a central issue at this year’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), with multiple high-level meetings on the issue happening amid several devastating natural disasters. Hurricane Irma recently swept through the Caribbean and into Florida, only to be quickly followed by Hurricane Maria...

A farming road weaves around a wheat field Thursday, Aug. 31, 2017, off Springhill Road. Montana’s average temperatures are increasing, mountain snowpacks are declining, large wildfires are more frequent, and all that is expected to continue in the coming decades, according to a study of climate change within Montana released Wednesday. Rachel Leathe/Chronicle

Montana’s average temperatures are increasing, mountain snowpacks are declining, large wildfires are more frequent, and all that is expected to continue in the coming decades, according to a study of climate change within Montana released Wednesday...