By Eric W. Dolan8 May 2013 (Raw Story) – In a nearly 17-minute speech on Wednesday evening, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) blasted an unnamed senator for saying God would protect the Earth from climate change. “I was recently at a Senate hearing where I heard a member of our Senate community say, ‘God won’t allow […]
By KARIN LAUB 11 May 2013 SOUK AL-JUMMA, Tunisia (Associated Press) – On the day he chose to die, Adel Khedri woke up at 6:30 a.m., took his black backpack and headed down to the busy boulevard where he worked as a cigarette peddler. It was the last in a series of odd jobs that […]
By Jonathon Gatehouse3 May 2013 (Maclean’s) – As far as the government scientist was concerned, it was a bit of fluff: an early morning interview about great white sharks last summer with Canada AM, the kind of innocuous and totally apolitical media commentary the man used to deliver 30 times or more each year as […]
(Rainforest Rescue) – Perched atop the remains of the last tree, an orangutan looks helplessly on what was until recently the forest he was living in but is now only ruins. Armed with chainsaws and bulldozers, workers of Bumitama Gunajaya Agro (BGA), a palm oil company, have completely destroyed the rainforest for miles. Three other […]
10 May 2013 (mongabay.com) – Dozens of elephants have been slaughtered in the Dzanga Bai World Heritage Site in the Central African Republic just days after conservationists warned about an impending threat from the movement of 17 heavily armed poachers. The massacre occurred at a site renowned as “village of elephants”, where tourists and scientists […]
By Kerry Sheridan10 May 2013 WASHINGTON (AFP) – The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has broken above 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, US monitors announced Friday, indicating a record level for greenhouse gases. Climate scientists say that the symbolic threshold should serve as a call for action […]
By Jeffrey Kluger (TIME) – Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was […]
By Jennifer Liberto10 May 2013 WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) – The U.S. flood alarm system is about to get smaller. On May 1, the U.S. Geological Survey began turning off some 150 stream gauges that monitor water levels on the nation’s rivers and streams, thanks to the federal spending cuts, also known as sequester. It’s a one-two […]
By Coral Davenport9 May 2013 (National Journal) – Kerry Emanuel registered as a Republican as soon he turned 18, in 1973. The aspiring scientist was turned off by what he saw as the Left’s blind ideology. “I had friends who denied Pol Pot was killing people in Cambodia,” he says. “I reacted very badly to […]
By Terry Devitt 6 May 2013 (UW–Madison) – For plants and animals forced to tough out harsh winter weather, the coverlet of snow that blankets the north country is a refuge, a stable beneath-the-snow habitat that gives essential respite from biting winds and subzero temperatures. But in a warming world, winter and spring snow cover […]
