https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/study-earths-roughly-warmest-in-about-100000-years/2016/09/26/2672bb28-8412-11e6-b57d-dd49277af02f_story.html Source:   By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: WASHINGTON — A new study paints a picture of an Earth that is warmer than it has been in about 120,000 years, and is locked into eventually hitting its hottest mark in more than 2 million years. As part of her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, Carolyn Snyder, now a climate policy official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, created a continuous 2 million year temperature record, much longer than a previous 22,000 year record. Snyder’s temperature reconstruction, published Monday in the journal Nature , doesn’t estimate temperature for a single year, but averages 5,000-year time periods going back a couple million years. Snyder based her reconstruction on 61 different sea surface temperature proxies from across the globe, su...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/science/shrinking-artic-ice.html Source:   Associated Press For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: The sea ice reached its summer low point on Saturday, extending 1.6 million square miles — just behind the mark set in 2012, 1.31 million square miles....

http://www.newsminer.com/news/alaska_news/above-the-arctic-circle-climate-change-closes-in-on-barrow/article_1e241b12-7911-11e6-bfe4-233b326bfe57.html Source:   By Adam Popescu, Washington Post For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: BARROW, Alaska — Here in the northernmost municipality of the United States, 320 miles above the Arctic Circle, people are facing the idea that they may soon be among the world's first climate-change refugees. Warming air, melting permafrost and rising sea levels are threatening their coastline, and researchers predict that by midcentury, the homes, schools and land around Barrow and its eight surrounding villages will be underwater. This despite decades of erecting barriers, dredging soil and building berms to hold back the water. "The coastline is backing up at rates of [30 to 65 feet] per year," says Robert Anderson, a University of Boulder geomorphologist who has studied Alaska's landscape evolution since 1985 and who first noticed in...

http://xkcd.com/1732/ Source:   By XKCD Comics For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: When people say "climate has changed before," here are the kinds of changes they're talking about...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/science/carlisle-england-climate-change-flooding.html Source:   By Tatiana Schlossberg, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: CARLISLE, England — After this ancient fortress city was hit by a crippling flood in 2005, its residents could take some comfort in the fact that it was the kind of deluge that was supposed to happen about once every 200 years. But it happened again four years later. And again last winter, when Storm Desmond brought record-breaking downpours that turned roads into rivers, fields into lakes, living rooms into ponds. ...In many places, the threat of climate change can still feel distant, even theoretical. But not here, a city of about 74,000 in the far northwest corner of England, where one of its rivers swelled to about 30 times its normal volume last year. About 2,000 houses and 500 businesses were damaged or destroyed in the flooding, and by July, thousands of people still were not able to return t...

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Gov-Brown-orders-big-greenhouse-gas-cuts-9211316.php Source:   By  David R. Baker, San Francisco Chronicle For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed the nation’s toughest climate law, requiring California to slash its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 while leaving open the question of exactly how to do it. No other state has enacted such deep emission cuts into law. The legislation goes well beyond the reductions required by California’s landmark 2006 global warming law, AB32, which called for returning emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The state’s emissions have fallen 9.5 percent since peaking in 2004, and analysts now consider the 2020 goal well within reach. “Here we are, 10 years later, emissions have gone down and the economy has gone up,” said state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills (Los Angeles County), who wrote AB32 as well as the new law, SB32. “It’s a success st...

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Climate-change-test-doesn-t-make-for-greener-9204104.php Source:   Associated Press For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: LOS ANGELES — In the course of a 17-year experiment on more than 1 million plants, scientists put future global warming to a real world test — growing California flowers and grasslands with extra heat, carbon dioxide and nitrogen to mimic a not-so-distant, hotter future. The results, simulating a post-2050 world, aren’t pretty. And they contradict those who insist that because plants like carbon dioxide — the main heat-trapping gas spewed by the burning of fossil fuels — climate change isn’t so bad, and will result in a greener Earth. At least in the California ecosystem, the plants that received extra carbon dioxide, as well as those that got extra warmth, didn’t grow more or get greener. They also didn’t remove the pollution and store more of it in the soil, said study author Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/world/asia/obama-xi-jinping-china-climate-accord.html Source:   By Mark Landler and Jane Perlez, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: HANGZHOU, China — President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China formally committed the world’s two largest economies to the Paris climate agreement here on Saturday, cementing their partnership on climate change and offering a rare display of harmony in a relationship that has become increasingly discordant. ...Jeffrey A. Bader, who helped formulate Mr. Obama’s Asia strategy as his chief China adviser in the first term...expressed concern that the South China Sea would be a chronic source of friction. The situation hasn’t stabilized,” Mr. Bader said. “Achieving that is beyond the capacity of the U.S. alone.” China has extended its military reach there by building artificial islands with airfields, facilities that American commanders have said they regard as military bases. ...Chinese mi...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/science/flooding-of-coast-caused-by-global-warming-has-already-begun.html Source:   By Justin Gillis, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: Scientists’ warnings that the rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline are no longer theoretical. NORFOLK, Va. — Huge vertical rulers are sprouting beside low spots in the streets here, so people can judge if the tidal floods that increasingly inundate their roads are too deep to drive through. Five hundred miles down the Atlantic Coast, the only road to Tybee Island, Ga., is disappearing beneath the sea several times a year, cutting the town off from the mainland. And another 500 miles on, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., increased tidal flooding is forcing the city to spend millions fixing battered roads and drains — and, at times, to send out giant vacuum trucks to suck saltwater off the streets. ...In Miami Beach, the city engineer, Bruce A. Mowry, has come up...