Global Warming or Climate Change

By  Marion Renault The Columbus Dispatch Scientists declared 2016 the warmest year on record last week, mostly blaming man-made global warming. It was the third straight record-breaking year. A majority of Americans - 61 percent - say they are "very" or "somewhat" worried about global warming, according to a national survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shortly after the presidential election in November. But the same Yale program found last year that about 1 in 5 Americans was doubtful or dismissive of global warming and tended to oppose climate action. President Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of state, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, expressed doubt during testimony before a Senate committee this month about greenhouse-gas predictions. Trump has called global warming a "Chinese hoax." As for consensus, studies show that more than 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are responsible for ongoing c...

BY  HIMANSHU GOENKA   @HIMGOJOURNO   ON  01/28/17 AT 5:59 AM Erik Björn of Umeå University, Sweden, is injecting small amounts of isotopically enriched mercury to the sediments for the mesocosm experiment. By adding stable (not radioactive) isotopes of mercury the scientists could trace how methylmercury was formed and accumulated in plankton in the mesocosm systems.  Photo: Sofi Jonsson The ill-effects of mercury are now much better known than in times past, but the danger of a large number of people being affected by mercury poisoning is far from over. And according to a study published Friday, climate change could be making the problem a lot worse. Mercury, in many of its forms, is  toxic to humans  and other species. In humans, it affects the nervous, digestive and immune systems, as well as the lungs, kidneys and eyes. And it also negatively impacts the cognitive development of children. The element is released into the environm...

Polar bears, increasingly land-bound due to vanishing ice sheets in the Arctic, are a poignant example of climate refugees.     DUSTIN STEPHENS/CBS NEWS   422   Comment       Share       Tweet      Stumble     Email 2016 was a milestone year in the continued warming of the planet. From unstable agriculture to the drought in California to melting ice sheets to extreme weather events and heat waves, climate change has disrupted virtually every corner of the world. It’s impossible to exhaustively list all the ways in which  climate change  was felt in 2016, but here’s a guide to understanding the year that was for the planet: A carbon dioxide milestone “In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate,” Brian Kahn of Climate Central  wrote  earlier this year. That’s because, duri...

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent 5 January 2017   From the section Science & Environment     comments Share Image copyright GETTY IMAGES Image caption Glaciers have continued to melt at increasing rates over the past 20 years despite the supposed pause A controversial study that found there has been no slowdown in global warming has been supported by new research. Many researchers had accepted that the rate of global warming had slowed in the first 15 years of this century. But  new analysis in the journal Science Advances  replicates findings that scientists have underestimated ocean temperatures over the past two decades. With the revised data the apparent pause in temperature rises between 1998 and 2014 disappears. The idea of a pause had gained support in recent years with even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reporting in 2013 that the global surface temperature "has shown a much smaller inc...

Andrew King, University of Melbourne / The Conversation Global   @_TCGlobal Dec. 22, 2016         "If we do not reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we estimate that by the late 2040s this event will occur on average once every two years" Play Mute Current Time 0:08 / Duration Time 0:53 Loaded : 0% Progress : 0%   Share Captions Fullscreen It’s Hard to Describe Just How Badly the Arctic Is Doing "This year we have really seen the deepening of the change signal in the Arctic" For the Arctic,  like the globe as a whole , 2016 has been exceptionally warm. For much of the year, Arctic temperatures have been much higher than normal, and sea ice concentrations have been at  record low levels . The Arctic’s seasonal cycle means that the lowest sea ice concentrations occur in September each year. But while September 2012 had less ice than September 2016, this year the ice ...