Americans are hot but not too bothered by global warming.

Most Americans know the climate is changing, but they say they are just not that worried about it, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. And that is keeping the American public from demanding and getting the changes that are necessary to prevent global warming from reaching a crisis, according to climate and social scientists.

As top-level international negotiations to try to limit greenhouse gas emissions start later this month in Paris, the AP-NORC poll taken in mid-October shows about two out of three Americans accept global warming and the vast majority of those say human activities are at least part of the cause.

However, fewer than one in four Americans are extremely or very worried about it, according the poll of 1,058 people. About one out of three Americans are moderately worried and the highest percentage of those polled — 38 percent — were not too worried or not at all worried.

Despite high profile preaching by Pope Francis, only 36 percent of Americans see global warming as a moral issue and only a quarter of those asked see it as a fairness issue, according to the poll which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

"The big deal is that climate has not been a voting issue of the American population," said Dana Fisher, director of the Program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland. "If the American population were left to lead on the issue of climate, it's just not going to happen."

Linda Gebel, a 64-year-old retired bookkeeper who lives north of Minneapolis, has read up on global warming.

"Everybody's life would be totally disrupted," Gebel said. "It will cause famines and wars, huge problems. I don't know why people wouldn't be worried about it."

And yet because she lives in the middle of the country — joking that she'll be "the last one who will be submerged"— Gebel added she doesn't "feel worried personally. I'm not sure this is going to happen in my lifetime, but I worry about my children. I worry about my grandchildren."

The "lukewarm" feeling and lack of worry has been consistent in polling over the years, even as temperatures have risen, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

"The issue hasn't quite boiled up enough so that people have put it on the top of things they want to focus on," Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said.

One issue is how big, yet distant the problem seems and how abstract it can be, Fisher said. It can cause people to put off worrying about it.

Renata Schram, a 43-year-old customer service representative in Sturgis, Michigan, says she believes global warming is real and is mostly caused by people, but she is only moderately worried.

"On my list of things that worry me today, global warming is kind of low," she said. The world's violence is a far more pressing issue, she says.

"Usually when we hear about global warming everything seems so distant," she said. "The sea levels are going to rise but I find it difficult to find a prediction that tells you how many years exactly."

White House science adviser John Holdren said climate contrarians emphasize how large the problem is, essentially telling people "the result (of warming) is too scary, so let's not believe it." He said these groups have been "incredibly effective in sowing doubt" about global warming.

For his part, Myron Ebell, a policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the elites on the coast may be concerned about global warming but people in the heartland who dig stuff up, grow stuff or make stuff are used to the vagaries of extreme weather. "They don't see it as much of a problem" because it isn't, he said.

Not so, said scientists.

"We are all vulnerable to the impacts," climate scientist Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution said. "If you are a farmer in Illinois or if you work on a railroad in Alabama or are a miner in West Virginia, there are impacts that are going to affect your life, your health and what you're going to pay for things in the grocery store."

Scientists, however, aren't communicating their worries well, figuring that issuing more reports and data will convince people, said climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe of Texas Tech, who reaches out to the evangelical Christian community. Success lies in finding common ground in humanity, she said.

"More facts are not going to fix the problem," Hayhoe told a meeting of top climate scientists last week in Washington. "Nearly every human on the planet has the values they need to care about climate change. We just need to connect the dots."

(News Survey Specialist Emily Swanson contributed to this report.)

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The United States is the world’s largest producer of nuclear power, but the country’s fleet of nearly 100 reactors is showing its age.

On November 2, the owner of a nuclear power station in New York said it will shut the plant down, which follows announcements of plant closures in Massachusetts, California, Florida and Wisconsin.

This raises important questions for the US energy sector.

The retirements reflect a set of economic challenges for nuclear power plants across the United States, and have important implications for climate change, energy costs and the reliability of the power grid.

Nuclear provides nearly 20% of the electricity in the United States, but the average plant is about 34 years old, and prospects for the future of many of these plants are murky, at best.

While five new reactors are currently under construction in the US, the World Nuclear Association estimates that more than 10 older ones are currently at risk of closure.

The explanation for these retirements and the limited amount of new construction is simple: cost.

Abundant and cheap natural gas coupled with the rapid expansion of wind power has limited increases in electricity prices, making it harder for some nuclear operators to justify continued operations or make expensive repairs.

By 2020, the US Energy Information Administration estimates that the cost of bringing new nuclear online will be about 25% more expensive than natural gas or wind.

But nuclear power is by far the most important source of non-CO2-emitting electricity in the United States. And while renewables like wind and solar have grown rapidly, they respectively accounted for just 4% and 0.4% of US electricity generation in 2014.

So as the existing nuclear fleet ages and eventually retires, what will happen to domestic CO2 emissions?

Regional picture

If nuclear power were somehow replaced entirely by wind and solar, emissions would remain flat – a best-case scenario.

The US electricity system produces about 500 tons of CO2 for every gigawatt-hour of power generated, and if all of today’s nuclear power were replaced by natural gas, total power sector CO2 emissions would grow by roughly 15%.

Take as an example Japan, which after the 2011 meltdown at Fukushima-Daiichi ordered all nuclear units closed. Nuclear power was replaced by coal, oil and gas-fired generation (the country also adopted increased energy-conservation measures). Most reactors are still offline, and Japanese CO2 emissions in 2014 were roughly 20% higher than they were in 2010, the year before the earthquake.

But the story in the United States is more complicated; the effect on CO2 emissions when a nuclear plant closes varies substantially based on which part of the country you’re looking at.

That’s because some regions, notably California and nine northeastern states, produce and consume electricity under a cap-and-trade program (a federal cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate in 2009). These programs cap the amount of CO2 that can be emitted from power plants each year (California’s program also covers other energy sources like transportation fuels), charging emitters a price for each ton of CO2 they produce.

So when a nuclear plant shuts down in California or Massachusetts, the market finds a way to stay under the emissions cap by reducing demand, increasing efficiency, and adding new carbon-free sources like wind and solar. These measures require new investment, and raise the price of electricity.

But when a nuclear plant goes offline in Wisconsin or Florida, where there is no cap, there is no requirement for power producers to find a way to hold emissions steady. Instead, the electricity will be replaced by a combination of sources that is cheapest for that region, and because that cheapest option is often natural gas, CO2 emissions will rise.

Wind and solar to rescue?

Some will argue that nuclear power can be replaced quickly with wind and solar.

Indeed, these sources are growing rapidly in the United States, and in some places, they are competitive with other fuels like natural gas. But wind and solar power do not provide the type of steady, reliable base load that nuclear (and coal and gas) can.

Wind and solar produce power when the wind blows or the sun shines, and need to be backed up by a rock-solid “baseload” source of power, such as natural gas. Policies in some parts of the country have introduced additional incentives for providing reliable power, but these incentives have not been enough to ward off retirement for a number of aging nuclear plants.

The federal government has for decades supported nuclear power with the Price-Anderson Act, which limits operator’s liability in case of accidents, and newer policies that provide a tax credit for new nuclear plants, loan guarantees for new construction and more.

The Obama administration’s recently finalized Clean Power Plan requires utilities to lower their overall emissions through efficiency or using less polluting sources of power but it does little to create incentives to keep older reactors producing.

Absent a substantial change in policy, nuclear technology, or electricity prices, nuclear power plants will continue to face substantial economic challenges in the United States.

In the meantime, the location of retiring plants matters a great deal for CO2 emissions. In regions with cap-and-trade, nuclear retirements will likely raise power prices, but have little short-term effect on emissions, while regions without cap-and-trade are likely to see their CO2 emissions rise if and when plants close.

Looking forward, a better approach to limiting CO2 emissions would bring together the entire country, rather than leaving cap-and-trade programs to be implemented in some states but not others.

Analysts have known for years that this type of nationwide carbon pricing needs to be the lynchpin of any economically sound climate policy.

The struggles of nuclear power will make it harder for the US to achieve its long-term climate goals, even though the falling costs of wind and solar power will provide a boost.

But without nationwide carbon pricing, there is no clear path toward the levels of emissions reductions we need to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.

(Daniel Raimi, Lecturer on Public Policy and Research Specialist, University of Michigan)

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President Barack Obama wants to make a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline by the end of his presidency, the White House said on Tuesday, calling a request by the project's Canadian developer to delay a review "unusual."

Obama, who has increasingly focused on environmental issues as his presidency nears its final year, will make a decision on TransCanada Corp's pipeline before he leaves office in 2017, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.

Faced with dimming prospects for approval of the pipeline that would help link Canada's Alberta oil fields to U.S. refineries, the Canadian company on Monday asked the Obama administration to delay its review, signaling that prolonged uncertainty is preferable to rejection of the $8 billion project.

The request "seems unusual," as the process has already taken more than seven years, Earnest said.

The request by Calgary-based TransCanada has been widely interpreted as an attempt to avert an impending "no" from Obama to the nearly 1,200-mile (2,000-km) cross-border pipeline. It would carry 830,000 barrels a day of mostly Canadian oil sands crude through Nebraska en route to refineries and ports along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The project has become the symbolic heart of a struggle between environmentalists opposed to oil sands development and defenders of fossil fuels.

All the Democratic presidential hopefuls including front-runner Hillary Clinton oppose the project, while most Republican presidential candidates support it.

The State Department, which is considering the project because it crosses the border with Canada, said it is in the process of responding to TransCanada but had no estimate of how long it would take.

The pipeline has many supporters in the U.S. Congress from oil-producing states, as it would also carry a small amount of domestic oil. But earlier this year Obama vetoed a bill that would have given Congress the power to approve the project.

(Reporting by Bruce Wallace in Los Angeles and Tim Gardner in Washington; Additional reporting by; Nia Williams in Calgary and Euan Rocha in Toronto; Rditing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

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Last month, Hurricane Patricia shattered records as the strongest storm ever recorded in the Western hemisphere.

Before that, in August, three category 4 hurricanes developed over the Pacific in rapid succession for a display unlike anything we've ever seen, shown in the image to the right.

And if climate scientists are correct, these monster storms are just a small taste of what is to come.

While predicting Earth's overall climate is a complex and tricky business, the notion that storms are growing ever-stronger is more of a guarantee than a possibility.

And the reason comes down to a simple, fundamental equation that's aided engineers for nearly 200 years.

In 1824, mathematician Nicolas Sadi Carnot developed an equation that has since been called Carnot's rule.

The equation calculates what is now called Carnot efficiency, which helps engineers evaluate how much power they can get out of an engine versus how much they lose to heat, sound, and other external forces. Here it is:

Efficiency of a heat engine = 1 - (Temp_cold/Temp_hot)

In his latest book "Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World," engineer and popular science communicator Bill Nye, explains that hurricanes are like a giant heat engine where Temp_cold and Temp_hot signal the temperature of the ocean and the air.

"As the sea surface warms with climate change, the temperature difference between the sea and the sky increases a little," Nye writes. "The Carnot efficiency of this enormous atmospheric spinning system gets just a little bit higher, and cyclonic storms can become more powerful."

Here, Nye is suggesting that the ocean is warming slightly faster than the air, which agrees with scientific analysis.

In a 2013 paper in Science, researchers discovered that although Earth's surface temperature has remained the same for the last 15 years, the overall global temperature continues to increase, and most of that heat is going into our oceans.

The researchers measured that, for the last 60 years, the middle depths of the Pacific have been warming 15 times faster than any other point in time in the last 10,000 years.

What's more, hurricanes get their energy from warm water, and the warmer the water, the faster the storm can develop. One recent study found that, compared with 25 years ago, hurricanes today tend to intensify significantly faster. That same study found that category 3 windspeeds are achieved nearly nine hours faster, on average, now than in the 80s, according to NASA.

For these reasons, experts anticipate that more violent storms are on their way.

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Fifty years ago today, as the American Association for the Advancement of Science highlighted, US president Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sent him a report entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.

The introduction to the report noted:

"Pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air and the lead concentrations in ocean waters and human populations."

The report included a section on atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate change, written by prominent climate scientists Roger Revelle, Wallace Broecker, Charles Keeling, Harmon Craig, and J Smagorisnky.

Reviewing the document today, one can’t help but be struck by how well these scientists understood the mechanisms of Earth’s climate change 50 years ago.

The report noted that within a few years, climate models would be able to reasonably project future global surface temperature changes. In 1974, one of its authors, Wallace Broecker did just that in a paper titled Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?.

You can read the details about this paper and Broecker’s modeling here and in my book Climatology versus Pseudoscience. His model only included the effects of carbon dioxide and his best estimates of natural climate cycles. It didn’t include the warming effects of other greenhouse gases, or the cooling effects of human aerosol pollution, but fortunately for Broecker those two effects have roughly canceled each other out over the past 40 years.

Broecker’s model predicted the global warming anticipated by 2015 both from carbon pollution alone, and when including his best estimate of natural climate cycles. In the figure below, the carbon-caused warming is shown in blue, and in combination with natural cycles (which Broecker turns out not to have represented very accurately) in green, as compared to the observed global surface temperatures from NOAA in red. As you can see, the climate model predictions from over 40 years ago turned out to be remarkably accurate.

The 1965 report also debunked a number of myths that climate contrarians continue to repeat to this day. For example, the first section of the climate chapter is titled Carbon Dioxide from Fossil Fuels – the Invisible Pollutant. Although the US supreme court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant in a landmark 2007 case, many contrarians object to this description. Nevertheless, climate scientists realized a half century ago that human carbon emissions qualify as pollution due to the dangers they pose via climate change.

The report noted that although carbon dioxide is an invisible “trace gas” – meaning it comprises a small percentage of the Earth’s atmosphere as a whole – it can nevertheless have significant impacts on the climate at these seemingly low levels. As the scientists wrote:

"Only about one two-thousandth of the atmosphere and one ten-thousandth of the ocean are carbon dioxide. Yet to living creatures, these small fractions are of vital importance … Within a few short centuries, we are returning to the air a significant part of the carbon that was slowly extracted by plants and buried in the sediments during half a billion years."

Contrarians today often repeat the myths that because carbon dioxide is invisible and only a trace gas, it can’t possibly cause significant climate change. This report demonstrates that scientists understood the greenhouse effect better 50 years ago than these contrarians do today.

The report documented the several different lines of evidence that prove the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is entirely human-caused, concluding:

"We can conclude with fair assurance that at the present time, fossil fuels are the only source of CO₂ being added to the ocean-atmosphere-biosphere system."

This is yet another fact understood by climate scientists 50 years ago that some contrarians, including a few favorite contrarian climate scientists like Roy Spencer and Judith Curry, continue to cast doubt upon to this day.

The report also projected how much the atmospheric carbon dioxide level would increase in the following decades.

"Based on projected world energy requirements, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (1956) has estimated an amount of fossil fuel combustion by the year 2000 that with our assumed partitions would give about a 25 percent increase in atmospheric CO₂, compared to the amount present during the 19th Century."

A 25% increase from pre-industrial levels would result in about 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The United Nations underestimated the growth in fossil fuel combustion, because the actual carbon dioxide level in 2000 was 370 ppm.

In addition to rising temperatures, the report discussed a variety of “other possible effects of an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide”, including melting of the Antarctic ice cap, rise of sea level, warming of sea water, increased acidity of fresh waters (which also applies to the danger of ocean acidification, global warming’s evil twin), and an increase in plant photosynthesis.

These climate scientists warned President Johnson in 1965 not just of the dangers associated with human-caused global warming, but also that we might eventually have to consider geoengineering the climate to offset that warming and the risks that we’re causing by inadvertently running a dangerous experiment with the Earth’s climate.

"Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years … The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO₂ content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings. The possibilities of deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic changes therefore need to be thoroughly explored."

Fifty years later, the impending Paris international climate negotiations represent our last chance to heed the expert counsel about the dangers posed by human-caused climate change before we’re fully committed to the deleterious consequences that climate scientists have been warning us about for a half century.

That’s why more than 1,500 academics from around the world have signed an open letter asking world leaders and delegates at Paris to take vigorous action now in order to avoid a future of catastrophic global warming.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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InStock, a restaurant in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is having its chefs create meals out of food waste. 

The products are collected from a variety of vendors who have a surplus of food or drinks that won't be sold.

Every morning, the restaurant collects items such as scraps from local fish shops, samples from chocolate shops, surplus beer from Heineken, or damaged goods from supermarkets.

As for the menu, it's constantly changing. The chefs don't usually know what items they will receive until it's time to get cooking.

This challenges the chefs to get creative with preparations — for instance, turning cauliflower into grated couscous or bananas into ice cream.

Menu items also depend on the harvest and the supermarket — if it's a rainy summer, the supermarkets in Amsterdam might have a surplus of meat that won't be used for outdoor barbecues. The meat not sold would go to InStock, which would result in a meat heavy menu that season.

As they cook, the restaurant also seeks to help vendors find ways to reduce waste. InStock is looking to expand its restaurant model to other cities as well. 

Take a look at some of the menu items that have been featured at this food rescuing restaurant. 

Zucchini made into sweet zucchini cake. 

Pouched salmon with apples, pears, leeks, and hash browns, prepared by InStock chefs. 

 Pork belly with fried rice dumplings, kimchi, and cauliflower.

 Steak with apple puree, snow peas, and ratatouille. 

SEE ALSO: 19 ways to eat healthy on a budget

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Today's most extreme summer days seen today could become the new norm in the Middle East by 2100, according to a recent study published in Nature Climate Change. Here's how hot it could get. 

Produced by Christine Nguyen. Original reporting by Rebecca Harrington.

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First and foremost, let's get something out of the way: weather and climate are not the same thing.

Climate is a long-standing pattern of temperature, precipitation and other atmospheric conditions in a given area, while weather looks at those same parameters over a much shorter time span.

Wait 10 minutes, and the weather might change.

Climate change, on the other hand happens over a much longer period of time, which means that it usually takes many years to notice any kind of shift in climate.

In a report published by the American Meteorological Society, researchers took a look at all the extreme weather events of last year, and attempted to see which were linked to climate change and which were just flukes of nature.

In all, 32 groups of scientists from around the world looked into 28 different extreme weather events, from drought and heat waves to storms, snowfall and flooding.

Among their findings, they found that heat waves in Asia and Australia were more likely due to climate change. Extreme rainfall in an area of Southern France was three times more likely than in the year 1950, because of climate change. A heat wave in Argentina during December 2013 was five times more likely to occur with the influence of climate change. Drought in East Africa? Floods in Indonesia? Cyclones hitting Hawaii? Also linked to climate change for 2014.

But not every bad storm or dry spell can be traced back to human-caused climate change. There were a huge number of winter storms in North America and a huge number of storms over the United Kingdom during the winter of 2013-1014, but those events could not be linked to climate change. Nor could the drought in northeastern Asia.

And some events happened in spite of global warming. In 2014, Antarctic sea ice reached a record-setting high. The culprit? Winds that blew cold air from the Antarctic continent out over the sea, speeding the freezing process. The authors caution that this event, already an anomaly, is likely to become even rarer as temperatures continue to rise.

The report is now in its fourth year.

"For each of the past four years, this report has demonstrated that individual events, like temperature extremes, have often been shown to be linked to additional atmospheric greenhouse gases caused by human activities, while other extremes, such as those that are precipitation related, are less likely to be convincingly linked to human activities," Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information said in a statement.

"As the science of event attribution continues to advance, so too will our ability to detect and distinguish the effects of long-term climate change and natural variability on individual extreme events. Until this is fully realized, communities would be well-served to look beyond the range of past extreme events to guide future resiliency efforts."

Previous years reports are also available online.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science

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Imagine if you could grow organic fruits and vegetables right inside your home, year-round?

That's what a startup called Grove wants to help you do with its Ecosystem, which they describe as "an intelligent, in-home garden."

Grove Labs, a startup based in Sommerville, Massachusetts, was founded by two MIT students who wanted to give people the ability to grow their own food, regardless of their location or season. 

The startup raised $4 million in seed funding, according to the Boston Globe. And in just four days, the company has raised more than $230,000 in additional funding on Kickstarter.

But their product isn't cheap: Pricing starts at $2,700.

Here's how the ecosystem works:

The ecosystem contains an aquarium, where fish eat food and turn it into waste. Bacteria take that waste and turn it into nitrates, which is a a critical fertilizer for plants. A plumbing system pumps the nitrate-enriched water through the plant beds, creating a self-enclosed ecosystem.

This symbiosis between fish, plants, and bacteria is called aquaponics.

The ecoystems contain two gardening beds. Instead of soil, they contain expanding clay pebbles, which also act as a biological filter. The plants are nourished by LED lights, which can slide up and down to adjust to the height of the plants.

The ecosystem is controlled by an intelligent operating system. It even comes with a vacation mode, so you won't need to rely on a neighbor to water your plants.

Grove plans to launch its product nationally soon.

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LOS ANGELES — The luxury electric-car market may be small, but it is lucrative enough to get another jolt — this time from a mysterious startup that says it wants to reimagine how people interact with their autos.

The startup's name is Faraday Future, and it has been hunting for a place to build what it says will be a $1 billion manufacturing plant for a new line of cars. Four states are contenders, and the company says to expect an announcement within weeks.

Headquartered in a low-profile office just south of Los Angeles, Faraday is holding a lot of details close. Though the company won't confirm the source of its funds, documents filed in California point to a parent company run by a Chinese billionaire who styles himself after Apple's late Steve Jobs.

Based on the few other public clues, Faraday is following the path blazed by Tesla Motors, its would-be rival hundreds of miles away in Silicon Valley.

Like Tesla, Faraday's car will be all-electric and debut at the high end.

The startup of about 400 employees has poached executive talent from Tesla and also draws its name from a luminary scientist — Michael Faraday — who helped harness for humanity the forces of nature.

Even Faraday's public announcement that California, Georgia, Louisiana, and Nevada are finalists for the factory mirrors the approach Tesla took to build a massive battery factory. Nevada won that bidding war among several states last year by offering up to $1.3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives.

Faraday hopes to distinguish itself by branding the car less as transportation than as a tool for the connected class.

"People's lives are changed by their mobile devices, the way that we interact," Faraday spokeswoman Stacy Morris said. "The car industry hasn't caught up sufficiently. The car still feels like a place where you're disconnected."

Just what that means could hit the road as early as 2017, when Faraday has said it wants to bring a car to market.

The timeline is ambitious, given that it typically takes automakers at least three years to go from concept to production — and that's when they already have their factories up and running.

"Developing an electric-vehicle platform from scratch takes many years, and doing it in 18 to 24 months would be a precedent-setting event, if it could be done," said John Gartner a director at the market-intelligence firm Navigant Research.

Then again, Faraday was around for more than a year before its recent public coming out. It was originally incorporated in California in May 2014 as LeTV ENV Inc., according to papers filed with the California Secretary of State. The address in Beijing is associated with Letv, a holding company founded by Chinese tech pioneer Jia Yueting.

Yueting is referred to as China's equivalent of Jobs, both for his talk of "disrupting" traditional industries as well as for his wardrobe at product launches of jeans and a T-shirt.

Faraday spokeswoman Morris wouldn't comment on Yueting.

"We're in stealth mode where we're not revealing ownership," she said. "There's a significant investor who wants the company to stand on its own merit before being associated" with it.

Navigant projects that the luxury plug-in market will grow in the US from 109,000 cars or SUVs next year to 468,000 in 2023. With a market share increase from 0.7% to 2.6% of all "light duty vehicles" (which also includes vans and pickup trucks), it's still a niche market.

And by 2023, there will be even more competition — automakers other than Tesla plan to compete for customers who want luxury electric vehicles.

"The market's only going to get more challenging," Navigant's Gartner said.

Barbara Sambriski in New York contributed.

Contact Justin Pritchard at https://twitter.com/lalanewsman .

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Carbon dioxide levels in the planet’s atmosphere hit a record high in 2014 – the 30th year in a row that record has been broken – spurring scientists to proclaim the planet is now in "uncharted territory" just weeks before international climate negotiations are scheduled to begin in Paris.

The figures are released annually by the World Meteorological Organization, a UN agency.

The organization's report on Monday shows that CO2 levels averaged 397.7 parts per million last year, briefly exceeding the 400-ppm threshold in the Northern hemisphere in early 2014, and again globally in early 2015.

Levels of atmospheric CO2 – the greenhouse gas most closely linked to climate change – has hit a new record every year since reliable record-keeping began in 1984.

"Every year we say time is running out. We have to act NOW to slash greenhouse gas emissions if we are to have a chance to keep the increase in temperatures at manageable levels," said Michel Jarraud, WMO secretary-general, in a statement.

Many scientists argue that CO2 levels above 400 ppm will lead to destructive and irreversible changes to the Earth's climate, but Dr. Jarraud said on Monday that 400 ppm will soon become "a permanent reality."

"We are moving into uncharted territory at a frightening speed," he added, saying the long-term implications for the planet will likely include rising sea levels, hotter global temperatures, and more extreme weather events like heat waves and floods. 

Global CO2 levels will likely increase again next year because of El Niño, the cyclical warming the Pacific Ocean has been experiencing this year, according to Oksana Tarasova, WMO atmospheric research chief.

Representatives from 190 countries will be meeting in Paris later this month for a week of negotiations aiming to coordinate a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for the effects of climate change that are now "locked in" because of gases that are already in the atmosphere.

Scientists have been stressing that the planet should seek to avoid warming more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Farenheit) above pre-industrial levels, but diplomats have said recently that it is unlikely such a goal will be achieved in Paris. Instead, the conference will hope to map out a pathway for a more achievable target.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said at a Monitor event last week that "we have to be able to admit publicly, privately, and everything in between that those 157 national climate change plans do not constitute enough emissions reductions to put us onto the path of 2 degrees [C]."

"However, what they do is get us off the business-as-usual trajectory that we were on just four or five years ago to a temperature increase of 4 or 5 degrees,"  Ms. Figueres added.

Global temperatures are set to rise 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels this year, according to the Met Office in the UK.

"This is the first time we're set to reach the 1C marker, and it’s clear that it is human influence driving our modern climate into uncharted territory," said Stephen Belcher, director of the Met Office Hadley Center, according tothe BBC.

The WMO maintains the world’s biggest network of sensors tracking changes in the Earth's atmospheric makeup, and it has been tracking rising greenhouse gas concentrations for decades. Besides the record CO2 levels, Monday's report also found that two other key greenhouse gases – methane and nitrous oxide – appear to be increasing at an even faster rate. Methane increased by 9 parts per billion from 2013 to 2014, up from an average annual increase of 4.7 ppb.

Material from Reuters was used in this report.

SEE ALSO: Giant air-sucking machines could be the solution to Earth's scary carbon dioxide problem

CHECK OUT: One graphic shows exactly who is responsible for climate change

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows what Europe would look like if all the Earth's ice melted

Our oceans are polluted and full of plastic. Roughly 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the world’s oceans every year, and according to a new study, the majority of this waste comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Regardless of its source, plastic pollution has a devastating impact on marine life.

At EcoWatch, we’ve highlighted photos of sea turtles killed by ingesting plastic and other debris. And just recently, two whales have been killed from ingesting plastic bags and fishing gear. But ocean pollution affects humans too.

Check out this infographic from DIVE.in, an online scuba diving magazine, to learn how ocean pollution hurts us, too:

SEE ALSO: Nearly half of all vertebrate sea animals have disappeared in just 40 years, and the future's not looking good

CHECK OUT: A 20-year-old is planning a 62-mile floating wall to make the ocean 'self-cleaning'

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NOW WATCH: This is what happens when plastic is thrown into the ocean

The strangely shaped clouds that appeared over South Africa over the weekend would seem to make the alien movie "District 9" seem all too real.

Viewers took to Instagram to document the strange phenomenon. Take a look:

But there's a perfectly rational explanation for these "UFO" clouds.

As National Geographic reports, they are known as lenticular clouds, and are typically formed when strong, moist winds move over jagged terrain or mountains, like South Africa's Table Mountain. As the air passes over this terrain, it cools and condenses into ominous UFO-like shapes, aligned perpendicularly to the direction the air is flowing.

Though sometimes, they can form over flat terrain due to shear winds created by a weather front, according to EarthSky.

These clouds are different from other clouds because they don't move, according to AccuWeather Meteorologist Jesse Ferrell.

For all these reasons, these clouds are often mistaken for UFOs.

Here are some more clouds. These ones were taken over Ireland in June:

These were spotted over Sierra Nevade in December 2011:

And these ones were seen downwind of Mount Rainier, Washington, in September 2011:

NOW SEE: This terrifying 'tsunami cloud' just engulfed Sydney harbor

NEXT: El Niño is coming

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NOW WATCH: Experience what it’s like to be in the center of a powerful storm in this time-lapse video

Greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2014 as the relentless fuelling of climate change makes the planet more dangerous for future generations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Monday, November 9th.

The rise in carbon dioxide levels was being amplified by higher levels of water vapour, which were in turn rising because of carbon dioxide emissions, the WMO said.

"We have broken a new record once again − over the last 25 years, between 1990 and 2014, there was a 36% increase in the radiative forcing of greenhouse gases," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud told a news conference in Geneva.

Graphs issued by the United Nations (UN) agency showed levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, climbing steadily towards the 400 parts per million (ppm) level, having hit a new record every year since reliable records began in 1984.

Carbon dioxide levels averaged 397.7ppm in 2014 but briefly breached the 400ppm barrier in the northern hemisphere in early 2014, and again globally in early 2015. Soon 400ppm will be a permanent reality, Jarraud said.

"Every year we say that time is running out and this year just adds to this pressure and it's very important that these figures are taken into account by the negotiators," Jarraud said.

Levels of the other two major man-made greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, also continued to rise in 2014, reaching 1,833 parts per billion (ppb) and 327.1ppb, respectively. Both increased at the fastest rate for a decade.

The UN panel of climate scientists estimates that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are at their highest in at least 800,000 years. Jarraud's annual plea for the world to do whatever it can to cut greenhouse gas emissions comes weeks before negotiators from more than 190 countries are due to meet in Paris to try to agree a new UN climate deal.

Plans revealed so far will not curb emissions enough to meet a target agreed in 2010 − to limit global warming to within 2C of pre-industrial levels.

"Even 1.5 degrees is virtually impossible any longer and certainly 2 degrees is still feasible but it requires quick and strong action," Jarraud said.

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NOW WATCH: These 300,000 bats consume 2.5 billion insects every night

Christmas trees are nice, but they only last a few weeks out of the year.

Green Furniture Concept, on the other hand — with its naturalistic design and modular, snakelike arrangement — lets people have a never-ending relationship with the great outdoors. 

Every piece of furniture is made of environmentally friendly materials, from the recycled plastic and steel of the Nova benches to the wool used in the leaf lamp trees to the finishing made of vegetable wax. 

The latter detail gives the furniture a delicious "new-bench smell, " according to Sandra Afeyan, the company's director of sales and marketing.

While the concept began with a chair built from a single piece of wood back in 2007, by Swedish designer Johan Berhin, it wasn't until earlier this year in Chicago that the European company made its North American debut.

The unveiling took place at this year's NeoCon design conference, where Green Furniture Concept won the silver medal in the Best of NeoCon bench division.

Despite the line's appearance in university cafeterias, libraries, airports, shopping malls, and other public spaces, Afeyan says, "no one knew who we were."

Whenever people catch a glimpse of the furniture, the reaction is fairly typical: a reflexive mix of confusion and awe.

"And we do different colors but no one wants different colors," Afeyan tells Tech Insider. "We do orange and green and blue and yellow, but people want to stick to this beautiful natural look."

If the benches aren't eye-catching, the trees certainly are.

Available in three sizes, each leaf lamp tree is made by tying together bushels of wool "leaves" that help trap nearby sounds, Afeyan says.

The dampened acoustics help serve larger quiet spaces, like university libraries, which can easily give off cold vibes to people staying there for extend periods of time.

"The other really neat feature about wool is that it's anti-static," she says. "So cleaning this thing is really easy." 

As for the future of Green Furniture Concept, Afeyan says the greatest focus is on designing integrated accessories for the bench series.

The company just introduced wireless charging capabilities at the end of each bench and has plans to include built-in garbage cans and flower planters, "so it's more of a system for public spaces."

Even Mother Nature has to adapt to the demands of modern technology.

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NOW WATCH: An artist has completely re-envisioned the most mundane piece of furniture

The ozone hole is now larger than North America, nearing record-size set in 2006.

Legislation and restrictions have reduced ozone-depleting chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere, and the ozone layer is starting to slowly repair its holes.

But those chemicals still concentrate around the poles during spring and summer (it's currently summer in Antarctica), eating a seasonal hole in the ozone layer every year.

As of October, the ozone hole over Antarctica was roughly 10 million square miles in size, slightly smaller than it was nine years ago when it was 10.42 million square miles across.

In this animation from DLR (Germany's space agency) you can watch this year's ozone hole being formed. Scientists think that unusual air currents carrying warm air towards the south pole are responsible for its current size.

On the ground, ozone is very harmful. It's the main ingredient in smog, and is produced by burning fossil fuels in power plants or vehicle engines. In the atmosphere, however, it forms a protective barrier, reflecting harmful radiation from the sun.

The hole in September 2006 was the largest and deepest ozone hole ever recorded. It remains to be seen whether this year's will top that record. Studies suggest that the ozone hole won't completely disappear until 2040 or even later.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science. 

SEE ALSO: Before-and-after pictures show how climate change is destroying the Earth

CHECK OUT: Giant, ancient viruses thawing out in Siberia are changing everything we thought we knew about them

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NOW WATCH: Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted

On November 30, world leaders from more than 140 countries around the world will meet in Paris to negotiate an international agreement on climate change. Former Vice President Al Gore stopped by our office to talk about what he hopes will happen at the summit.

Gore is one of the world's most prominent environmental activists and the winner of a Nobel Peace Price for his work on climate change. Ahead of the United Nations’ climate conference (COP 21), Gore’s organization The Climate Reality Project will be hosting a live broadcast on November 13th to raise awareness for the climate talks.

Produced by Christine Nguyen and Graham Flanagan.

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Although no one knows the exact amount of carbon that China emits each year, it's a well-known fact that the country has some of the most polluted air in the world. A recent study from UC Berkeley found that 4,000 people die every day because of complications from air pollution in China. 

In March, Chen Jining, the country's minister of environmental protection, said that while China cannot hold back on efforts to address the pollution, the turnaround is not going to be immediate. 

On November 9, the country was once again blanketed in acid smog from burning coal, breaking the record for the highest amount of pollution ever recorded in China. That weekend, the levels of airborne harmful particles were more than 50 times the number that the World Health Organization deems safe. The smog is estimated to remain lingering in the air throughout the rest of this week.

Here are a selection of photos that illustrate the escalation of China's pollution problems over recent years.

SEE ALSO: 20 shocking photos that show the many ways humans are destroying the Earth

A woman strolls through polluted air in front of a construction site of a residential compound in Wuhan.

Residential buildings are shrouded in a haze in Shenyang.

Even the night skies are hazy over downtown Shanghai.

A new report from Climate Central has named the cities that are most at risk from rising sea levels, and compared the effects of temperature rises of 4 degrees and 2 degree Celsius.

The following maps were created as part of the Surging Seas analysis, and use Google Earth to map the effects of rising water levels on cities around the world. They are based on forecasts published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

On the left you can see the result of a rise of 4 degrees Celsius, and on the right the result of 2 degrees.

Shanghai, China

In Shanghai, 76% of the population are below the rise caused by a 4 degree increase in temperatures – some 22.4 million people. Even if we restrict warming to a 2 degree increase, this will still affect 11.6 million people.

London, UK

In London, 13% of the 2010 population live below the sea-level rise caused by a 4 degree increase in temperature.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

19% of Buenos Aires’s population live below the rise caused by a 4 degree increase – some 2.4 million people.

Cape Town, South Africa

A 4 degree rise in Cape Town, will see 9% of the population below the median locked-in sea-level rise.

New York, US

Nearly 3 million people in New York live below the rise caused by a 4 degree temperature increase.

The authors emphasize that these rises will not happen overnight, and will play out over centuries – however if we do not tackle global warming, they highlight that such rises may become unpreventable within a few decades.

Check out how your city will be affected here.

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Since Wednesday, a powerful cyclone with winds of hurricane-force has been making its way across the country hitting parts of the Plains, Upper Midwest, Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, and Northeast.

The storm has spawned some nasty weather including blizzards in Minneapolis, flooding along the Great Lakes, and tornadoes across central Iowa. And it's expected to persist through Friday afternoon, the Weather Underground reported.

Here's a map showing where high wind alerts were yesterday: 

And a forecast from NOAA showing that the midwest and northeast can expect some rain and snow from the last gust of this thing today:

Unlike the cyclones we're used to seeing develop over oceans, this cyclone formed over land.

It's what meteorologists call the "Witch of November" or simply the "November Witch," and it's not the first one to strike our country. Records of the November Witch causing problems date as far back as the 1860s.

These storms should not be taken lightly. Here's what the coast at Grand Haven Michigan looked like on Thursday:

The November Witch is a consequence of cool, low-pressure air that's migrated down from Canada mixing with warm, high-pressure air that's come up from Mexico.

When the two mix, they can begin to rotate and if that rotation picks up enough speed, it forms a funnel. The result is a powerful cyclone with hurricane-force winds.

Most years, the witch goes unnoticed, but this year's crazy events were impossible to ignore. Millions have been affected either by snow-covered roads (like the on in Denver shown below), power outages, flight delays, flooding, vehicle damage, and more.

At least two semi-trailer trucks were tipped over by high winds, NBCNews reported on Thursday.

So far, the highest wind speeds reported this year were in Kansas City and over Michigan Lake that reached over 60 mph. More than 12,000 people in Kansas City lost power. And lakeshore flooding has led to the closing of streets like Route 5 in Hamburg, New York.

This year's November Witch is being compared to a similar one that struck in 1975 and conjured wind speeds so high that the resulting waves sunk the Great Lake freighter ship called the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The most severe November Witch in recorded history hit between Nov. 7-10 in 1913, that led to over a dozen ship wrecks and an estimated 250 deaths. It's estimated to have caused today's equivalent of $117 million in damage.

Luckily, there are no news reports of sunken ships this year.

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NOW WATCH: The strongest hurricane on record, with 200 mph winds, could be 'unimaginably catastrophic' for Mexico