By Mike Jaccarino5 August 2012 Thousands – perhaps millions – of various types of fish, some endangered, have died in the Midwest, as record summer temperatures dry up rivers and raise water temperatures in some spots to nearly 100 degrees. About 40,000 shovelnose sturgeon were killed in Iowa last week as the water reached 97 […]
By Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post 5 August 2012 POINT HOPE, Alaska – Fermented whale’s tail doesn’t taste the same when the ice cellars flood. Whaling crews in this Arctic coast village store six feet of tail — skin, blubber and bone — underground from spring until fall. The tail freezes slowly while fermenting and […]
By Laura Legere, staff Writer3 August 2012 Pennsylvania’s heaviest downpours have gotten wetter and more frequent in the last six decades, according to a report released Thursday by PennEnvironment [pdf]. Between 1948 and 2011, the state has seen a 52 percent increase in the number of “extreme” storms – those that are among the largest […]
By Chunichi Shimbun4 August 2012 Large numbers of jellyfish have been swarming near nine thermal power plants on Ise Bay. Chubu Electric Power Co. estimates that there are close to 24,000 tons of the sea creatures swimming around the area, twice the usual level and the second-most recorded in the past decade. Measures are being […]
RALEIGH, 2 August 2012 (AP) – North Carolina lawmakers have temporarily banned using a science panel’s recommendation to plan for rising sea levels, after the governor decided Thursday not to veto the measure. The measure has been lampooned by comedians and has drawn the ire of environmentalists. It blocks the state from adopting any rate […]
By KELLY SLIVKA2 August 2012 In yet another display of the inexorable interdependence of Earth’s ecosystems, a bad summer for Midwestern farmland has turned out to be a good one for life in the Gulf of Mexico. Researchers from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium have found that this summer’s hypoxic zone in the Gulf of […]
By MARC SANTORA4 August 2012 Firefighters in Oklahoma struggled on Saturday to contain at least a dozen wildfires that have burned more than 80,000 acres near Oklahoma City. Fueled by searing temperatures and whipped by high winds, the fires forced hundreds of people to flee and had burned dozens of homes by late Friday. Oklahoma […]
By KEN MILLER, Associated Press2 Aug 2012 OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – More than 64 temperature records were broken in Oklahoma during a scorching July, and additional ones fell across the state Wednesday on the first day of August, according to the National Climatic Data Center. The National Weather Service reported that Guthrie, about 30 miles […]
Muller’s announcement last year that the Earth is indeed warming brought him up to date w/ where the scientific community was in the the 1980s. His announcement this week that the warming can only be explained by human influences, brings him up to date with where the science was in the mid 1990s. At this […]
By Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, www.guardian.co.uk 1 August 2012 Drought, wildfires, hurricanes and heatwaves are becoming normal in America because of climate change, Congress was told on Wednesday in the first hearing on climate science in more than two years. In a predictably contentious hearing, the Senate’s environment and public works committee heard from […]
