ROME, 7 February 2013 – The FAO Food Price Index held steady at 210 points in January 2013 after three straight months of decline. Increases in oil and fats prices offset lower cereals and sugar quotations while dairy and meat values remained substantially unchanged. The pause in the Index’s decline tallies with a significant upward […]
By Coral Davenport7 February 2013 NORFOLK, Virginia (National Journal) – Jimmy Strickland can tell you exactly how much money rising sea levels have cost his business. In 1989, he opened his accounting firm in a one-story brick building near Norfolk’s historic cobblestoned Hague district, which surrounds one of this low-lying city’s many tidal rivers. Dressed […]
By Carey Gillam; editing by Andrew Hay and Peter Galloway7 February 2013 Kansas City (Reuters) – Harsh drought conditions expanded in key U.S. farm states in the nation’s midsection over the last week, climate experts said on Thursday. There has been some recent precipitation through the Plains region but the frozen ground did not allow […]
5 February 2013 (National Climate Centre) – Severe rainfall deficiencies for the 6 month (August 2012 to January 2013) period have expanded in central Australia and in large parts of the inland southeast of Australia following below average January rainfall. Severe deficiencies now cover most of South Australia (where August to January rainfall was the […]
By Raymond T. Pierrehumbert6 February 2013 (Slate) – Like swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, every December some 20,000 geoscientists flock to San Francisco for the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Slate readers have already heard about a presentation with a particularly eye-catching title, but for me some of the most thought-provoking news […]
By Jim Lynch 2 February 2013 (The Detroit News) – In the nearly 100 years researchers have catalogued the rise and fall of the Great Lakes, Michigan and Huron have never seen a month like January. The two-lake system recorded its lowest-ever level for a month, a mean of 576.02 feet above sea level. It’s […]
30 January 2013 (Bloomberg News) – Beijing’s air, which has exceeded the World Health Organization’s “healthy” limit every day this year, is similar to that in an airport smoking lounge. The CHART OF THE DAY shows Beijing’s daily peak and average concentrations of PM2.5, the airborne particulate matter that raises risks for lung and heart […]
By dana198130 January 2013 A paper recently published in Global Environmental Change by Brysse, et al., (2012) examined a number of past predictions made by climate scientists, and found that that they have tended to be too conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change. The authors thus suggest that climate scientists […]
By RACHEL NUWER30 January 2013 (The New York Times) – Water, or the lack thereof, is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. As temperatures rise and droughts become more frequent, the threat of dwindling water resources worries not just environmentalists and governments but companies and their investors, too. Nearly every industrial sector, […]
By Dr. Jeff Masters 29 January 2013 (Weather Underground) – The calendar says it’s January, but the atmosphere looks more like April over the Midwest U.S., where a spring-like surge of warm air is interacting with a strong low pressure system to create a dangerous severe weather situation. The warm air surging northwards has already […]
