By Ellen Knickmeyer and John Locher18 August 2014 Ivanpah Dry Lake, California (Associated Press) – Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. Federal wildlife investigators […]
By Evan Halper and Ralph Vartabedian 25 October 2014 (Los Angeles Times) – California’s pioneering climate-change law has a long reach, but that doesn’t mean all its mandates will help stave off global warming. To meet the requirement that it cut carbon emissions, for example, Southern California Edison recently sold its stake in one of […]
By Melanie Fitzpatrick17 October 2014 (UCSUSA) – What would it be like to live in a place that floods every full moon? We asked that question and others in our report, Encroaching Tides, which was released last week. During that week, there was a perigean spring tide – an extra-high tide when the sun, moon, […]
By Rebecca Trager22 October 2014 (Chemistry World) – A pro bono network that will provide legal protection for US scientists in government and academia has been launched by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), an environmental group based in Washington, DC. The new Alliance for Legal Protection of Science (Alps), will provide legal information, […]
By Richard Martin16 October 2014 (The Atlantic) – Scotty Lucas is the former mayor of a town that no longer exists. This double obsolescence seems to faze him little, which is not all that surprising considering that he has outlived his wife, one of his children, and the town he spent most of his 81 […]
By Gary Chittim and Elizabeth Wiley21 October 2014 SEATTLE (KING 5 News) – The death of a baby southern resident orca is part of a trend that doesn’t bode well for survival of the endangered pods. On the same day the “L” pod thrilled whale watchers with a late season visit to the waters near […]
By Michael Mann, John Abraham, Dr. Peter Gleick, Scott Mandia, Richard C.J. Somerville20 October 2014 (EcoWatch) – Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry has authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that “there is less urgency to phase out greenhouse gas emissions now” than in the past. This could not be further from the […]
By Keith M. Parsons15 October 2014 (Huffington Post) – I grew up in the heroic age of American science and engineering. In my lifetime, the space program put men on the moon, the interstate highway system connected the continent, Salk and Sabin conquered polio, and computers went from room-sized behemoths to hand-held wonders. In my […]
ABSTRACT: Wildfire activity in boreal forests is anticipated to increase dramatically, with far-reaching ecological and socioeconomic consequences. Paleorecords are indispensible for elucidating boreal fire regime dynamics under changing climate, because fire return intervals and successional cycles in these ecosystems occur over decadal to centennial timescales. We present charcoal records from 14 lakes in the Yukon […]
By Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara10 October 2014 (ProPublica) – Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater – according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings. The 1,217 […]
