Ready or not: How water-ready is your state?

4 April 2012 (NRDC) – As climate change affects communities across the U.S., some states are leading the way in preparing for the impacts on water resources. These states are reducing carbon pollution and planning for climate change impacts. Yet many states are not acting and remain woefully unprepared. Green: The state has developed an […]

U.S. population growth slows, especially in far suburbs – America’s romance with sprawl may be over

By Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, USA TODAY5 April 2012 America’s romance with sprawl may not be completely over, but it’s definitely on the rocks. Almost three years after the official end of a recession that kept people from moving and devastated new suburban subdivisions, people continue to avoid counties on the farthest edge […]

Science and the doubting conservatives

1 April 2012 (Los Angeles Times) – With so many scientific issues becoming battlefields in the culture wars — from climate change to stem-cell research to evolution (see above) — we hardly needed a new study to tell us that scientists have become a favorite target of the right. Yet a paper written by University […]

Graph of the Day: 2011-2012 Ratio of U.S. Heat to Cold Records

By Steve Scolnik 2 April 2012 (Capital Climate) – U.S. daily record high temperatures continued to surge into the end of March, with new heat records overwhelming cold records by the incredible ratio of 35.3 to 1. The total number of heat records was 6,182, nearly double the number in the sweltering month of August […]

MIT researchers predict ‘global economic collapse’ by 2030 – ‘We are not on a sustainable trajectory’

By Eric Pfeiffer, The Sideshow4 April 2012 A new study from researchers at Jay W. Forrester’s institute at MIT says that the world could suffer from “global economic collapse” and “precipitous population decline” if people continue to consume the world’s resources at the current pace. [Here’s a pdf of Dr. Turner’s 2008 paper: “A comparison […]

Graph of the Day: Regions Most Vulnerable to Flooding Caused by Sea Level Rise

Global mean sea level has already risen by about 25cm since the 1800s, and the pace is accelerating. Levels rose by approximately 1.8mm per year over the last five decades, doubled to 3.1mm per year in the 1990s, and were 2.5mm per year in the period 2003–2007. Sea level rise is caused by melting glaciers […]

We were warned: Evaluating a global warming projection from 1981

By Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Rein Haarsma, KNMI2 April 2012 […] A projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about […]

Oceans have been warming for over a century

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com 2 April 2012 In 1872, the HMS Challenger pulled out from Portsmouth, England to begin an unprecedented scientific expedition of the world’s oceans. During its over three year journey the HMS Challenger not only collected thousands of new species and sounded unknown ocean depths, but also took hundreds of temperature readings—data […]

State-by-state look at how early spring has arrived

23 March 2012 (Climate Central) – For most of the country spring has sprung earlier this year, but is this anything more than a single warm year? It seems that it is. During the past several decades, with the exception of the Southeast, spring weather has, indeed, been arriving earlier. In the interactive map, you […]

‘Mind boggling’ U.S. warmth set or tied 7,577 record high temperatures in March

By Brian K. Sullivan1 April 2012 Chicago had its all-time warmest March, while New York’s Central Park had its second-hottest as thousands of new weather records were set or tied across the U.S., according to the National Weather Service. The average temperature for the month in Chicago was 53.5 degrees Fahrenheit (11.9 Celsius). That topped […]

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