Trump says it’s obvious how to fix the problem of wildfires in California: just remove every scrap of vegetation from the entire state. One wonders, among other things, if he realizes how much of the state is devoted to agriculture.

Chris Wallace asks Trump about the purpose of his trip.

"Just to see the firefighters. Nobody's ever seen what's going on over there."

From there, it gets worse.

Listen, if you can. Only 85 seconds pic.twitter.com/Zr80dAfW3U

— RiotWomenn (@riotwomennn) November 16, 2018

Shrubs, he says angrily, flailing his stubby little hands. He really seems to think that California needs to pave itself over right this second to avoid more wildfires. One wonders how he thinks that would even be possible, … Read the rest

Ah, North Carolina. Will you rethink at all?

In 2012, the state now in the path of Hurricane Florence reacted to a prediction by its Coastal Resources Commission that sea levels could rise by 39in over the next century by passing a law that banned policies based on such forecasts.

Policies like…saying no to new building on the beaches?

North Carolina has a long, low-lying coastline and is considered one of the US areas most vulnerable to rising sea levels.

Long, low-lying, and made even longer by the barrier islands.

But dire predictions alarmed coastal developers and their allies, who said they did not believe the rise in sea level would be as bad as the worst models predicted and

What’s one of the bad effects of global warming? Crop failures. Who is having crop failures right now?

Germany for one.

In Germany, record temperatures and no rainfall since early April have led to a drought and thousands of farms are facing bankruptcy because of crop failure.

This week, the government pledged $390 million in federal and state aid, but for many farmers, it’s not enough. Many of the country’s farmers are starting to question whether they can cope with climate change.

…

According to the German Farmers Association, 10,000 farms are facing financial ruin, dairy farmers are slaughtering cows because there’s not enough feed for them and while the national average grain shortfall this year is 26 percent,

Rupert Read just said no.

ike most Greens, I typically jump at opportunities to go on air. Pretty much any opportunity: BBC national radio, BBC TV, Channel 4, Sky – I’ve done them all over the years, for good or ill. Even when, as is not infrequently the case, the deck is somewhat stacked against me, or the timing inadequate for anything more than a soundbite, or the question up for debate less than ideal.

But this Wednesday, when I was rung up by BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and asked to come on air to debate with a climate change denier, something in me broke, and rebelled. Really? I thought. This summer, of all times?

So, for almost

There was a big die-off in Northern Europe in 1258.

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons.

Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 10,000

Phil Plait reports on yet another spike in global warming.

February 2016 was the hottest February on the planet on record, a staggering 1.35° C hotter than the average. The previous hottest Februaries were 1998 (0.88° above average) and 2015 (0.87°). That’s a huge jump.

Those numbers are from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the premier centers for keeping tabs on our ever-warming globe. They are from temperature measurements over land and ocean going back to 1880. They representtemperature anomalies, that is, deviations from an average. In this case, the average is taken over the range of 1951–1980. That makes comparing temperatures easier, and shows that February 2016 was the hottest recorded