Seth Borenstein Posts

Federal researchers next week will start testing humans with an experimental vaccine to prevent the deadly Ebola virus. This isn't a treatment for the disease, but a hoped-for preventative measure. Fauci said the vaccine cannot cause Ebola in the volunteers being tested. The World Health Organization Thursday estimated that the death toll could eventually exceed 20,000, while announcing new efforts to fight what Fauci called the "rapidly evolving and currently uncontrolled outbreak."

There is little in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that was sent to governments on Monday that wasn't in the other more-detailed versions, but the language is more stark and the report attempts to connect the different scientific disciplines studying problems caused by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas. The 127-page draft paints a harsh warning of what's causing global warming and what it will do to humans and the environment. It also describes what can be done about it.

The U.S. estimates didn't take into account that the added oil from the pipeline would drop prices by about $3 a barrel, spurring consumption that would create more pollution, the researchers said.

All sorts of weather factors came together for Hawaii's twin hurricane threat: stuck currents, an oddball brewing El Nino, slightly warmer water but mostly just bad luck.

Driven by exceptionally warm ocean waters, Earth smashed a record for heat in May and is likely to keep on breaking high temperature marks, experts say.

The devastating wildfires scorching Southern California offer a glimpse of a warmer and more fiery future, according to scientists and federal and international reports. In the past three months, at least three different studies and reports have warned that wildfires are getting bigger, that man-made climate change is to blame, and it's only going to get worse with more fires starting earlier in the year. While scientists are reluctant to blame global warming for any specific fire, they have been warning for years about how it will lead to more fires and earlier fire seasons.

The Obama administration is more certain than ever that global warming is changing Americans' daily lives and will worsen — conclusions that scientists will detail in a massive federal report to be released Tuesday. "We're already seeing extreme weather and it's happening now," Wuebbles said Monday. "We're seeing more heat waves, particularly in the West and in the South."

If you think of climate change as a hazard for some far-off polar bears years from now, you're mistaken. That's the message from top climate scientists gathering in Japan this week to assess the impact of global warming. In fact, they will say, the dangers of a warming Earth are immediate and very human.

Scientists are discovering new planets by the truckload. Some 715 were confirmed by NASA on Wednesday, leading to speculation about their habitability and increasing the likelihood that life may be found somewhere else in the universe.

The globe cozied up to the fourth warmest January on record this year, essentially leaving just the eastern half of the United States out in the cold.

The average world temperature was 58.12 degrees (14.52 Celsius) tying with 2003 for the fourth warmest since 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday. At the same time, NASA, which calculates records in a different manner, ranked last year as the seventh warmest on record, with an average temperature of 58.3 degrees (14.6 Celsius).

As the world warms, the United States is getting fewer bitter cold spells like the one that gripped much of the nation this week. So when a deep freeze strikes, scientists say, it seems more unprecedented than it really is. An Associated Press analysis of the daily national winter temperature shows that cold extremes have happened about once every four years since 1900. Until recently.

The United States is spewing 50 percent more methane — a potent heat-trapping gas — than the federal government estimates, a new comprehensive scientific study says. Much of it is coming from just three states: Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. That means methane may be a bigger global warming issue than thought, scientists say.

Starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease already lead to human tragedies. They're likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change, a leaked draft of an international scientific report forecasts.

Starting in about a decade, Kingston, Jamaica, will probably be off-the-charts hot - permanently. Other places will soon follow. Singapore in 2028. Mexico City in 2031. Cairo in 2036. Phoenix and Honolulu in 2043.

And eventually the whole world in 2047.

The ice cap at the North Pole melts in the summer and grows in winter; its general shrinking trend is a sign of global warming. The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said Friday that Arctic ice was at 1.97 million square miles when it stopped melting late last week. The data shows a continuance of the Arctic Sea's shrinking ice at 12 percent per decade.

People worrying about having enough money to pay their bills tend to lose temporarily the equivalent of 13 IQ points, scientists found when they gave intelligence tests to shoppers at a New Jersey mall and farmers in India.

Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that evidence of a large-scale chemical weapons attack in Syria was "undeniable." There are still many questions about chemical weapons, though, some of which can be answered easily and some of which can't. Experts weigh in with the latest evidence.

Many states get hit frequently with tornadoes and other natural catastrophes, but Oklahoma is Disaster Central. The twister that devastated Moore, Okla., was the 74th presidential disaster declared in the Sooner state in the past 60 years.

A draft of a 2010 Homeland Security Department handbook lists only one person killed by ricin. And that was a political assassination, in 1978, of a Bulgarian dissident who was injected — via specialized secret-agent style umbrella— with a ricin pellet.

The CDC categorizes ricin as a "Class B" threat, which is the agency's second-highest threat level. It ranks behind anthrax, botulism, plague, smallpox, tularemia and viral hemorrhagic fevers.