By Paul Douglas10 September 2012 During the Republican National Convention in Tampa, climate change became a punch line. “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” Mitt Romney said. (Pause for polite laughter) “My promise is to help you and your family.” All well and good. But […]
By Michael D. Lemonick9 September 2012 Forests cover some 30 percent of Earth’s surface, and it’s hard to overestimate how crucial they are to the functioning of the planet. Forests provide shelter for uncountable numbers of species, hold soil in place that would otherwise wash away, pull excess carbon out of the atmosphere, absorb and […]
By Natalie Obiko Pearson 10 September 2012 Inner Mongolia’s rivers are feeding China’s coal industry, turning grasslands into desert. In India, thousands of farmers have protested diverting water to coal-fired power plants, some committing suicide. The struggle to control the world’s water is intensifying around energy supply. China and India alone plan to build $720 […]
By John Blackstone 7 September 2012 SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS, California (CBS News) – Summer is nearly over, but the wildfire season in the West is still going strong. Forty wildfires are burning from Southern California to Montana. Nationally, 45,000 fires have left more than 8 million acres scorched. After months of putting out blazes and […]
By Miguel Llanos7 September 2012 (NBC News) – Reefs in the Caribbean and Florida Keys have lost most of the colorful corals that feed a rich ecosystem and made the region a diving and snorkeling mecca, a major conservation group reported Friday. On average, reefs have live coral on just 8 percent of their surface […]
This figure shows that the very largest storms are getting bigger, faster, than other storms. All storm categories are defined relative to the local climate at each weather station used in this analysis. For example, the far right column represents the change over time in the amount of total precipitation produced by the largest 0.1 […]
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL and ANDREW W. LEHREN7 September 2012 MIAMI – The chief executive of the century-old company from America’s heartland shifted nervously on the witness stand here as he tried to explain how a trusted senior vice president had been caught on a wiretap buying half a million dollars in smuggled merchandise, much of […]
7 September 2012 (AFP) – New Zealand’s High Court on Friday dismissed a challenge launched by climate change sceptics against a government research agency’s finding that the temperature had risen in the past century. The court backed the science that led the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) to conclude that New Zealand’s […]
By Tim Lister8 September 2012 (CNN) – Hurricane Isaac may have inundated the parishes of Louisiana, but for thousands of American farmers, it was a blessing, a reprieve from the most torrid summer on record. In much of North America, July was the hottest month since such a record was first taken. Crop yields have […]
By Becky Oskin 7 September 2012 (LiveScience) – Global warming may fuel stronger hurricanes whose winds whip up faster, new research suggests. Hurricanes and other tropical cyclones across the globe reach Category 3 wind speeds nearly nine hours earlier than they did 25 years ago, the study found. In the North Atlantic, the storms have […]
