By Chris Mooney 25 June 2015 (Washington Post) – If Greenland goes, it is becoming clear that it won’t go quietly. Scientists have already documented entire meltwater lakes vanishing in a matter of hours atop the vast Greenland ice sheet, as huge crevasses open beneath them. And now, they’ve cast light on the mechanisms behind […]
3 July 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Will world agriculture be able to support a human population of 12 billion people in the year 2100? The answer largely turns on how much land is available for growing crops. Unfortunately, the world’s arable land area is declining at an enormous rate. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification […]
By Leila Carvalho26 June 2015 (The Conversation) – Exceptional drought, extreme temperatures, unprecedented drops in reservoir levels, and threatening water shortages for millions of people have dominated headlines in California in recent years. Unfortunately, Californians are not the only people being stressed with the “water crisis.” Citizens of one of the most densely populated areas […]
By Glenn Farley26 June 2015 NEAR BLEWETT PASS, Washington (KING 5 News) – From the crest of the Cascade Mountains running east to the sagebrush and desert country along the Columbia River, a map shows years of damage from the Western Spruce Budworm, which is killing trees by the thousands. The state’s worst patch of […]
30 June 2015 (The Weather Channel) – A torrid heat wave is easing a bit, but will kick into high gear yet again later this week into the July 4th holiday weekend, and possibly beyond. June record highs have been broken in at least 31 cities in the Northwest, five of which appear to have […]
By Chris Mooney 26 June 2015 (Washington Post) – Following on a record hot May in which much snow cover melted off early, Alaska saw no less than 152 fires erupt last weekend. The numbers have only grown further since then, and stood at 317 active fires Friday, according to the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, […]
By Sharon Kelly25 June 2015 (DeSmog) – When EPA’s long-awaited draft assessment on fracking and drinking water supplies was released, the oil and gas industry triumphantly focused on a headline-making sentence: “We did not find evidence of widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” But for fracking’s backers, a sense of […]
By Damian Carrington and Sarah Boseley22 June 2015 (The Guardian) – Climate change threatens to undermine half a century of progress in global health, according to a major new report [Policy Responses to Protect Public Health; pdf]. But the analysis also concludes that the benefits to health resulting from slashing fossil fuel use are so […]
By Robert Scribbler5 May 2015 (RobertScribbler.wordpress.com) – The world ocean is now a region of expanding oxygen-deprived dead zones. It’s an upshot of a human-warmed ocean system filled with high nutrient run-off from mass, industrialized farming, rising atmospheric nitrogen levels, and increasing dust from wildfires, dust storms, and industrial aerosol emissions. Warming seas hold less […]
[Right now, the prudent thing for Mark Steyn to do is to keep his mouth shut, but it seems that he can’t resist defaming Michael Mann. –Des] By Greg Laden22 June 2015 (Science Blogs) – There is a new attack by an anti-science and anti-environment talking head on a well respected climate scientist and his […]
