Climate Change

This undated artist rendering shows the proposed storm surge barrier that would be installed in New York's Newtown Creek as part of a sweeping blueprint unveiled by Mayor Michael Bloomberg for protecting New York from rising seas, storms and other extreme weather and climate threats. (AP Photo/NYC Mayor's Office) WASHINGTON (AP) - Efforts to curb global warming have quietly shifted as greenhouse gases inexorably rise. The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It's becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet's wild weather. It was Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement last week of an ambitious plan to stave off New ...

(Comstock) NEW YORK (AP) - By the 2050s, more than 800,000 New York City residents could be living in a flood zone that would cover a quarter of the city's land and New Yorkers could sweat out as many 90-degree days as is now normal for Birmingham, Ala., as effects of global warming take hold, a scientists' group convened by the city says. With local waters a foot to 2½ feet higher than they are today, 8 percent of the city's coastline could see flooding just from high tides, the group estimates. And while the average day could be 4 degrees to nearly 7 degrees hotter, a once-in-a-century storm would likely spur a surge 5 or more feet higher than Superstorm Sandy, which sent a record ...

Mount Everest is the second peak from the left. (Pavel Novak) Earth's global thaw has reached Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak, researchers said today (May 14) at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico. Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snowline has shifted upward by 590 feet, Sudeep Thakuri, a graduate student at the University of Milan in Italy, said in a statement. Located in the Himalaya Mountains on the border between China and Nepal, Everest's summit is 29,029 feet above sea level. Thakuri and his colleagues tracked changes to glaciers, temperatures and precipitation at Everest and the surrounding Sagarmatha ...

May 10, 2013 In this Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012 photo, a flock of Geese fly past the smokestacks at the Jeffrey Energy Center coal power plant as the suns sets near Emmett, Kan. (AP) WASHINGTON (AP) - Worldwide levels of the chief greenhouse gas that causes global warming have hit a milestone, reaching an amount never before encountered by humans, federal scientists said Friday. Carbon dioxide was measured at 400 parts per million at the oldest monitoring station in Hawaii which sets the global benchmark. The last time the worldwide carbon level was probably that high was about 2 million years ago, said Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That was during the ...

Mauna Loa, the Hawaiian Volcano from which researchers have been monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide for decades. (NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory) The proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is set to break 400 parts per million this month, levels not seen in 3 million years, according to one of the best climate records available. The Keeling Curve, a daily record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, has been running continuously since March 1958, when a carbon dioxide monitor was installed at Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. On its first day, the observatory measured a carbon dioxide concentration of 313 parts per million (ppm). That number means there were 313 molecules of ...