RSS Feed
Archive for December 26th, 2012
Storm Pummels Nation’s Midsection As It Heads East
Posted by National Public Radio: Pam Fessler on December 26th, 2012
National Public Radio: Bad weather was making its way across the eastern part of the U.S. on a busy post-Christmas travel day. Hundreds of flights were canceled and roads were treacherous in many East Coast and Midwestern states.
Posted in 
Storm Brings Tornado Outbreak and Blizzard Conditions
Posted by Climate Central: Andrew Freedman on December 26th, 2012
Climate Central: A far-reaching storm system tore across the South on Tuesday, causing what is likely to go into the record books as the worst Christmas Day tornado outbreak on record. The storm responsible for the severe weather also spread a swath of snow and ice from Texas to Indiana, and the whole mess of extreme weather slid east on Wednesday, with a string of blizzard warnings that stretched at least 700 miles across seven states as of midday Wednesday.
The storm was already wreaking havoc with holiday travel....
Extreme Weather 101: Drought and Our Changing Climate
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 26th, 2012
Climate Central: Drought has left huge swaths of the United States parched this year. Are these dry conditions simply a fluke, or something we many need to get used to in a warming world? Scientist Mike Brewer and meteorologist Dan Satterfield explain the connection between drought and a changing climate in our series Extreme Weather 101.
Interview: What’s Damaging Marshes Along U.S. Coast and Why It Matters
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Kevin Dennehy on December 26th, 2012
Yale Environment 360: For centuries now, the salt marshes along the U.S. coast have been disappearing, with some experts estimating that 70 percent have been lost, largely due to development. While in recent decades the U.S. has done a better job of protecting these ecosystems, even marshes spared from development are now succumbing to more subtle threats, from rising sea levels to invasive species.
MBL Linda Deegan One factor scientists always thought marshes could withstand was nutrient enrichment, such as the flow...
United States: Planners wary of coastal sea rise in St. Augustine area
Posted by Florida Times-Union: Peter Guinta on December 26th, 2012
Florida Times-Union: Scientists studying the effect of higher sea levels on the 100,000-acre Matanzas Basin -- which runs from Anastasia Island to Crescent Beach -- say that rising waters will turn coastal marshes into open water and coastal forests into marshes.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projections point to a potential 3- to 7-inch sea level rise along St. Johns County’s coast over several decades.
Kathryn Frank, assistant professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Florida,...
Sandy tops list of 2012 extreme weather, climate events
Posted by Climate Central: Andrew Freedman, Michael Lemonick, and Dan Yawitz on December 26th, 2012
Climate Central: From unprecedented heat waves that shattered "Dust Bowl" era records from the 1930s, to Hurricane Sandy, which devastated coastal New Jersey and New York, 2012 was the year Mother Nature had it out for the U.S. No country on Earth rivaled the U.S. in 2012 in terms of extreme weather and climate events, as one rare episode after another rocked the country.
Many served to highlight the growing role that global warming may be playing in tipping the odds in favor of high-impact weather events.
2012's...
Erratic Environment May Be Key to Human Evolution
Posted by LiveScience: Charles Choi on December 26th, 2012
LiveScience: At Olduvai Gorge, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment, researchers added.
Olduvai Gorge is a ravine cut into the eastern margin of the Serengeti Plain in northern Tanzania that holds fossils of hominins -- members of the human lineage....
Indonesia: Paper giant breaks pledge to end rainforest logging in Sumatra
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 26th, 2012
Mongabay: Pulp and paper giant Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL) continues to destroy large areas of rainforests and peatlands despite a commitment to end natural forest logging by 2009, says a new report issued by a coalition of Indonesian environmental groups.
The Eyes on the Forest report [PDF] finds that APRIL and its suppliers cleared at least 140,000 hectares (346,000 acres) of natural forest between 2008 and 2011 in Riau, accounting for 27 percent of all forest loss in the province...
Restoring Democracy in the Fight Against Fracking
Posted by EcoWatch: Thomas Linzey, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund on December 26th, 2012
EcoWatch: Same story. Different day.
People are threatened by an activity that will injure them, and they work overtime to pass a law that bans the activity.
An affected corporation--or industry association--then sues the municipality, contending that the community can’t prohibit what the state allows, and that the ban violates the “rights” of the corporation.
The upshot of these machinations is that the municipality then either repeals the ban or is bankrupted trying to defend it. Most likely, the...
Climate change may have driven evolution, scientists believe
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 26th, 2012
Telegraph: The early landscape shifted between woodland to grassland half a dozen times over 200,000 years, meaning man had to adapt to survive.
Experts from Penn State university say that this may have set the tone for the rapid evolution which then took place.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Clayton Magill said: "The landscape early humans were inhabiting transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland about five to six times during...