Activists crack China’s wall of denial about air pollution

By SHARON LaFRANIERE27 January 2012 BEIJING – Weary of waiting for the authorities to alert residents to the city’s most pernicious air pollutant, citizen activists last May took matters here into their own hands: they bought their own $4,000 air-quality monitor and posted its daily readings on the Internet. That began a chain reaction. Volunteers […]

Michael Mann: The climate scientist targeted by the fossil fuel industry – ‘Scientists have to recognise that they’re in a street fight’

  By Steve Connor16 January 2012 He is one of the most vilified men in the highly vilified field of climate science, yet Professor Michael Mann is surprisingly jolly. Despite being the focus of a brutal campaign orchestrated by the fossil-fuel industry and senior politicians within the US Republican Party, Mann’s cheery stoicism is positively […]

Judge prevents Wisconsin town from tightening coal ash regulations

By Rachel Cernansky, Energy / Fossil Fuels17 January 2012 The EPA is still deciding how to regulate coal ash, and a bill in Congress would prevent the EPA from regulating it at all. Here’s a hint of what happens with weak regulations—in this case, a town is prevented from creating regulations stricter than what the […]

‘Doomsday Clock’ moves one minute closer to midnight due to continuing inaction on climate change

CONTACT: Patrick Mitchell, (703) 276-3266, or pmitchell@hastingsgroup.com10 January 2012 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Faced with inadequate progress on nuclear weapons reduction and proliferation, and continuing inaction on climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) announced today that it has moved the hands of its famous “Doomsday Clock” to five minutes to midnight. The last […]

West Coast shellfish farms impacted by ocean acidification

By Laine Welch, For the Alaska Journal of Commerce21 December 2011 West Coast shellfish growers have learned to work around upwellings of corrosive waters and save the lives of their bivalve stocks. Increased levels of carbon dioxide, or CO2, in the atmosphere are changing the chemistry of the oceans, making it more acidic. The CO2 […]

From Cairo to the Cape, climate change takes hold of Africa – ‘A new and harsh reality’

By John Vidal, environment editor, www.guardian.co.uk  1 December 2011 We are right on the equator, and Speke, Moebius, Elena, Savoia, and Moore, the five great glaciers of the the Rwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon, glint in the bright Ugandan sun. Usually lost in the mists that cloak these peaks up to 5,100 metres high, […]

Graph of the Day: World Energy Consumption by Fuel Type, 1990-2035

In the long-term, the Reference case projects increased world consumption of marketed energy from all fuel sources through 2035. Fossil fuels are expected to continue supplying much of the energy used worldwide. Although liquid fuels—mostly petroleum based—remain the largest source of energy, the liquids share of world marketed energy consumption falls from 34 percent in […]

Bulgaria choking on hazardous air ‘due to the massive use of coal for heating’

Sofia, November 23 (AFP) – Air quality in Bulgaria has deteriorated sharply over the past week with dust pollution up to five times over the norm, posing a grave health risk, the environment ministry said Wednesday. “The norms for pollution with fine dust particles have been surpassed since November 15,” Valery Serafimov, an air pollution […]

Global greenhouse gas emissions exceed worst-case scenario

By Seth Borenstein5 November 2011 WASHINGTON (AP) – The global output of carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the US Department of Energy has calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming. The new figures for last year mean that levels of greenhouse gases are […]

New study: Bleak prospects for avoiding dangerous global warming

By Richard A. Kerr 21 October 2011 The bad news just got worse: A new study finds that reining in greenhouse gas emissions in time to avert serious changes to Earth’s climate will be at best extremely difficult. Current goals for reducing emissions fall far short of what would be needed to keep warming below […]

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