https://eos.org/articles/leading-companies-take-white-house-climate-pledge Source:   By Randy Showstack, Earth & Space Science News—EoS (AGU) For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: ...Alcoa, Cargill, General Motors, Microsoft, and nine other major U.S. companies have committed to cut greenhouse gases as part of a new White House program. ...Thirteen of the biggest companies in the United States have signed on to a new initiative by President Obama to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the White House announced Monday. ...Brian Deese, senior advisor to the president, praised the companies for “setting an example” for their industries. ...The administration intends to announce a second round of pledges “from a far broader spectrum of American companies” later this year, prior to the Paris conference, Deese said....

http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2015/07/hot-spells-doomed-mammoths Source:   By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: About 30,000 years ago, mammoths, giant sloths, and other massive mammals roamed the earth. Twenty thousand years later they were all gone. Some researchers blame human hunting, but a new study claims that abrupt shifts in climate set in motion a downward spiral for many of these species, one that humans aggravated. The results, the authors say, are a warning to modern humans that, if not slowed, current warming could doom many more species....

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/world/europe/mayors-at-vatican-pledge-efforts-against-climate-change.html Source:   By Gaia Pianigiani, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: VATICAN CITY — About 60 mayors from around the world gathered here on Tuesday and pledged to combat global warming and help the poor deal with its effects, at a conference swiftly organized by the Vatican barely a month after Pope Francis’ sweeping encyclical on the environment. The two-day conference, which also focused on fighting forms of modern slavery, was not the first time that the Vatican had organized a meeting on the issue. But it was the first time that it specifically invited local officials, hoping to mobilize grass-roots action and maintain pressure on world leaders for action ahead of a global summit meeting on climate change scheduled for December in Paris....

http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/nasa-captures-epic-earth-image   Source:   NASA Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: A NASA camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory [DSCOVR] satellite has returned its first view of the entire sunlit side of Earth from one million miles away...taken by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope. [This...is the first complete picture of our planet since 1972 (those in the interim have actually been composites). ...DSCOVR [is] a joint mission between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Air Force....

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/PT.5.8127 Source:   By Steven T. Corneliussen, Physics Today For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: The Royal Astronomical Society  press release "Irregular heartbeat of the Sun driven by double dynamo"  explains that at the recent National Astronomy Meeting in Wales, Northumbria University astrophysicist and mathematics professor Valentina Zharkova reported on a new model of the Sun's solar cycle. The model suggests that "solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the 'mini ice age' that began in 1645." The resulting media stir merits notice.... See also The Guardian article  No, the sun isn't going to save us from global warming .

http://time.com/3951339/bees-climate-change/ Source:   By Justin Worland, Time Magazine For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: As if pesticides, disease and habitat loss were not enough, there's more bad news for bees. Changing temperature and weather conditions due to climate change has restricted the area where bees can survive, and the pollinators have struggled to adapt, according to new research published in the journal Science. "They just aren’t colonizing new areas and establishing new populations fast enough to track rapid human-caused climate change," said study author Jeremy Kerr, a professor at the University of Ottawa, on a call for journalists. "Impacts are large and they are underway. They are not just something to worry about at some vague, future time." For the study, researchers looked at 110 years of data on 67 bumblebee species to track their movements over time. Activity between 1901 and 1974 was compared to movement in recent decades when c...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/science/bumblebees-global-warming-shrinking-habitats.html Source:   Nicholas St. Fleur, The New York Times For Investigation:   Excerpt: Climate change has narrowed the range where bumblebees are found in North America and Europe in recent decades, according to a study published Thursday. The paper, published in the journal Science, suggests that warming temperatures have caused bumblebee populations to retreat from the southern limits of their travels by as much as 190 miles since the 1970s. Logic would suggest that the northern reaches of their home turf would shift to higher latitudes by a corresponding distance. But that has not happened, leading researchers to think that the more northern habitats may be less hospitable to them. “Bumblebee species across Europe and North America are declining at continental scales,” Jeremy T. Kerr a conservation biologist at the University of Ottawa in Canada who was the lead author of the report, s...

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-study-finds-indian-pacific-oceans-temporarily-hide-global-warming Source:   NASA Release 15-147 For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: A new NASA study of ocean temperature measurements shows in recent years extra heat from greenhouse gases has been trapped in the waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans. Researchers say this shifting pattern of ocean heat accounts for the slowdown in the global surface temperature trend observed during the past decade. ..."The western Pacific got so warm that some of the warm water is leaking into the Indian Ocean through the Indonesian archipelago," said Nieves, the lead author of the study. The movement of the warm Pacific water westward pulled heat away from the surface waters of the central and eastern Pacific, which resulted in unusually cool surface temperatures during the last decade. Because the air temperature over the ocean is closely related to the ocean temperature, this provides a plausible...