By TRACIE CONE, Associated Press 6 May 2012 MERCED, California (AP) – With her anti-poverty budget stretched beyond its limits, Brenda Callahan-Johnson is braced for next Saturday: the day California’s chronically unemployed will be cut off from the nation’s jobless benefits. A drop in the state’s unemployment rate to 11 percent — its lowest mark […]
This trend is seen in the observational studies (blue) but not in the experimental studies (red). The numbers correspond to those in Fig. 1 and to site information given in the Supplementary Information. ABSTRACT: Warming experiments are increasingly relied on to estimate plant responses to global climate change1, 2. For experiments to provide meaningful predictions […]
4 April 2012 (Surfmeisters) – Ocean lovers everywhere, we are at crisis point. The top predator species in the food chain of our oceans is being hunted to extinction. Some shark specie populations are estimated to have declined by over 99% since the 1970′s! The repercussions for marine eco-systems are dramatic and have devastating consequences […]
By Nina Chestney; Editing by Janet Lawrence2 May 2012 LONDON (Reuters) – Plants are flowering faster than scientists predicted in response to climate change, research in the United States showed on Wednesday, which could have devastating knock-on effects for food chains and ecosystems. Global warming is having a significant impact on hundreds of plant and […]
Patterns of 50-year surface salinity changes (PSS-78 50 / year). (A) The 1950–2000 observational result from P. J. Durack, S. E. Wijffels, “Fifty-year trends in global ocean salinities and their relationship to broad-scale warming”, J. Clim. 23, 4342 (2010). ABSTRACT: Fundamental thermodynamics and climate models suggest that dry regions will become drier and wet regions […]
By Kate Mackenzie2 May 2012 Bernstein’s energy analysts have looked at the upstream costs for the 50 biggest listed oil producers and found that — surprise, surprise — “the era of cheap oil is over”: Tracking data from the 50 largest listed oil and gas producing companies globally (ex FSU) indicates that cash, production and […]
By Brandon Keim 1 May 2012 Herbicide-resistant superweeds threaten to overgrow U.S. fields, so agriculture companies have genetically engineered a new generation of plants to withstand heavy doses of multiple, extra-toxic weed-killing chemicals. It’s a more intensive version of the same approach that made the resistant superweeds such a problem — and some scientists think […]
The Amazon has reached record breadth, width, and height this rainy season. According to Peru’s Health Ministry, the river has grown at least 6.5 feet during the floods, with the Marañón River, which feeds the Amazon, increasing some 13 feet. Neither river has swelled this much since the 1970s, when a similar flood affected the […]
By Michael Carlowicz17 April 2012 First they called it the year without a winter. Then springtime began to feel more like summer for most of North America. March 2012 saw thousands of daily temperature records fall in the contiguous United States (often called the “lower 48”), and the entire month was the warmest March in […]
By Alison Young and Peter Eisler, USA TODAY22 April 2012 Kathleen Marshall used to think the fenced backyard of her Philadelphia home was a safe place for her five children to play. Not anymore. Marshall was horrified to learn that a long-forgotten factory once melted lead just across the street and that soil tests by […]