By Madison Park, Dayu Zhang, and Elizabeth Landau3 October 2013 HONG KONG (CNN) – A thumb-sized wasp with an orange head has killed dozens of people in China and injured more than 1,500 with its powerful venomous sting. The Asian giant hornet, known scientifically as Vespa mandarinia, carries a venom that destroys red blood cells, […]
By Steve Gutterman, with additional reporting by Maria Tsvetkova; Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Timothy Heritage and Angus MacSwan2 October 2013 MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian authorities charged Greenpeace activists from several nations with piracy on Wednesday over a protest against Arctic oil drilling at a platform owned by the state-controlled energy company Gazprom, the […]
By Phil Plait26 September 2013 (Slate) – As I predicted, with the advent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report due tomorrow, the noise machine is out in full force. Still, when I saw that James Delingpole had written yet another climate change denial piece for The Telegraph, I dithered. After all, in my […]
By Bryan Walsh 1 October 2013 (TIME) – Thousands of homeowners in flood-prone parts of the country are going to be in for a rude awakening. On Oct. 1, new changes to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which offers government-subsidized policies for households and businesses threatened by floods, mean that businesses in flood zones […]
By DAN JOLING, Associated Press 1 October 2013 ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – An estimated 10,000 walrus unable to find sea ice over shallow Arctic Ocean water have come ashore on Alaska’s northwest coast. Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Friday photographed walrus packed onto a beach on a barrier island near Point […]
By Holli Riebeek27 September 2013 (NASA) – The waters of Lake Erie seem to glow green in this image taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on 26 September 2013. The color comes from a toxic algae bloom, which has been growing in the lake since mid July. The algae […]
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 30, 2013 (FEMA) – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that federal disaster aid has been made available to the State of New Mexico to supplement state, local and tribal recovery efforts in the area affected by severe storms and flooding during the period of 23-28 July […]
By Claire Salisbury 27 September 2013 (mongabay.com) – Tropical tree communities are moving up mountainsides to cooler habitats as temperatures rise, a new study in Global Change Biology has found. By examining the tree species present in ten one-hectare plots at various intervals over a decade, researchers found that the proportion of lowland species increased […]
27 September 2013 (IPCC) – [This graph shows a] comparison of observed and simulated climate change based on three large-scale indicators in the atmosphere, the cryosphere and the ocean: change in continental land surface air temperatures (yellow panels), Arctic and Antarctic September sea ice extent (white panels), and upper ocean heat content in the major […]
STOCKHOLM, 27 September 2013 (The Economist) – It has been a long time coming. But then the fifth assessment of the state of the global climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, was a behemoth of an undertaking. It runs to thousands of pages, involved hundreds of scientists and […]
