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Archive for October 12th, 2011
Global Warming May Worsen Effects of El Niño, La Niña Events
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 12th, 2011
Climate Central: As just about everyone knows, El Niño is a periodic unusual warming of the surface water in the eastern and central tropical Pacific Ocean. Actually, that's pretty much a lie. Most people don't know the definition of El Niño or its mirror image, La Niña, and truthfully, most people don't much care.
What you do care about if you're a Texan suffering through the worst one-year drought on record, or a New Yorker who had to dig out from massive snowstorms last winter (tied in part to La Niña), or...
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BP, 2 other companies cited over Gulf oil spill
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 12th, 2011
Associated Press: Federal regulators on Wednesday cited oil company BP PLC and two other companies -- Transocean Ltd. and Halliburton -- for alleged safety and environmental violations stemming from last year's rig explosion and massive Gulf oil spill.
The companies have 60 days to appeal the citations issued by the Interior Department's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.
The bureau says the alleged regulatory violations could result in civil penalties once the appeal period has ended.
These...
Chemical Industry Shifts on BPA After Spending Millions to Fight Legislation
Posted by GreenWire: Jeremy P. Jacobs on October 12th, 2011
Greenwire: The ACC email that arrived Friday afternoon said there's no reason to worry about bisphenol-A (BPA) in baby bottles and children's sippy cups because the controversial plastic additive is no longer used in those products in the United States.
The trade group's announcement came after Salter, the policy manager of the Breast Cancer Fund, had spent the past six years on the frontlines of a major battle over California legislation to ban BPA from those products.
Salter's group and others were...
Deep Thinking About the Future of Food
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 12th, 2011
New York Times: Trying to tap into the best thinking about the future of global agriculture, as I have tried to do in my work as a reporter, can be an exercise in frustration. Many groups and many bright people go at the problem, but not many of them go at it in a holistic way.
The environmental crowd is worried mainly about the ecological damage from agriculture and is prone to recommend solutions that farmers say would undercut the food supply. Traditional agronomists are mainly worried about supply - and tend...
Global Meat Production Increased 20 Percent Since 2000, Report Says
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 12th, 2011
Yale Environment 360: Global meat production has grown by 20 percent in the last decade and tripled since 1970, increases that have far exceeded the rate of population growth during the same periods and pose significant threats to the environment, the economy, and public health, a new report says. According to the Worldwatch Institute report, much of that growth is due to the rise of large-scale factory farming in developing countries such as China. Such industrial-scale farming not only poses health risks to livestock...
Canada: Keystone pipeline will go ahead; Obama needs it
Posted by National Post: Lorne Gunter on October 12th, 2011
National Post: The Keystone XL pipeline will get built from Alberta to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast, despite high-profile protests by celebrities and environmentalists, because unions that U.S. President Barack Obama needs for his re-election campaign want the jobs it will bring.
Tuesday, the anti-oilsands, anti-pipeline, anti-modern life coalition called the Climate Action Network Canada obtained a year-old memo
from a staffer at the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. Sent to our ambassador, former...
Perry Officials Censored Climate Change Report
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 12th, 2011
Mother Jones: Rick Perry takes Texas pride in being a climate change denier--and his administration acts accordingly.
Top environmental officials under Perry have gutted a recent report on sea level rise in Galveston Bay, removing all mentions of climate change. For the past decade, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), which is run by Perry political appointees, including famed global warming denier Bryan Shaw, has contracted with the Houston Advanced Research Center to produce regular reports...
Climate change could shrink chocolate production: report
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 12th, 2011
LA Times: Scientists say climate change will eventually claim many victims -– including, according to a new report, chocolate. As temperatures increase and weather trends change, the main growing regions for cocoa could shrink drastically, according to new research from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. Ghana and the Ivory Coast –- which produce more than half of the global cocoa supply –- could take a major hit by 2050. Currently, the optimal locations to grow the crop are about 330 feet...
European wars, famine, and plagues driven by changing climate
Posted by Ars Technica: Alllie Wilkinson on October 12th, 2011
Ars Technica: Economic chaos, famine, disease, and war may all be attributed to climate change, according to a recent study. Through advances in paleoclimatology, researchers used temperature data and climate-driven economic variables to simulate the climate that prevailed during golden and dark ages in Europe and the Northern Hemisphere from 1500-1800 AD. In doing so, they discovered a set of casual linkages between climate change and human crisis. They noted that social disturbance, societal collapse and population...
The oceanographer: Making a splash studying mountains, snow and wolverines
Posted by Daily Climate: Rae Tyson on October 12th, 2011
Daily Climate: We are on a path where we will increase CO2 to around 1,000 parts per million by the end of the 21st century.... That is mind-boggling, will certainly be life-altering, and we should do everything we can to not let anything even close to that happen. - Synte Peacock
Earlier this year, a breakthrough study by - oddly - an oceanographer concluded climate change could imperil the survival of wolverines in alpine areas of the Pacific Northwest. By focusing on projected changes to the mountainous Northwest,...