Climate Desk

What's it like to stand by as your house is ripped from its foundations and hoisted six feet in the air? "It's a dream come true," says Sue Graf, who owns a getaway cottage in Gloucester County, Virginia. "It's surreal. It's exciting," she says. "This is the eighth summer of worrying about flooding with all the storms. We finally don't have to worry about that any more." So we rigged the house with cameras for the event. Watch above as Expert House Movers—a company that has been raising houses with the help of FEMA grants for about four years—excavate Sue's house, and elevate it onto a new foundation.

In Part Two watch ​Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard explain why this historic stretch of the Virginia coastline, some of the first areas in America to be settled by Europeans, is so susceptible to sea level rise. "It's becoming very real here," says Skip Stiles, the executive director of Wetlands Watch. "If you want to see what's going to happen to your East coast city, come here, because we're getting it now. This is America's coastal future here."

In warming seas, even lobsters think lobster is delicious.

Climate Desk: What You Should Know About Obama's Climate Plan

Internet researchers at George Mason University recently found that when it comes to online commenting, throwing bombs gets more attention than being nice, and makes readers double down on their preexisting beliefs. What's more, trolls create a false sense that a topic is more controversial than it really is. Witness the overwhelming consensus on climate change amongst scientists—97 percent agreement that global warming is real, and caused by humans. But that doesn't settle the question for Twitter addict and Climate Desk perennial thorn-in-the-side Hoyt Connell. We first encountered Hoyt, or as we know him, @hoytc55, several months ago on our Twitter page, taking us to task for our climate coverage. And the screed hasn't stopped since: In April alone, Hoyt mentioned us on Twitter some 126 times, almost as much as our top nine other followers combined. So we did the only thing we knew how to do: track him down, meet him face to face... and ask a few questions of our own. Watch Episode One of our three-part series Meet the Trolls: Trollus Maximus.

For better or worse, online, people have the luxury to lob bombs from behind a keyboard barricade. Which led us to launch an experiment: What if the trolls and the troll slayers met face to face and talked it out, analog-style (or as close as we can get with Google Hangout)? For all their differences, Hoyt and Rosi have one thing in common: they aren't cowards. They agreed to square off in a debate about online commenting, climate change, and what defines truth in the digital age. Watch Episode Three, The Showdown.

While it might not always seem this way, many of our followers actually do believe in climate change. Some are silent, watching from the wings, what internet researchers call "lurkers." Not Rosi Reed, a 34-year-old nuclear physicist at the Large Hadron Collider and long-time Internet truth crusader, who goes by the nom-de-guerre PhysicsGirl. We like to call her The Troll Slayer.

The biggest survey of climate articles to date finds that scientists are more united than ever.

To document this May 2008 "calving" event, researchers snapped photos every ten seconds for an hour.

Australian puppeteer Tim Watts presents the story of Alvin Sputnik, a lone undersea diver making his way in a post-climate change world.

Homes ripped apart by Sandy are proving to be magnets for bargain hunters—but not everyone is getting a good deal.

3D printing could slash the carbon footprint of manufacturing and provide nifty solutions for a disaster-prone world.

This week marked the start of the the civil trial against BP over its role in the 2010 explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 men and caused the worst spill in US history.

Hurtling toward the USS Nimitz in a biofuel-powered jet was just one of the adventures that Mother Jones environmental correspondent Julia Whitty had while reporting the cover story for the March/April 2013 issue of the magazine. Read the full story here: http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/02/watch-what...

Produced by: Brett Brownell and James West
Video production by: Sydney Brownstone and Jaeah Lee
Photos by: Julia Whitty
Additional material by: U.S. Navy
Music by: Louis "Remember Remember", Justin Marcellus "Elimination", Broke for Free "Budding"

Visit Mother Jones on the web: http://www.motherjones.com

Scientists are heading out to sea for a forensic look at the storm's impacts.

China plans to introduce a carbon tax, according to state-run news agency, Xinhua. That's right, that great thorn in the side of global carbon reduction treaties, that recalcitrant negotiator and world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is now on the path to imposing its own carbon tax.

The gigantic carbon-rich Arctic landmass has—until recently—locked away its greenhouse gases in a deep thaw for millennia. That is, until man-made climate change has begun to unlock its C02 stores, only then to be devoured by methane-spewing organisms.

Graphics and game designers translate climate science into interactive visual media.

How one climatologist is using visual and audio art to reveal the science behind Greenland's melting ice.

Glaciologist Jason Box describes a post-warming world that you won't even be able to recognize.

Dr Eugene Cordero thinks climate change needs a superhero. Bam! Enter the Green Ninja, the not-very-talkative martial arts master who whips up all sorts mayhem to teach young minds about carbon footprints, energy-saving strategies and gas guzzling leaf blowers, a kind of climate-bent Captain Planet, for a younger generation.

When Ken Ilgunas began following the Keystone XL controversy, he decided to strap on a pair of good boots and see it firsthand.

2012, the hottest year on record in the US, has been a wild year for Climate Desk. We've scoped out coal-guzzling data centers; traipsed across New York City's solar-paneled rooftops; stepped through the ashes of Colorado's record-breaking wildfire season; mingled with drought-striken cattle; been awed by the North Dakota fracking boom; cruised down the shrinking Mississippi River; strained to hear through the climate silence; seen communities pick through debris left by Superstorm Sandy, and more.

Rep. Ed Markey and a distinguished panel discuss how the administration can help us avoid a dastardly combined remake of Thelma & Louise and The Day After Tomorrow.

When the electric utility failed, solar stepped.

In the rush to frack, workers get hit, squeezed, maimed—and pushed to keep quiet. By Tim McDonnell and James West

The filmmaker talks to Climate Desk about the worst man-made ecological disaster in US history, and what it teaches us about future climate catastrophes.