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Archive for October 2nd, 2012
Clam Shells Record Climate Events Over Past Thousand Years
Posted by redOrbit: Brett Smith on October 2nd, 2012
redOrbit: Modern climatologists have access to a wide array of technological tools, but an international team looking to study climate events from the past thousand years has decided to utilize something a little more old school.
Researchers led by Alan Wanamaker from Iowa State University have been collecting clam shells from the waters of the North Atlantic because the mollusks act as tiny recorders, storing information about their environment in the growth bans that runs along their shells. As these...
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Sea Rise Will Be Irreversible Over Next Several Thousand Years Due To Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Posted by redOrbit: Brett Smith on October 2nd, 2012
redOrbit: A groundbreaking study by a team of European researchers warns that greenhouse gas emissions will cause an irreversible rise in sea level over the next several thousand years.
The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Environmental Research Letters, expanded the scope of typical climate change studies to include thousands of years in its projections and also took into consideration all of the Earth’s land ice, something which had never been done before.
Using thermomechanical...
Yellow Springs, Ohio Bans Fracking
Posted by EcoWatch: None Given on October 2nd, 2012
EcoWatch: On Oct. 1, the Yellow Springs Village Council voted 3-2 to adopt a Community Bill of Rights ordinance banning corporations from conducting shale gas drilling and related activities in the village.
The ordinance was drafted by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) at the invitation of the community group Gas and Oil Drilling Awareness and Education (GODAE), a group of citizens concerned about the potential effects of gas and oil drilling on the environment.
Yellow Springs is...
Disaster Planning and Climate Change
Posted by Huffington Post: Steve Fleischli on October 2nd, 2012
Huffington Post: Fall may have arrived, but it hasn't brought an end to the great drought of 2012. My home state of Nebraska has been hit hard, with nearly 98 percent of the state still experiencing extreme or exceptional drought. Friends and family have told me that cities have restricted water use, farmers have plowed their crops under, and ranchers have thinned their herds. Tens of thousands of acres have caught fire across the state, and fire departments have had to ask for emergency increases in property taxes...
United States: Regulators Approve First Commercial Hydrokinetic Projects in U.S
Posted by EcoWatch: U.S. Energy Information Administration on October 2nd, 2012
EcoWatch: New hydrokinetic energy technologies that generate electricity by harnessing the energy from ocean waves, tides and river currents are advancing toward commercial development in the U.S. They are not expected to add major power supplies anytime soon, but federal regulators this year approved licenses for two hydrokinetic energy projects to produce electricity from wave power buoys anchored off the Oregon coast and from underwater turbines driven by the current in New York City`s East River.
Hydrokinetic...
Ocean Acidification Leaves Mollusks Naked and Confused
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 2nd, 2012
Inter Press Service: - Climate change will ruin Chilean sea snails` ability to sniff out and avoid their archenemy, a predatory crab, according to Chilean scientists who presented their findings at an international science symposium here.
Researchers from Australia also revealed that as the oceans become more and more acidic, some fish become hyperactive and confused, and move towards their predators instead of trying to escape.
"The conditions in oceans are changing 100 times faster than at any time in the past,"...
Feeling The Economic Impact Of Climate Change
Posted by National Public Radio: Adam Frank on October 2nd, 2012
National Public Radio: Everyone knows that the weather this summer in the United States was a disaster. Temperature records fell faster than knickknacks off a broken bookshelf across much of the country. Vast swaths of the nation were facing "extreme" or "exceptional" drought conditions. And while it is impossible to say with certainty if any particular weather event is caused by climate change, the events of the summer are pretty much exactly what climate scientists have been predicting for decades.
Given the onslaught...
Saving Civilization is Not a Spectator Sport
Posted by Earth Policy Institute: None Given on October 2nd, 2012
Earth Policy Institute: Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold. The world food situation is deteriorating. Grain stocks have dropped to a dangerously low level. The World Food Price Index has doubled in a decade. The ranks of the hungry are expanding. Political unrest is spreading. On the demand side of the food equation, there will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night. And some 3 billion increasingly affluent people are moving up the food chain, consuming grain-intensive livestock...
Bolivia’s silver mountain loses its lustre as report warns of risk of collapse
Posted by Guardian: Juan Forero on October 2nd, 2012
Guardian: The tunnel grew darker and more claustrophobic, the air harder to breathe. But Daniel Cruz trudged deeper into the bowels of a mountain where thousands of miners toil and countless more are entombed, casualties of a centuries-old lust for silver.
Behind him followed five foreign tourists, here to see an anachronism in the 21st century, medieval mining in the Rich Mountain of Potosí. This cone-shaped peak is at any given moment home to as many as 16,000 shirtless miners, straining in dark caverns...
Climate trends threaten U.S. forests
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 2nd, 2012
United Press International: U.S. university and federal researchers expressed concern about the long-term health of forests in the southwestern United States given recent climate trends.
Scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Arizona and partner organizations said that if warmer temperatures and drought continue for the southwestern states, forest ecosystems could change dramatically.
Researchers, in a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, compared...