It's Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record

It's Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record: "Deny this. The animation below shows the Earth’s warming climate, recorded in monthly measurements from land and sea over 135 years. Temperatures are displayed in degrees above or below the 20th-century average. Thirteen of the 14 hottest years are in the 21st century."



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Shanghai first major Chinese region to ditch GDP growth target - FT.com

Shanghai first major Chinese region to ditch GDP growth target - FT.com: "hanghai has ditched its official economic growth target for 2015, becoming the first major city or province in China to abandon such metrics as government policy shifts towards a focus on growth quality over quantity.
The move signifies both a nationwide move to switch focus from hitting annual targets with some of the fastest growth rates in the world — now that those rates are waning — as well as an effort to de-link growth from promotions at the local level.
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Growth in gross domestic product has long been a key metric to evaluate the performance of local officials, helping to determine whether they were promoted. But President Xi Jinping last year said that “we can no longer simply use GDP growth rates to decide who the [party] heroes are”."



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US Senate: full of hot air humans, who do not accept scientic evidence

US Senate refuses to accept humanity's role in global climate change, again | Environment | The Guardian: "It is nearly 27 years now since a Nasa scientist testified before the US Senate that the agency was 99% certain that rising global temperatures were caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

And the Senate still has not got it – based on the results of three symbolic climate change votes on Wednesday night.

The Senate voted virtually unanimously that climate change is occurring and not, as some Republicans have said, a hoax – but it defeated two measures attributing its causes to human activity.

Only one Senator, Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, voted against a resolution declaring climate change was real and not – as his fellow Republican, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma once famous declared – a hoax. That measure passed 98 to one.


White House unveils plan to open Atlantic waters to offshore oil drilling
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But the Senate voted down two measures that attributed climate change to human activity – and that is far more important.

Unless Senators are prepared to acknowledge the causes of climate change, it is likely they will remain unable and unwilling to do anything about it.

Democrats had planned the symbolic, “sense of the Senate” votes as a way of exposing the Republicans’ increasingly embarrassing climate change denial. Further climate votes will come up on Thursday.

Two were tacked on as Democratic amendments to a bill seeking to force approval of the contentious Keystone XL pipeline – despite a veto threat from Barack Obama.

The third, introduced by a Republican, affirmed climate change was real but expressed support for the Keystone XL pipeline."



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Mass Death of Seabirds in Western U.S. Is 'Unprecedented'

Mass Death of Seabirds in Western U.S. Is 'Unprecedented': "Cassin's auklets are tiny diving seabirds that look like puffballs. They feed on animal plankton and build their nests by burrowing in the dirt on offshore islands. Their total population, from the Baja Peninsula to Alaska's Aleutian Islands, is estimated at somewhere between 1 million and 3.5 million.

Last year, beginning about Halloween, thousands of juvenile auklets started washing ashore dead from California's Farallon Islands to Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) off central British Columbia. Since then the deaths haven't stopped. Researchers are wondering if the die-off might spread to other birds or even fish.

"This is just massive, massive, unprecedented," said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. "We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far.""



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