Climate change

As the Republican presidential race has shown, the conservatives who dominate the primaries are deeply skeptical of science -- making Newt Gingrich, for one, regret he ever settled onto a couch with Nancy Pelosi to chat about global warming.

A study released Thursday in the American Sociological Review concludes that trust in science among conservatives and frequent churchgoers has declined precipitously since 1974, when a national survey first asked people how much confidence they had in the scientific community. At that time, conservatives had the highest level of trust in scientists.

Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released this week.

WASHINGTON — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

The new normal is warmer.

That's the assessment of the nation's top weather agency, which releases data Friday that show the 30-year "normal" temperature in the United States.

"The climate of the 2000s is about 1.5 degree Fahrenheit warmer than the 1970s, so we would expect the updated 30-year normals to be warmer," said Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. That recent temperature trend was enough to drag the three-decade moving average, from 1981-2010, up by half a degree Fahrenheit from the 1971-2000 period, according to the report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Spring passed California by, and summer remains in hiding.

Nine tornadoes have torn up the Sacramento Valley from Oroville to Fairfield. A giant Sierra snowpack, still frozen fast, has put innumerable summer adventures on hold.

The weather has gone haywire.

"It's what I call global weirding," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "This has been a very strange year all over the planet."

SEATTLE -- Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is investing more of his own time and money in the search for clean energy and solutions to climate change.

Gates is moving into a third arena, after software and philanthropy, and is using his Kirkland-based incubator, BGC3, to fund related science.

WASHINGTON -- Climate change is likely to diminish already scarce water supplies in the Western United States, exacerbating problems for millions of water users in the West, according to a new government report.

A report released by the Interior Department said annual flows in three prominent river basins -- the Colorado, Rio Grande and San Joaquin -- could decline by as much 8 percent to 14 percent over the next four decades. The three rivers provide water to eight states, from Wyoming to Texas and California, as well as to parts of Mexico.