RSS Feed
Archive for August 15th, 2013
Soaring temperatures may complicate fight against Idaho wildfire
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 15th, 2013
Reuters: A massive wildfire raging in the Idaho mountains crept ever closer to a pair of nearly deserted resort towns on Thursday, with firefighters bracing for soaring temperatures and high winds that could complicate their work, federal fire managers said.
The so-called Elk Complex Fire, which has been nipping at the edges of the south central Idaho communities of Pine and Featherville for days, has already devoured 38 homes and 43 other structures outside the city limits since it was sparked by lightning...
Posted in 
United Kingdom: Balcombe oil drilling stops in anticipation of weekend protest
Posted by Guardian: Fiona Harvey, on August 15th, 2013
Guardian: Cuadrilla has halted its oil-drilling operations in West Sussex in anticipation of an influx of anti-fracking protesters at the site this weekend.
The company, which is pioneering the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing in Britain, said that after discussions with police it had doubled the height of its security fences and installed razor wire at the Balcombe site, and had called a halt to the stopped drilling until further notice. A spokesman said this was owing to concerns "for the...
The people are hungry: The link between food and revolution
Posted by Grist: Nathanael Johnson on August 15th, 2013
Grist: The rising price of food isn’t the only thing driving the revolutionary fervor from Tunisia to Turkey to Brazil. The bad economy was surely a principal factor (remember that Adel Khazri shouted “This is Tunisia, this is unemployment,” as he burned). There was the effect of new social media technology. And then there was that tyranny thing that people seemed to dislike. But food scarcity is different, because it looks as if it’s going to stick around even as the economy improves. And unless we do...
United Kingdom: Energy company scales back drilling over protest fears
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 15th, 2013
Agence France-Presse: Energy firm Cuadrilla on Friday announced it was cutting back its activities at a site in south England as over 1,000 protesters prepare for a six-day "action camp".
The company, which specialises in hydraulic fracturing for shale gas, the controversial technique known as "fracking", will scale back its exploratory drilling operation at Balcombe in West Sussex due to concerns over the protest by "No Dash For Gas" campaigners.
"After taking advice from Sussex Police, Cuadrilla is scaling back...
Ecuador expected to open Amazon’s Yasuni basin to oil drilling -sources
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 15th, 2013
Reuters: Ecuador is expected to open part of the Amazon rainforest to oil drilling on Thursday after rich nations failed to back a conservation plan that would have paid the country not to explore in the area, government sources said.
In 2007 Ecuador's President Rafael Correa launched an initiative to protect the Yasuni area of the Amazon basin, which boasts one of the planet's richest ranges of wildlife. However, the sources said that decision has been reversed and an announcement on the plan's future...
Expect More Crippling Heatwaves By 2020
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on August 15th, 2013
Climate News Network: Stand by for extreme weather. Prepare for heat waves on a scale that was once unprecedented. For once, there is no “if” in the forecast. Even if governments abandon fossil fuels everywhere, immediately and invest only in green energy, there will be new record temperatures.
European climate scientists say the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere mean it is inevitable that far more parts of the world will experience more frequent and severe heat waves in the next 30 years.
The greenhouse...
Church of England in ‘fracking land-grab’
Posted by Telegraph: James Kirkup on August 15th, 2013
Telegraph: Residents across England have started receiving letters from the Land Registry, informing them that the Church is seeking to register the mineral rights to the earth beneath their property.
Lawyers believe that the Church's claim could allow it to profit from fracking, the controversial method of extracting oil and cash by fracturing underground rocks with water and chemicals.
Responding to residents' worries, the Church insisted that it has "no particular plans to mine under any property'...
Climate Change May Be Easing Devastating 2012 Drought
Posted by Climate Central: Bobby Magill on August 15th, 2013
Climate Central: Early this week, when Colorado State Climatologist Nolan Doesken toured an area of southeast Colorado hit hardest by the drought of 2012, he was greeted with a vast expanse of parched farmland that had turned into a moonscape with almost no vegetation.
That area along the Arkansas River hadn't seen much rainfall in nearly three years, a long dry spell broken recently by a series of torrential downpours, leaving the moonscape even more surreal.
"Some of that moonscape was standing water from...
Australian floods lowered worldwide sea levels
Posted by Grist: John Upton on August 15th, 2013
Grist: Flood-inducing rainfall in Australia in 2010 was so severe that it lowered worldwide sea levels.
Scientists have been puzzled by satellite data that shows sea levels fell in 2011. A paper published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters attributes a lot of the surprising sea-level decline to antipodean deluges - record-breaking rainfall that was linked to climate change.
Seas have been rising by about 3 millimeters a year in recent decades. But from mid-2010 until 2011 sea levels...
New Clues to Greenland’s Hidden Plumbing
Posted by LiveScience: Becky Oskin on August 15th, 2013
LiveScience: What happens under Greenland's ice sheet, where water, ice and rock meet, is key to predicting how its glaciers will react to global warming.
Turns out, beneath the island's mysterious middle, where the ice is thick and the bottom bedrock difficult to reach, meltwater flows through channels and voids that open when flowing ice travels over rough ground, a new study finds. The passageways are spaces between the rock and the overlying ice. The results, based on computer modeling and fieldwork observations...