Climate Change & Environment
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Scientists are Breeding 'Super Corals' to Save Reefs from Global Warming

For thousands of years, human beings have been helping evolution along by tinkering with the breeding habits of plants and animals.

Now, as one of our favorite underwater features faces serious threats from warming oceans, acidification, pollution and overfishing, scientists are rallying to breed a better future for coral reefs.

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UK Becomes Only G7 Country to Increase Fossil Fuel Subsidies

The UK is alone among G7 nations in dramatically increasing its fossil fuel subsidies, despite an earlier pledge to phase them out, a new report has found.

The revelation will embarrass ministers who want to take a leading role at a crunch UN climate change summit in Paris in December, but who have been sharply cutting support for green energy at home.

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Paris Climate Talks to Move Forward Despite Attacks; Obama to Attend

A major international climate conference in Paris will move forward later this month, and President Obama is still slated to attend, despite a series of attacks in the city Friday.

An administration official confirmed Saturday that Obama is still planning on going to Paris later this month to attend early sessions of the United Nations climate change conference.

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Security Fears Risk Overshadowing Paris Climate Summit

Security fears in the wake of Friday's brutal slaying of 129 people in Paris threaten to overshadow a crunch climate summit to be launched by 120 world leaders in the French capital on November 30.

France's government has said it will not "give in" to terrorism and insists that the long-anticipated conference will go ahead, tasked with no less than producing a plan to rescue Earth's climate.

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Jane Goodall Urges Bold Action at Climate Talks

Primatologist Jane Goodall called Friday for bold action next month at high-stakes United Nations climate change talks.

The 81-year-old British chimpanzee expert said she has her "fingers crossed" heading into the summit in Paris, which will seek a comprehensive deal on curbing carbon emissions warming the planet.

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Labor Says Australia Must 'Tell Story of Pacific to World' at Paris Climate Talks

Australia should “tell the story of the Pacific to the world” when global leaders sit down to climate change talks in Paris at the end of this month, Labor has said.

The impact of climate change on the nations of the Pacific is a focus for both the government and opposition ahead of COP21, where governments of more than 190 nations will gather to discuss a possible new global climate accord.

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Insects Should be Part of a Sustainable Diet in Future, Says Report

Insects should become a staple of people’s diets around the world as an environmentally friendly alternative to meat, according to a report by the UK government’s waste agency.

But persuading consumers to overcome “the yuck factor” will be a key issue, says the report by the Waste and Resources Action Program (Wrap) which assesses challenges to the development of the food system in the next 10 years.

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Global Warming Linked to Greater Number of Hurricanes Near Hawaii

New scientific analysis shows the fingerprints of man-made climate change on 14 extreme weather events in 2014, including an apparent higher-than-normal number of hurricanes near Hawaii last year.

Dozens of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and across the world examined 28 strange weather conditions last year to see if global warming partly increased their likelihood or their strength. In a series of papers in a 180-page, peer-reviewed report, the scientists spotted some effects of climate change in half of them.

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Deforestation 'May have Started West Africa's Ebola Outbreak

Deforestation may have triggered the recent Ebola outbreak in west Africa, France’s environment minister Ségolène Royal told a London summit hosted by the Prince of Wales ahead of next month’s Cop21 conference.

Addressing the British energy and climate change secretary, Amber Rudd, representatives from forest nation governments and global companies, Royal said researchers believe the destruction of forest habitat brought bats, known to carry the virus, into greater contact with humans.

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A Disappointing but Long-Awaited Decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline

At least it’s over.

President Obama rejected the Keystone XL oil pipeline on Friday, ending an unseemly political dispute marked by activist hysteria, GOP hyperbole, presidential weakness and a general incapability of various sides to see the policy question for what it was: a mundane infrastructure approval that didn’t pose a high threat to the environment but also didn’t promise much economic development. The politicization of this regulatory decision, and the consequent warping of the issue to the point that it was described in existential terms, was a national embarrassment, reflecting poorly on the United States’ capability to treat parties equitably under law and regulation.

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