Climate Change

"With about a month and a half remaining in the Arctic melt season, sea ice cover continues to decline at a rapid pace, and is currently on par with where the 2007 record melt season stood at the same time of year."

A Senate Environment Committee hearing on climate science Wednesday only exemplified the political deadlock that keeps the United States from basing policy on established science.

"A Senate committee passed a bill on Tuesday authorizing the transportation secretary to bar U.S. airlines from complying with a European Union law that would require them to pay for carbon emissions on flights to and from Europe."

"In a speech to the Senate on Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) addressed what he calls the 'major environmental crisis of our time,' and took aim at the 'myths' of Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Ok.) and other legislators who ignore or actively deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change."

"CORVALLIS, Oregon -- The climate's 'new normal' for most of the coming century will parallel the long-term drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004 -- the most severe drought in 800 years - scientists report in a study published Sunday."

"EPA's requirements for corn ethanol will drive food prices even higher after an already distressed harvest, growers warn."

"A byproduct of the ongoing heat wave, increased smog, may ultimately bring more and longer-lasting annoyance than the heat itself. The heat wave will eventually break, but Wichita’s smog reports probably already have been damaged to the extent of triggering some mandatory -- and potentially costly and inconvenient -- pollution controls like those in other big cities."

"Two Canadian biologists have reported sighting a handful of grizzly bears and hybrid grizzly/polar bears at unusually high latitudes in the Arctic, indicating that the interbreeding of the two bear species is becoming more common as the climate warms and grizzlies venture farther north."

"Richard Muller, a cantankerous but creative physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who once derided climate change research, then dove in with his own reconstruction of terrestrial temperature changes and confirmed substantial warming, has now concluded that recent warming is 'almost entirely' human caused."