Going to seed: Climate change could spark small mammal invasion

By Henry Gass 8 July 2013 (Scientific American) – Invasive animals are a scourge the world over, and on many islands they have decimated local plants and animals. New Zealand has contended with such losses for centuries as rats and stoats (short-tailed weasels) from abroad have helped to wipe out 19 bird species. These small […]

Arizona horses dying as Navajo Nation declares drought emergency – ‘We've been in a drought for eight years’

5 July 2013 (ICTMN) – The horses, desperate for water, had come to drink from a pool of rainwater that had run off a hill and flooded land on the Navajo reservation. What they got was a mud bath that turned deadly as they became trapped in the bentonite clay of the Chinle Formation, which […]

Global warming and economists – SuperFreakonomics is SuperFreakingWrong

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 […]

As Arizona fire rages, scientists warn of more unpredictable blazes – ‘These huge fires are the new normal’

By Julie Cart3 July 2013 BOISE, Idaho (Los Angeles Times) – Early morning is a frenetic time at a wildfire command post. Biologists, meteorologists, foresters and firefighters hustle into tents and grab laptops to review overnight reports, prepping for the day’s assault. Fire behavior analysts run computer models that spit out information crucial to putting […]

Waterways warmed by climate change will increase electricity prices in southern Europe

By Jonathan Tirone; Editing by James Hertling8 July 2013 VIENNA (Bloomberg) – Waterways warmed by climate change will increase electricity prices by as much as a third in southern Europe as producers struggle to cool power stations, a study showed. Countries from Romania to Bulgaria and Slovenia face the biggest price increases, according to research […]

Australia heatwaves ‘five times more likely due to global warming’

Tim Radford for Climate News Network8 July 2013 (The Guardian) – Global warming has increased five-fold the probabilities that Australians will bake in record hot summers, according to new research from the University of Melbourne. And human activities – including greenhouse gas releases from fossil fuels – must account for at least half of these […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of Kedarnath after June 2013 flood

By Raju Gusain29 June 2013 Dehradun (India Today) – New satellite images of Kedarnath clearly indicate the devastation which has taken place there. The images, taken by US based NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite on 23 June 2013, when compared with old National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) images provided by the Uttarakhand Space Application Centre, show […]

2°C climate target is half of what is needed, say scientists – ‘CO2 emissions have to be cut twice as much as if we only want to meet the two degree target’

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 […]

Gearing up for an ‘extreme fire year’ in U.S. West – ‘We’re going to have to accept defeat when we're defeated’

By Kaci Poor for The Times-Standard, and Alicia Chang and Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writers6 July 2013 (Eureka Times-Standard) – […] An updated U.S. drought monitor map for California — released each Thursday by the National Drought Mitigation Center — shows nearly all of California, including Humboldt County, falling under a severe drought designation. ”This […]

Scenes from a melting planet: On the climate-change novel

By Carolyn Kormann3 July 2013 (The New Yorker) – “We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” President Obama said last week as he outlined his climate-change plan. The gibe was widely tweeted and repeated, the message clear: when it comes to global warming, Obama won’t tolerate any more anti-science bunk. […]

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