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Recent research shows that the cold snap of the last few weeks is not the result of climate change.  This research was done as a result of Trump's odd tweet saying that the East Coast "could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming. Al Gore then responded to the tweet by saying that he believed that the drastic temperature change was just some more of that good old climate change. The researchers also said that these swings are just natural in North America, and that while they'll still happen, they will most likely not be severe as climate change worsens.

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The cold snap that sent temperatures plunging last week and brought the most frigid new year in recorded history, in some places, had nothing to do with climate change, according to a new study.

In recent years, climate scientists have studied the connection between global warming and freezing temperatures. They are examining how shifting air patterns over the Arctic, and their incursion into North America and Europe, are connected to climate change.

But the two-week deep freeze didn't carry the hallmarks of human activity, according to a rapid attribution study from Climate Central, a science communication project based in Princeton, N.J. World Weather Attribution, a group of international researchers, performed the analysis.

Temperatures in some parts of the country, including Buffalo and Detroit, were more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit below normal for this time of year. Such events are increasingly rare, and the group found that wintertime temperatures are actually increasing in the United States. That is to be expected in a warmer world, the authors wrote.

"We conclude that this was an exceptional two-week cold wave in the area in the current climate," the authors wrote. "Cold outbreaks like this are getting warmer (less frequent) due to global warming, but cold waves still occur somewhere in North America almost every winter."

That didn't stop politicians from seizing on the cold. President Trump tweeted that the East Coast "could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming," while former Vice President Al Gore tweeted that the bitter cold is "exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis."

Researchers found that such a cold spell was more likely before human-caused global warming. Now, a two-week deep freeze is about 15 times less likely to occur than a century ago, when temperatures in such an event would be 4 degrees lower, according to the international group of researchers. The cold streak was also unique in that it occurred so early in the season.

The group has looked at other extreme weather events. It found that the likelihood of Hurricane Harvey's rainfall was increased by climate change, but a drought in Somalia, in 2016 and 2017, was not connected to global warming.

There is evidence that Arctic blasts of frigid air could become more common as a result of climate change, though scientists say more study is needed to firmly draw any conclusions. That's because the jet stream around the Arctic region seems to be weakening. It typically traps and encircles the coldest air over the Arctic, but as it weakens, colder air can filter down to lower latitudes.

Scientists are looking at the link between the loss of Arctic sea ice and how it affects weather in lower latitudes, but more research is needed.

Gabriel Vecchi, a geosciences professor at the Princeton Environmental Institute and an author of the report, said the climate community is divided on whether or not colder winter temperatures can be traced to global warming. He said most experts in the field likely don't agree with that hypothesis, though he says there is evidence for it.

"The finding that cold spells could become more common due to global warming is an interesting one, but it is also a controversial one in our field," Vecchi said. "There is a lot of discussion about it in the scientific literature, and I think it's a very counterintuitive hypothesis that people have, and I think because of that, it's appealing. But we don't find any support for it in this work."

While the report failed to find human fingerprints on the cold weather, that doesn't raise questions about the broader role that people are having on the globe, he said.

"I think it would be misguided to look at any cold event as evidence for or against global warming," Vecchi said. "There is evidence for global warming on a number of levels, and the planet has been warming, the oceans have been taking up heat, sea levels have been rising, land snow has been melting, glaciers are melting, and all these other things, so the reality of global warming is uncontroversial."
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

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The cold snap that sent temperatures plunging last week and brought the most frigid new year in recorded history, in some places, had nothing to do with climate change, according to a new study. In recent years, climate scientists have studied the connection between global warming and freezing temperatures.

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Data shows that 2017 caused more damage in terms of dollars as a result of natural disasters than any year in history. The total cost was estimated at $306 billion. For comparison, that money could probably buy the entirety of the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB. There were 16 disasters that totaled over $1 billion in damage. The firm also confirmed that there were a total of 710 natural catastrophic disasters, nearly a hundred more than the average. This data begs the question, is rebuilding in the same areas worth it?

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Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria combined with devastating Western wildfires and other natural catastrophes to make 2017 the most expensive year on record for disasters in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Monday.

The disasters caused $306 billion in total damage in 2017, with 16 events that caused more than $1 billion in damage each. The bulk of the damage, at $265 billion, came from hurricanes.

"2017 was a historic year for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters," said Adam Smith, an economist for NOAA, on a call with reporters.

The record-breaking year raises concerns about the effects of future natural disasters, as scientists fear climate change could make extreme weather events more damaging.

Hurricane Harvey, which sparked extreme flooding in Houston and the surrounding area in August and September, caused $125 billion in damage, the year's most expensive disaster. Hurricane Maria, which in September set off a fatal and ongoing humanitarian crisis in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico and elsewhere, caused $90 billion in damage. Hurricane Irma raked across the Caribbean and hit Florida in September, causing $50 billion in total damage, NOAA reports.

The storms also caused 251 combined deaths, the report found. According to Smith, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria now join 2005's Katrina and 2012's Sandy among the five most costly U.S. hurricanes in the agency's disaster record.

Western wildfires cost an additional $18 billion and 54 lives, the report found. This, too, was an annual record. Other large costs came from tornadoes, droughts, flooding and other severe weather events.

The previous most expensive disaster year was 2005, when events such as Hurricane Katrina caused $215 billion in U.S. damage when adjusted for inflation. NOAA's record of billion-dollar natural disasters goes back to 1980.

According to NOAA, there have been 215 U.S. disasters costing $1 billion or more since 1980, for a total of more than $1.2 trillion in damage. The year 2017 tied 2011 for the largest total number of such events, at 16.

With numbers like the ones above, it's no wonder the insurance industry also took a massive hit during 2017, thanks in large part to the trio of hurricanes that ravaged parts of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and parts of the South.

Insurers are set to pay out a record $135 billion stemming from natural disasters around the globe last year, according to data released this month from the world's largest reinsurer.

Those huge payouts stem largely from last year's deadly and devastating hurricanes, but those were far from the only disasters. Widespread flooding caused by monsoon rains in South Asia also contributed to the costs, as did a severe earthquake in Mexico, according to Munich Re, a German-based reinsurer.

Overall losses, which include uninsured losses, amounted to about $330 billion, the reinsurer said. That is second only to 2011, when a massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan fueled overall losses of more than $350 billion in today's dollars.

The firm identified 710 natural catastrophes around the globe, significantly higher than the annual average of 605. But those in the United States were by far the most costly, accounting for roughly half of all insurance payouts.

Insurance officials also said they expect more such catastrophes ahead.

"Some of the catastrophic events, such as the series of three extremely damaging hurricanes, or the very severe flooding in South Asia after extraordinarily heavy monsoon rains, are giving us a foretaste of what is to come," Torsten Jeworrek, a Munich Re board member, said in an announcement about the global losses. "Because even though individual events cannot be directly traced to climate change, our experts expect such extreme weather to occur more often in future."

Solomon Hsiang, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied how natural disasters impact societies, said that the economic effects of the 2017 disasters will reverberate for years to come.

"There's sometimes a sense that we recover to where we were before the disaster," Hsiang said. But he said that even if people rebuild and stitch together lives resembling those they had before, the process itself can be economically draining. "When we look back in historical record, we see that overall economic growth slows down, but it slows down over a long time. It shows up over the next decade ... The idea that it causes any kind of economic stimulus is a myth; there's just no evidence of that."

That makes the financial impact harder to recognize. "It's going to end up costing us a lot of money, but it's hard to notice," Hsiang said. "Because when a train slows down gradually, you don't just fall over."

If the country experiences an increase in the number of such disasters, he said, "it's going to make us poorer in the long run." Hsiang said reason is that land that gets hit again and again by hurricanes or other disasters eventually will decline in value. But he also noted that as Americans recovering from devastating storms and floods borrow large amounts to rebuild, it actually has the potential to affect capital markets, making credit more expensive even for people in other part of the country.

"There's no one in the country who's completely insulated from these impacts," he said.

In addition, the key question underlying the latest tally of disaster cost is to what extent climate change may be driving the United States and the rest of the world toward more numerous or more severe disasters.

NOAA experts demurred on this question on a media call, declining to apportion how much of the damage could be attributed to a changing climate as opposed to other factors. One key factor that is also known to be worsening damage is that there is more valuable infrastructure, such as homes and businesses, in harm's way - along coastlines or in areas vulnerable to wildfire.

"For the purposes especially of this product, we do not try to parse those apart," said Deke Arndt, chief of the monitoring section at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. "We're more interested in quantifying what's going on. Both the economists and physical scientists will retrospectively look at that, but those sort of happen at the speed of science."

But one expert, Harvard oceanographer and climate expert James McCarthy, highlighted the role of climate change in a statement in response to the NOAA findings.

"We can expect extreme weather events and economic losses and costs associated with them to continue increasing unless we make dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions," McCarthy said.

McCarthy authored a recent report with Robert Watson, the former chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Liliana Hisas, the executive director of the Universal Ecological Fund (FEU-US), arguing that U.S. $ 1 billion disasters are increasing over time and suggesting economic costs from such events will only increase under climate change.

"As we both know hurricanes, wild-fires, floods and severe weather events occur naturally," said Watson by email. "However, the data shows an overall increased frequency in these events, and an associated increase in intensity. The precautionary principle would suggest that we should assume a significant contribution from human activities and prepare to adapt and mitigate."
Read more at Energy & Environment: Katrina. Sandy. Harvey. The debate over climate and hurricanes is getting louder and louder The scariest thing about 2017's hurricanes: They keep getting really strong, really fast The science behind the U.S.'s strange hurricane 'drought' - and its sudden end For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.

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Extreme hurricanes and wildfires made 2017 the most costly U.S. disaster year on record

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Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria combined with devastating Western wildfires and other natural catastrophes to make 2017 the most expensive year on record for disasters in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Monday. The disasters caused $306 billion in total damage in 2017, with 16 events that caused more than $1 billion in damage each.

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Most articles about climate change have a very saddening view on the Earth's future, but this one is quite the opposite.  According to a team of researchers from Leeds, England, if we continue creating environmental legislation at even a bit of a faster rate, then we may just end up at the lowest end of their predicted average temperature range at the end of the century.  They were able to predict this using something called "equilibrium climate sensitivity". The only problem with this data is that it is just that - predictions. Should we hit temperature ranges just a tad higher, the same scientists say that we are essentially doomed.

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Climate scientists on Wednesday suggested that they may be able to rule out some of the most dire scenarios of what would happen if greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere were to double.

Unfortunately, the same scientists say the best-case scenarios are also probably unrealistic.

How a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gases would affect the climate is of tremendous importance, as humans are running out of time to avoid that outcome. With current atmospheric concentrations at 405 parts per million, as opposed to about 280 parts per million before the dawn of the industrial era, the planet is already about halfway there.

In the new study in the journal Nature, Peter Cox and Mark Williams of the University of Exeter and Chris Huntingford of the United Kingdom's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology attempt to recalculate the "equilibrium climate sensitivity," a highly influential metric that describes how much the planet will warm if carbon dioxide doubles and the Earth's climate then adjusts to the new state of the atmosphere.

For decades, climate studies have found a very broad range of possibilities for this key figure - somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with 3 degrees Celsius (or 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) sitting smack in the middle of the range. But the inability to further narrow this estimate has been a big problem, Cox said.

"The problem is the low end sort of implies maybe you don't need to do much about climate change except adapt, and the high end implies it's kind of too late," he said.

Recently, however, different teams of scientists have hit upon an approach to try to narrow the results - trying to find an "emerging constraint" on what the possible future outcome could be by comparing high-powered climate change models, which predict the future, with currently observed elements of present climate.

"You find something in the models which is well correlated to future response and can potentially be observed in the real world," Ben Sanderson, a climate expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said of the approach. Sanderson was not involved in the current study.

To that end, Cox and his colleagues focused on a simple measurement: How much the climate varies on an annual basis, irrespective of greenhouse gas emissions.

"What we did is look at how the variation from year to year, having taken out the long-term trend, was related to the sensitivity of the system, across all models," Cox said.

The result allowed the scientists to narrow the probable climate sensitivity range to between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees Celsius, with a central figure of 2.8 degrees C (5.04 degrees Fahrenheit), somewhat lower than the previous central estimate. They said this amounts to narrowing the uncertainty around the figure by 60 percent.

"We think the likely range is 2.2 to 3.4, so that kind of very much downplays high climate sensitivities above 4, and low climate sensitivities below 2," Cox said. The study asserted that there is less than a 3 percent possibility that the climate sensitivity is lower than 1.5 degrees, and less than a 1 percent possibility that it is higher than 4.5 degrees.

If correct, this would be very good news - suggesting that we may not have to reckon with truly hellish temperature increases by the end of this century. "I should thank Cox and colleagues for helping me to sleep a little easier in my bed at night," Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, wrote in a commentary on the new study, also published in the journal Nature.

Forster also called the new study's methodology "ingenious."

But the key question is, of course, whether it's actually right.

The new finding contrasts with a similar study, also published in the journal Nature, which found that the global climate models that best capture the current climate are also those that predict some of the warmest and most severe outcomes. That study, by the Carnegie Institute for Science's Patrick Brown and Ken Caldeira, used a conceptually similar methodology but focused on the incoming and outgoing energy at the top of the planet's atmosphere, rather than annual temperature wobbles. And it actually pushed upward somewhat the estimate for how bad warming could get.

Brown and Caldeira said they are studying Cox's new research to try to figure out why it differs from their own.

Cox, meanwhile, said he saw similarities, as well as differences, with the other team's study. "What we both do is say the low values are unlikely," he said. "We also think the high values are unlikely, they think they're likely."

"It's normal for these types of studies to be apparently contradictory," Sanderson said in an email. "The way forward is to better understand the physical mechanisms for why the correlations exist . . . then we can look together at all the information to make a holistic assessment of all the evidence as it pertains to the real world."

It all suggests that scientists have plenty more work to do in figuring out a better estimate of the climate sensitivity. Their best answer will be watched closely when it arrives in the form of the next report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, expected in 2021.

In the meantime, getting the number right matters a great deal in the current moment - because it helps determine the chance of limiting global warming to below 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, two key international targets enshrined in the Paris climate agreement.

Cox explained that with current emissions levels, we're probably committed to a warming that would be about half of the central equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) number.

"If we believe the ECS is 4, we're already committed to 2 degrees," he said. "An ECS of 3 means that the aspirational limit of Paris of 1.5 degrees is essentially about to be passed. An ECS of 2.8 means we still have the possibility of avoiding 2 degrees - we're very close to 1.5, but we could still avoid 2."

"If this study is proved correct, it wouldn't change our best guess of what the future would look like under climate change - but it would make the worst-case scenario slightly less catastrophic," Sanderson said.

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Yes, global warming will be bad. But these scientists say it won't reach the worst-case scenario.

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Climate scientists on Wednesday suggested that they may be able to rule out some of the most dire scenarios of what would happen if greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere were to double. Unfortunately, the same scientists say the best-case scenarios are also probably unrealistic.

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A team of researchers led by Daniel Scott, a University of Waterloo professor, recently did research that analyzed the rising temperatures in all of the previous Olympic Winter Games sites. They came to the conclusion that of the 21 sites, 9 of them will have temperatures too high to host another Winter Games by the year 2050. The researchers were also quick to point out that conditions for the Winter Games have not been ideal in recent years either. In Sochi, a record number of snowboarders wiped out during their half-pipe run. This crazy occurrence was due to the quality of the snow at the top of the pipe. The sugary texture slowed the riders down right as they were attempting their most difficult maneuvers.

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Richard Heathcote/Getty Images

Distill the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, to their essence and you get 15 sports that involve gliding on snow or ice. Because of climate change, though, by 2050 many prior Winter Games locations may be too warm to ever host the Games again.

By midcentury, nine former Winter Olympics sites may not be reliably cold enough for the Games.

A team of researchers, led by Daniel Scott, a geography professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, came to that conclusion by taking climate data from previous Winter Games locations and applying climate-change models to predict future winter weather conditions.

The research, originally published in 2014, was updated this month to include the Pyeongchang Olympics, which begin Feb. 9, and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

According to Dr. Scott's research, using emissions projections in which global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise through midcentury and global temperatures increase by 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, nine of the host locations will be too hot to handle the Games. But that temperature increase won't be felt equally. Chamonix, France, the site of the first Winter Games, will have winter temperatures 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by midcentury.

Three former venues may also lack sufficient snow, even with artificial snowmaking.

Dr. Scott's model factors in artificial snowmaking, but that has its limits. The technology involves pumping water through small nozzles under high pressure. When the water hits cold air it freezes almost instantly and turns into snow - but only if the air is cold enough.

"You're relying on cold air to do the refrigeration for you," Dr. Scott said.

When the temperatures are above freezing, as they were during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, you have to turn to more extreme measures.

In Vancouver, which melted under one of its warmest winters on record, organizers brought in 1,000 bales of straw and covered them with a mix of artificial snow and natural snow hauled in from higher elevations to cover the bare ski slopes.

When shortages of cold and snow are combined, four former venues are likely to be unreliable hosts by midcentury. Five more will be risky.

In Sochi, whose mild climate made it an unusual choice for the Winter Games, organizers banked snow from the previous winter, storing it in shady places and covering it with insulation.

Both locations also used technology that involves embedding pipes with dry ice in the sites for aerials and moguls skiing. The technique supposedly preserves snow for up to two days by cooling it from the bottom up.

Despite these efforts, athletes at both Games complained of poor snow that they said led to unfair conditions.

Skiers, for example, may consider a competition unfair when shifting conditions make a course faster or slower depending on when the skier races. At Sochi, snowboarders complained that the half-pipe was dangerous because of bumps and sugary snow that can slow down riders when they should be gaining speed for maneuvers that involve launching as much as 20 feet above the half-pipe's 22-foot top edge. During the event's qualifying runs, more than half of the athletes fell.

In the past, Olympic organizers have dealt with the vagaries of weather by bringing events indoors. Skating events were once held outside, for instance. But you can't move the mountains required for the giant slalom or the 50-kilometer course for one of the men's cross country ski events indoors.

Even in a warming world, some regions will still have cold places. But the number of possible Winter Olympics locations will decline. In the future, the Winter Games might rotate through a handful of the same cities.

At the same time, the warming climate affects not only the locations of the Olympics, but also the ability of athletes to train. In the United States, some ski locations are forecast to see seasons 50 percent shorter by 2050 and 80 percent shorter by 2090.

That will complicate life for elite athletes, but they can at least travel to find snow.

The repercussions are potentially much more serious for young athletes getting a first taste winter sports. What will happen to the pipeline that feeds elite sports programs when the local ski hill, or the frozen pond where kids play hockey, disappears?

"It's an interesting question that nobody really knows the answer to," Dr. Scott said.

Note: Locations with less than 75 percent probability for either freezing minimum temperatures or deep enough snow were categorized by researchers as unreliable hosts for the Winter Olympics. Those with greater than 90 percent probability for both metrics were considered reliable. All others were considered "marginal/higher risk" hosts.

Additional production by Claire O'Neill.

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Of 21 Winter Olympic Cities, Many May Soon Be Too Warm to Host the Games

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Richard Heathcote/Getty Images Distill the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, to their essence and you get 15 sports that involve gliding on snow or ice. Because of climate change, though, by 2050 many prior Winter Games locations may be too warm to ever host the Games again.

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This article outlines the idea that environmental issues are becoming increasingly bipartisan, and that this trend has no plans of stopping soon.  Fewer than a third of republicans nationwide would say that climate change is caused by humans, compared to an overwhelming majority of democrats.  As a result of today's hyper partisanship, "Being skeptical about global warming has become part of Republican or conservative identity", says Riley E. Dunlap, a professor of environmental ecology at Oklahoma State University. Due to this overall trend, it will become harder for environmental legislation to become passed.

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Happening?

Happening?

Over the past two decades, Republicans have grown increasingly doubtful about climate change, even as Democrats have grown increasingly convinced that it's happening and is caused by humans. But recent research published in the journal Climatic Change reveals greater nuance in partisan climate opinions across the country.

"Pockets of Republicans, or even a plurality or majority, support some pro-climate issues," said Matto Mildenberger, a professor of political science at the University of California Santa Barbara and lead author on the study. Researchers found variation in Democratic beliefs too, he said, but those findings were less politically relevant because a majority of Democrats tend to accept climate science and support related policies no matter where they live.

The study's maps show how Republican support swings between minority and majority, depending on geography and how questions are posed.

Across the country, most Republicans don't think humans are causing climate change.

Fewer than a third of registered Republicans nationwide say that climate change is caused mostly by human activities, while nearly half say it's mostly due to "natural changes in the environment," according to the study, which looked at eight years of opinion data and mapped the results by congressional district.

"Being skeptical about global warming has become part of Republican or conservative identity," said Riley E. Dunlap, a professor of environmental sociology at Oklahoma State University who was not involved in the study.

Republicans in the New York City area are about twice as likely to agree that human activities are driving global warming as their counterparts in Montana. But even in New York, barely 50 percent attribute the cause to humans.

Since the election of Donald Trump as president, belief that climate change is human-caused has declined among registered Republican voters, according to another recent poll.

Last month, more than a dozen federal agencies published a major scientific report showing that global warming is largely due to human greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet half of Republicans say that climate change is happening, with strongest support on the coasts and in places where climate effects are now being felt.

Climate views at the local level tend to reflect "where liberal and moderate Republicans live compared to conservative Republicans,"said Patrick J. Egan, a professor of politics and public policy at New York University. So it's no surprise that Republicans in major cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York are most likely to say climate change is happening.

But, there are also "tantalizing hints" that geographic vulnerability to climate change may affect opinion, Professor Egan said.

For example, in south Florida, an area vulnerable to sea level rise and increased risk of extreme weather, an estimated 56 percent of Republicans agree that climate change is happening. A majority of Republicans in both Alaska and Hawaii say the same.

A majority of Republicans say they support policies to mitigate climate change.

A majority of Republicans in almost every congressional district support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, even when they don't believe those emissions are causing climate change.

That may seem like a paradox, but there's a long history of "support among people of all partisan backgrounds for regulating pollution - basic things like clean water and clean air," Professor Egan said. "To the extent global warming is framed that way, it raises support for policy interventions more than the abstract concept of 'climate change.'"

Despite this majority support, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has worked to repeal Obama-era policies regulating power plant emissions. He has also raised questions over whether his agency should be regulating greenhouse gases at all.

Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who is working to get others in his party to accept climate change, said that Republicans are often willing to embrace solutions, even if they say they don't "believe" in climate change.

"It doesn't help to point the finger at conservatives and ask, 'Do you believe?'" he said. "By showing me a solution that fits with my values, I've got a way to accept the existence of the problem."

Republican support for various policy proposals, nationwide

When it comes to financing renewable energy research, support among Republicans is high: above 75 percent in 15 states, and at least 70 percent in all but Texas and Rhode Island, according to estimates from the recent study.

Still, Profesor Egan cautioned that people may show more support for complex public policy questions in the abstract before specific policy details, and costs, are attached.

Asked if utilities should produce at least 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources, with a quantified cost of $100 per consumer laid out, overall support among Republicans dropped to 48 percent. But a close look at congressional districts showed majority support among Republicans on the East and West Coasts, as well as in Florida, a state which currently does not have a mandate for power companies to get a portion of their energy from renewable sources.

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How Republicans Think About Climate Change - in Maps

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Happening? Happening? Over the past two decades, Republicans have grown increasingly doubtful about climate change, even as Democrats have grown increasingly convinced that it's happening and is caused by humans. But recent research published in the journal Climatic Change reveals greater nuance in partisan climate opinions across the country.

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NASA just ranked 2017 as the second hottest year since the data was first recorded in 1880. The only year to have been hotter was 2016. Even more shockingly, it came during a year without El Nino, which as we learned, naturally increases the average temperature. Gavin A. Schmidt, the man in charge of the committee that compiled that data at NASA, was quoted saying, "It's not that we've gotten to a plateau, this isn't where we're going to stay. In ten years we are going to say, 'oh look another decade of record setting temperatures'". Scientists also project that if our temperatures rise more than an average of 2 degrees celsius, the climate will hit a "disastrous point of no return".

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The world in 2017 saw some of the highest average surface temperatures ever recorded, surprising scientists who had expected sharper retreat from recent record years.

Scientists at NASA on Thursday ranked last year as the second-warmest year since reliable record-keeping began in 1880, trailing only 2016. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which uses a different analytical method, ranked it third, behind 2016 and 2015.

What made the numbers unexpected was that last year had no El Niño, a shift in tropical Pacific weather patterns that is usually linked to record-setting heat and that contributed to record highs the previous two years. In fact, last year should have benefited from a weak version of the opposite phenomenon, La Niña, which is generally associated with lower atmospheric temperatures.

"This is the new normal," said Gavin A. Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA group that conducted the analysis. But, he said, "It's also changing. It's not that we've gotten to a new plateau - this isn't where we'll stay. In ten years we're going to say 'oh look, another record decade of warming temperatures.'"

An analysis by a private independent group, Berkeley Earth, ranked last year as the warmest year on record without El Niño. Zeke Hausfather, a researcher with the group, said that despite the weak La Niña, "It doesn't seem like there's any evidence things are cooling down."

By both the NASA and NOAA analyses, 17 of the 18 warmest years since modern record-keeping began have occurred since 2001. Overall, fueled by emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, temperatures have increased more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century.

In order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, scientists say global temperatures must not increase more than 2 degrees Celsius.

The warming trend comes at a time that President Donald Trump is dialing back many climate-related regulations and policies. Last year he announced that the United States would withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord and repeal the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era measure designed to reduce emissions from power plants.

But more than statements from politicians or data from scientists, events last year reminded the world that the climate is changing.

Temperatures in the Arctic, which is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, soared again during parts of 2017, and the region continued to lose sea ice and permafrost.

Much of the eastern half of the United States had an abnormally warm February, an occurrence that scientists said was made more likely by climate change. Scientists found the fingerprints of warming in many other weather events as well, including a June heat wave that led to wildfires in southern Europe and extreme heat in Australia's summer.

In other cases the links to climate change were not as conclusive, but a series of catastrophes last year - including widespread hurricane damage from Texas to the Caribbean and lethal wildfires in California - seemed to indicate that such disasters were becoming much more common.

Researchers had expected that 2017 would end a string of three consecutive years with record temperatures. That string was exacerbated by a strong El Niño that began in 2015 ended in the second half of 2016. (Though 2015 was not technically an El Niño year.)

Normally, trade winds around the tropical Pacific blow from east to west, moving warmer water away from the South American coast and piling it up around Asia and Australia. In an El Niño those trade winds weaken or even reverse, allowing the typically colder parts of the ocean to warm. This extra heat at the ocean's surface releases energy into the atmosphere, increasing global temperatures.

This is why, ordinarily, El Niño years tend to be the warmest years on record.

In a La Niña year, the oceanic pendulum tends to swing the other way, with the east-to-west trade winds becoming unusually strong, strengthening the process by which cold waters emerge from the ocean. That leads to cooler than normal ocean temperatures and, as a result, cooler atmospheric temperatures.

The world is now experiencing a weak La Niña, with ocean temperatures in the Pacific slightly below normal, said Anthony Barnston, chief forecaster with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.

"That will probably hold back the average mean temperatures from breaking records again," Dr. Barnston said.

The NOAA and NASA analyses both use temperature measurements from weather stations on land and at sea. The analyses differ largely in how they treat the Arctic. In NASA's method, the region has more of an influence on the overall average.

"It's startling to know there are individuals on the brink of adulthood who have spent their entire lives in a climate that, largely due to human activity, is vastly different from the one their parents experienced growing up," said Rachel Licker, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a research and advocacy group.

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2017 Was One of the Hottest Years on Record. And That Was Without El Niño.

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The world in 2017 saw some of the highest average surface temperatures ever recorded, surprising scientists who had expected sharper retreat from recent record years. Scientists at NASA on Thursday ranked last year as the second-warmest year since reliable record-keeping began in 1880, trailing only 2016.