Despite wind chills nearing -60 degrees Fahrenheit in Chicago and temperatures that left some parts of Canada colder than Mars, Arctic sea ice is still melting, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are still climbing and climate change is predicted to pose a far greater threat to the planet than many scientists thought.
And as rents in some once-dicey neighborhoods climb, the local climate has changed and such once-intrepid entrepreneurs have been bedeviled by residents seeing their eating establishments as nothing more than chains.
The more carbon dioxide, the higher global average temperatures have climbed, according to climate science.
If nearby ocean temperatures climb higher still, as climate projections would have them do, Ascension will probably become ever moister and greener.
Researchers report them living in vertical slits in Thai mountain waterfalls, areas most turtles could never climb to, and a climate few of the giant's tortoise's brethren could brave.
In 1988 the nation's crime rate had been climbing for years, and the climate of fear had been climbing even faster.
Most heinous of all the sins of emissions is what has happened to our air quality since climate change climbed the political agenda 20 years ago.
One is the conceivable collapse of the Atlantic "conveyor belt", a system of currents that gives much of Europe its relatively mild climate; if temperatures climb too high, say scientists, the system may undergo radical changes that damage both Europe and America.
The Networking and Information Technology project to advance computing and software would receive an increase of almost 3percentto to $1.9 billion, and financing for research on global climate change would climb 5percentto to $1.8 billion.
Michael Liebreich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, likened the challenge of fighting climate change to climbing Mount Everest: "We've just reached base camp".
