Archive for January 11th, 2013

Climate change set to make America hotter, drier, and more disaster-prone

Guardian: Future generations of Americans can expect to spend 25 days a year sweltering in temperatures above 100 degrees F (38 degrees C), with climate change on course to turn the country into a hotter, drier, and more disaster-prone place. The National Climate Assessment, released in draft form on Friday, provided the fullest picture to date of the real-time effects of climate change on U.S. life, and the most likely consequences for the future. The 1,000-page report, the work of the more than 300...

Climate change report: Seas rising, heat waves ahead

USA Today: Climate change is already affecting how Americans live and work, and evidence is mounting that the burning of fossil fuels has roughly doubled the probability of extreme heat waves, the Obama administration said Friday. "Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glacier and Arctic Sea ice are melting," says a draft of the third federal Climate Assessment Report, compiled by more than 240 scientists for a federal advisory committee. "These changes are part of the pattern of global...

Report: Climate change already affecting US economy, people

Kansas City Star: A new report warns that climate change driven by human activity already is affecting the American people and economy, with more frequent and intense heat waves, heavy downpours and, in some places, floods and droughts. A draft version of the National Climate Assessment that was released Friday warns that as the Earth continues to warm because of increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the health and livelihoods of many Americans and the ecosystems that sustain the country face...

A Nuclear Post-Mortem for Sandy

New York Times: The operators of the Oyster Creek nuclear plant, the reactor that declared an "alert" during Hurricane Sandy, made several small errors, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Friday. But an inspection team has concluded that "performance was acceptable and that emergency action level declarations were timely." The operators kept control room logs in a way that safety inspectors found hard to decipher later, and at one point, they took a wind level reading off the wrong sensor on their meteorological...

Australia’s Climate Inferno “Encroaching on Entirely New Territory”

Climate Desk: Australia`s top government-appointed climate commissioner says this week`s heatwave is occurring amid record-breaking weather around the world. "This has been a landmark event for me," Professor Tim Flannery told Climate Desk from his home in Melbourne. "When you start breaking records, and you do it consistently, and you see it over and over again, that is a good indication there`s a shift underway--this is not just within the normal variation of things." Flannery is perhaps best known in the...

Yoko Ono, in Albany, Raises Her Voice Against Hydraulic Fracturing

New York Times: For months they have been descending on Albany: farmers, environmentalists, latter-day hippies and placard-bearing parents. But on Friday, the forces against hydraulic fracturing, a method for drilling for natural gas, brought to Albany a face and a voice familiar to the world: Yoko Ono. Ms. Ono — along with her son, Sean Lennon, who came with her — has a personal connection to the issue. She and her husband, John Lennon, bought a farm in the Catskills, and she and Sean want to prevent the drilling,...

Climate change set to make America hotter, drier and more disaster-prone

Guardian: Future generations of Americans can expect to spend 25 days a year sweltering in temperatures above 100F (38C), with climate change on course to turn the country into a hotter, drier, and more disaster-prone place. The National Climate Assessment, released in draft form on Friday , provided the fullest picture to date of the real-time effects of climate change on US life, and the most likely consequences for the future. The 1,000-page report, the work of the more than 300 government scientists...

Climate Change: Going to Extremes

Huffington Post: There are extremes and then there are EXTREMES. Last year seemed to bring one weather-related disaster after another, including the following: In June an intense linear storm known as a derecho spawned extreme thunderstorms across the eastern United States. In late June record-breaking heat met or exceeded more than 1,900 previous daily high temperature records. Throughout the year dry, hot conditions in the West aggravated wildfires, which burned large swaths of New Mexico, Colorado...

New Yorkers Deliver Unprecedented 200K+ Comments on Cuomo’s Fracking Rules

EcoWatch: On the final day of the 30-day public comment period on the Cuomo administration’s proposed fracking rules, a coalition of New Yorkers and organizations opposed to fracking--including Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon of Artists against Fracking--delivered an unprecedented 200,000-plus public comments to the state’s DEC. On the final day of the 30-day public comment period on the Cuomo administration’s proposed fracking rules, a coalition of New Yorkers and organizations opposed to fracking--including...

Wildfires across Australia and the US’s hottest year on record: the heat that’s making history

Telegraph: Confused? You have every right to be. On just one day this week, it was reported that the heatwave that has lit wildfires across Australia is so unprecedented that two new colours have had to be added to weather forecasting maps; that 2012 had been by far the hottest year on record in the United States; that the blue-chip World Economic Forum had identified climate change as one of the world's most urgent dangers; and that, nevertheless, the Met Office had concluded that global warming had stalled....