By Dana Liebelson and Chris Mooney17 July 2013 (Mother Jones) – The Central Intelligence Agency is funding a scientific study that will investigate whether humans could use geoengineering to alter Earth’s environment and stop climate change. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will run the 21-month project, which is the first NAS geoengineering study financially […]
By Dennis Pillion12 July 2013 PENSACOLA, Florida (al.com) – To get a better understanding of the full impact of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, renowned marine scientist Roger Payne is thinking big. That is to say, he’s looking at sperm whales, one of the largest inhabitants of the Gulf and the largest of the […]
By John Abraham 7 July 2013 (The Guardian) – Perhaps I have been naïve, but for many years I have held the view that economists were good decision makers and that part of being a good decision maker was to seek out good information. Well-informed decisions, I thought, allowed people to earn better returns, to […]
By Tim Radford for Climate News Network, part of the Guardian Environment Network 5 July 2013 (The Guardian) – Governments that agreed to try to restrict global warming to a rise of no more than 2°C may have set themselves the wrong target, according to Swiss scientists. Marco Steinacher from the University of Bern and […]
3 July 2013 (UN) – The world experienced “unprecedented high-impact climate extremes” between 2001 and 2010 and more national temperature records were broken during that period than in any other decade, according to a United Nations report launched today. The report, The Global Climate 2001-2010, A Decade of Extremes, says the first decade of the […]
By Carmel Lobello27 June 2013 (The Week) – In a speech on Tuesday, President Obama laid out a plan for reducing carbon emissions, directing the EPA to add new carbon limitations for coal plants that are already active — a move that opponents are likening to a “war on coal.” Coal, the largest source of […]
27 June 2013 (University of Melbourne) – Human influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in Australia’s recent “angry” hot summer, the hottest in Australia’s observational record, new research has found. The research led by the University of Melbourne, has shown that global warming increased the chances of Australians experiencing record […]
By Tom Randall 25 June 2013 (Bloomberg) – Transcript of President Barack Obama’s speech at Georgetown University announcing his new climate-change policy: On Christmas Eve, 1968, the astronauts of Apollo 8 did a live broadcast from lunar orbit. So Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders — the first humans to orbit the moon — described […]
By Adam Welz 21 June 2013 (The Guardian) – The world’s fastest land animal is in trouble. The cheetah, formerly found across much of Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, has been extirpated from at least 27 countries and is now on the Red List of threatened species. Namibia holds by far the […]
By PAUL KRUGMAN16 June 2013 (The New York Times) – Last week the International Monetary Fund, whose normal role is that of stern disciplinarian to spendthrift governments, gave the United States some unusual advice. “Lighten up,” urged the fund. “Enjoy life! Seize the day!” O.K., fund officials didn’t use quite those words, but they came […]
