By Doyle Rice23 April 2013 (USA TODAY) – A rainy Tuesday added to flooding misery in the Midwest, as bloated rivers and streams continued to rise across the region. Floodwaters rose to record levels along the Illinois River in central Illinois on Tuesday, while in Missouri, six levees north of St. Louis were overtopped by […]
WASHINGTON, 22 April 2013 (The Onion) – After nearly a decade of promises that the nation was on the brink of a technological, economic, and scientific golden age, citizens across the country confirmed Monday they are now realizing a bold new era of American innovation is just flat-out not gonna happen. Citing the fragile economy […]
Global Highlights The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for March 2013 tied with 2006 as the 10th warmest on record, at 0.58°C (1.04°F) above the 20th century average of 12.3°C (54.1°F). The global land surface temperature was 1.06°C (1.91°F) above the 20th century average of 5.0°C (40.8°F), the 11th warmest March […]
By Will Oremus 22 April 2013 (Slate) – Environmentalists like to think that the public is in their corner—that it’s only the pernicious influence of Big Oil and Big Coal that keeps Congress from passing a carbon tax or Obama from nixing the Keystone Pipeline. They’re right that most voters care about the planet, insofar […]
(Climate Commission) – Very hot days and heatwaves have a significant impact on human health, infrastructure, agriculture and natural ecosystems. Research at the Natural Hazards Research Centre (NRHC) has shown that heatwaves are the most significant natural hazard in Australia in terms of loss of life. There have been 4287 fatalities directly attributable to heatwaves […]
By Joel Connelly22 April 2013 (Seattle PI) – Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, oft-faulted for a go-it-alone governing style, became a coalition builder Monday, joining with other city officials and Indian tribes in a new organization designed to build opposition to location of big coal export terminals in Northwest waters. In an interview, McGinn suggested that […]
By Neela Banerjee 22 April 2013 WASHINGTON (The New York Times) – The Environmental Protection Agency issued a sharply critical assessment of the State Department’s recent environmental impact review of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, certain to complicate efforts to win approval for the $7-billion project. In a letter to top State Department officials overseeing […]
By John Upton22 April 2013 (Grist) – The good news: Heavy rainfall across the Midwest has helped ease a widespread drought. The bad news: Rainfall has been so heavy that drought has been replaced by flooding The scary news: The cycle of flood-drought-flood that has ravaged the Midwest over the past two years is the […]
By Michael E. Mann, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Pennsylvania State University[Text excerpted from chapter 2 of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, by Michael E. Mann, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, 395pp] (wunderground.com) – By the mid-1990s, it was possible to investigate the causal mechanisms behind changes in Earth’s climate using relatively sophisticated mathematical […]
By Eric W. Dolan20 April 2013 (PsyPost) – A strong belief in a hands off approach to economics is tightly linked to the rejection of scientific facts such as climate change, according to research published in Psychological Science in late March [NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax]. “The conspiracist ideation that […]
