By Brian Bienkowski6 May 2015 (Scientific America) – Fracking wells in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region are disproportionately located in poor rural communities, which bear the brunt of associated pollution, according to a new study. The study bolsters concerns that poor people are more likely to deal with hydraulic fracturing in their community and raises concerns […]
[cf. Report: Cheap natural gas leads to more plants and pollution] By Bill McKibben23 March 2016 (The Nation) – Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps […]
By Adam Voiland8 March 2016 (NASA) – For a chemical compound that shows up nearly everywhere on the planet, methane still surprises us. It is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and yet the reasons for why and where it shows up are often a mystery. What we know for sure is that a […]
By Nathaniel Rich31 March 2016 (The New York Times Magazine) – “It just seems like a beautiful day in Southern California,” Bryan Caforio said. It was late January in Porter Ranch, an affluent neighborhood on the northern fringe of Los Angeles. Caforio and I sat at a Starbucks overlooking an oceanic parking lot crowded with […]
NEW ORLEANS, 29 February 2016 (Associated Press) – The nation’s boom in cheap natural gas — often viewed as a clean energy source — is spawning a wave of petrochemical plants that, if built, will emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases, an environmental watchdog group warned in a report Monday [Greenhouse Gases from a Growing […]
By Lucy Nicholson, with additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Alistair Bell20 January 2016 (Reuters) – Air quality regulators, meeting for the third time this month to address a huge natural gas leak that has forced thousands of Los Angeles residents from their homes, delayed action again on Wednesday on a proposal to curtail […]
7 January 2016 (Stockholm University) – Climate-sensitive regions in the north are home to most of the world’s lakes. New research from universities in Sweden and the US, shows that these northern freshwaters are critical emitters of methane, a more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane is increasing in the atmosphere, but many sources […]
20 December 2015 (EDF) – Aerial footage filmed 17 December 2015, shows potent, climate-damaging methane gases escaping from a massive natural gas leak at a storage facility in California’s Aliso Canyon, with the San Fernando valley pictured in the background. The giant methane plumes were made visible by a specialized infrared camera operated by an […]
11 November 2015 (Met Office) – Global annual average surface temperature in 2015 is looking set to reach 1°C above the pre-industrial average (as represented by the 1850-1900 reference period) for the first time, according to the HadCRUT4 dataset produced by the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. […]
GENEVA, 9 November 2015 (WMO) – The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached yet another new record high in 2014, continuing a relentless rise which is fuelling climate change and will make the planet more dangerous and inhospitable for future generations. The World Meteorological Organization’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin says that between 1990 and […]