The Fifth - and hopefully final - Assessment Report (AR5) from the UN Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) is due next month. The leaks are already here:

Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the UN panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities – chiefly the burning of fossil fuels – are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.

That is up from at least 90 percent in the last report in 2007, 66 percent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995, steadily squeezing out the arguments by a small minority of scientists that natural variations in the climate might be to blame.

This is a doubly impressive story since, as we’ve reported, Reuters has slashed climate coverage and pressured reporters to include false balance. Leading climatologists who have seen drafts of the report confirm this story’s accuracy.

Of course, nothing in the report should be a surprise to readers of Climate Progress, since the AR5 is just a (partial) review of the scientific literature (see my 12/11 post, It’s ‘Extremely Likely That at Least 74% of Observed Warming […]

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RWE has announced in their latest report on their first six months results (press release in German) that they plan to take 3.1 GW of fossil fuel generating capacity off the market.

The reason they give for that is that wholesale electricity prices are way down in Germany as a consequence of more renewable in the mix. They would be losing money if they needed to sell at these low prices. They don’t, since most of their business is fulfilling contracts from the past couple of years, which still have higher prices, but that effect will be gone soon.

Welt has an excellent article giving some background on this (in German).

They show an interesting graphic, which I hesitate to reproduce here for copyright reasons.

We learn from that: Prices have gone down from the mid term average of around EUR 55 a MWh to less than EUR 40. They estimate the minimum price necessary for gas generation as EUR 70, for coal as EUR 60, for lignite as EUR 45, and even for nuclear power after the plants have already paid back their investment as EUR 40, including a tax on nuclear fuel.

With prices below EUR 40 on the wholesale markets, operators like […]

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Children who drink soda tend to score slightly higher on scales that measure aggressive behavior than kids who don’t drink the carbonated beverages, according to a new study.

The study’s lead author cautioned, however, that the increase may not be noticeable for individual children and the researchers can’t prove soda caused the bad behaviors.

‘It’s a little hard to interpret it. It’s not quite clinically significant,’ Shakira Suglia, of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York, told Reuters Health.

Previous work by some of the study’s authors had found connections between soda drinking and violent behavior, but the link had not been studied in young children.

For the new analysis, the researchers used an existing study of mothers and their 2,929 children from 20 large U.S. cities. The mothers and children were first recruited between 1998 and 2000 to be periodically interviewed and evaluated.

Mothers completed a checklist on children’s behaviors over the previous two months to measure withdrawal, attention and aggression.

‘It’s things like how often does a child destroy his or her own belongings and how often do they destroy the belongings of others,’ Suglia said.

The mothers were also asked how many servings of soda their children drank per day and […]

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As bee populations plummet in the US and Europe, people have been urged to plant bee-friendly gardens to create safe havens for the endangered little pollinators. But a first-of-its-kind study released today found that flowers and vegetables bought from American nurseries are contaminated with the same agricultural pesticides linked to the mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate a third of the food on your dinner plate.

An analysis of supposedly bee-safe backyard plants like daisies, tomatoes and salvia purchased from Home Depot, Lowe’s and other big-box US retailers discovered they were contaminated with neonicotinoids. That class of pesticide has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder, an affliction that has wiped out 10 million beehives over the past six years in the US. In April, European regulators banned the pesticide manufactured by Bayer CropScience and Syngenta for two years in response to crashing bee populations in France and elsewhere.

‘Gardeners may be unwittingly purchasing toxic seedlings and plants attractive to pollinators for bee-friendly gardens, only to poison them in the process,

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Even the tiniest mistake during an operation to extract over 1,300 fuel rods at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan could lead to a series of cascading failures with an apocalyptic outcome, fallout researcher Christina Consolo told RT.

Fukushima operator TEPCO wants to extract 400 tons worth of spent fuel rods stored in a pool at the plant’s damaged Reactor No. 4. The removal would have to be done manually from the top store of the damaged building in the radiation-contaminated environment.

In the worst-case scenario, a mishandled rod may go critical, resulting in an above-ground meltdown releasing radioactive fallout with no way to stop it, said Consolo, who is the founder and host of Nuked Radio. But leaving the things as they are is not an option, because statistical risk of a similarly bad outcome increases every day, she said.

RT: How serious is the fuel rod situation compared to the danger of contaminated water build-up which we already know about?

Christina Consolo: Although fuel rod removal happens on a daily basis at the 430+ nuclear sites around the world, it is a very delicate procedure even under the best of circumstances. What makes fuel removal at Fukushima so dangerous and […]

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