What happened to the oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster? ‘Oil trapped in the deep ocean from this event fell to the seafloor, like a light mist settling over approximately 3,200 square kilometers’

By James Urton, special to mongabay.com 24 November 2014 (mongabay.com) – Images from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster endure, from the collapsing platform to oil-fouled coastline. But beneath the surface is a story photographers cannot as easily capture. Two days after the April 20, 2010 explosion that killed 11 and injured 16, the Deepwater Horizon […]

New data show residential per capita water use across California – In some areas, residential use averages more than 500 gallons per person per day

By Matthew Heberger, Senior Research Associate18 November 2014 (Pacific Institute) – New monthly water use data for California water utilities shows that residential water use varies widely around the state, and that the response to the drought has been uneven. Moreover, in some areas, residential use averages more than 500 gallons per person per day, […]

New blood record: 1,020 rhinos slaughtered by poachers this year in South Africa

By Jeremy Hance24 November 2014 (mongabay.com) – South Africa has surpassed last year’s grisly record for slaughtered rhinos—1,004—more than a month before the year ends. In an announcement on November 20th, the South African Department of Environmental Affairs said that 1,020 rhinos had been killed to date. Rhinos are butchered for their horns, which are […]

2014 set to be hottest year on record – Chances of record cold years now ‘astronomically small’

20 November 2014 By Andrea Thompson (Climate Central) – A surge of Arctic air has left much of the continental U.S. shivering in unusually bitter November cold. But this early foray into winter weather is just a small blip in the overall global picture, which is of a warming world that is still on track […]

Graph of the Day: Water storage anomalies in California, 2011-2013

By J. S. Famiglietti    29 October 2014 (Nature Climate Change) – The ongoing California drought is evident in these maps of dry season (Sept–Nov) total water storage anomalies (in millimeter equivalent water height; anomalies with respect to 2005–2010). California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins have lost roughly 15 km3 of total water per year […]

Video: Global Fishing Watch – Technology illuminating the global fishing fleet

(globalfishingwatch.org) – Global Fishing Watch is the product of a technology partnership between SkyTruth, Oceana, and Google that is designed to show all of the trackable fishing activity in the ocean. This interactive web tool – currently in prototype stage – is being built to enable anyone to visualize the global fishing fleet in space […]

Despite phase-out promise, the G20 still heavily subsidize fossil fuels

13 November 2014 (Planet Experts) – To prevent potentially catastrophic climate change, the world’s largest economies agreed to phase out their subsidies for carbon-emitting fossil fuels in 2009. That anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas emissions are influencing the global climate is now almost without dispute. The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate […]

Australia’s chance of El Niño rises to 70 percent – Heatwaves and drought to persist

By Reissa Su21 November 2014 (IBT) – Australia will be facing drought as soon as the Bureau of Meteorology forecasts a 70 percent chance of El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. By summer’s end, Australians will see less rainfall as temperatures rise due to warmer weather. The weather bureau has revised its El Niño forecast […]

Graph of the Day: World growth in total fossil fuel consumption versus growth in wind and solar, 1990-2013

By Rune Likvern 10 October 2014 (Fractional Flow) – […] The Race between Fossil Fuels and Renewables By putting the growth between fossil fuels and renewables into a perspective, it demonstrates how dependent our economies, our wealth and well beings are upon fossil fuels. Looking at the growth in total fossil fuels versus renewables consumption […]

America’s wealth gap ‘unsustainable’, may worsen: Harvard study

By Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Sandra Maler8 September 2014 BOSTON (Reuters) – The widening gap between America’s wealthiest and its middle and lower classes is “unsustainable”, but is unlikely to improve any time soon, according to a Harvard Business School study released on Monday. The study, titled An Economy Doing Half its Job, said American […]

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