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Archive for June 3rd, 2014
Potential Downside of Natural Gas
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 3rd, 2014
New York Times: CONVENTIONAL wisdom, strongly promoted by the natural gas industry, is that natural gas drives down American emissions of carbon dioxide, by substituting for carbon-rich coal. The climate stabilization plan announced by the Obama administration on Monday relies on that. But in other ways, cheap natural gas drives emissions up. “It’s a seesaw,” said Michael W. Yackira, chairman of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association of the investor-owned electric companies. Some of the factors are...
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Proposed Denton fracking ban to be debated at public meeting
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 3rd, 2014
ABC: The Denton City Council officially accepted a petition ordinance on Tuesday night which calls for an outright ban on fracking within city limits. A public hearing will be held in mid-July. After that, the Council can vote for or against the ordinance. Voters will likely have the final say if the ordinance is rejected by the Council. "It's been a long hard climb for us to get here," said Sharon Wilson, one of the main petition organizers. Last month, organizers submitted a petition with nearly...
Iran Faces Dangerous Water Crisis as Temperatures Rise, Are the People to Blame?
Posted by Nature World: Brian Stallard on June 3rd, 2014
Nature World: As summer presses on and temperatures rise, water scarcity in Iran is becoming a national emergency. Iran is facing a critical shortage of water as arid temperatures rise with the encroaching summer season. According to Future Directions International (FDI), an independent strategic analysis group based in Australia, the country of Iran began to experience notable water supply drops in 2013, with lower-than-average precipitation levels leaving the great majority of the region's dams and waterways...
How Will We Know When El Niño Finally Arrives?
Posted by Climate Central: Andrea Thompson on June 3rd, 2014
Climate Central: El Niño, El Niño, El Niño. Because of the implications it has for weather around the world, it's been the talk of the meteorological and climatological community since the first signs it might be developing emerged back in the winter. It's like the Marcia Brady of climate phenomena.
For example, hurricane forecasters expect it to tamp down on tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin this season, while drought-weary officials in California hope it will finally bring them some rain. El Niño could...
Dramatic flood sweeps through residential area in China as reservoir bursts
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 3rd, 2014
Telegraph: A huge downpour has battered Pingba County in Guizhou Province, southwest China, with rainfall over 7 inches (188 millimeters).
Heavy rain started to batter Pingba Monday night, inundating roads and residential areas.
Rain-triggered flood trapped more than 1,000 vehicles across the county, and rescuers are busy freeing the vehicles out. It is not known if there are any casualties.
To make matters worse, a nearby reservoir burst during the rainstorm, bringing the water level to about 4 foot...
Fukushima Disaster Still Global Nightmare
Posted by EcoWatch: Harvey Wasserman on June 3rd, 2014
EcoWatch: The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.
Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.
At least three extremely volatile fuel assemblies are stuck high in the air at Unit 4. Three years after the March 11, 2011, disaster, nobody knows exactly where the melted cores from Units 1, 2 and 3 might be.
Amid a dicey cleanup infiltrated by organized crime,...
10 Reasons Why Must Save Indonesian Peatlands
Posted by EcoWatch: Joao Talocchi, Greenpeace on June 3rd, 2014
EcoWatch: For years, this is known as a smoky, hazy time of year in Sumatra, Indonesia. And each year it’s getting worse. It’s the dry season, and hundreds of thousands of hectares of Indonesian peatland fires will burn for months. Those fires are a direct result of decades of forest and peatland destruction. Peat is partially decayed, dead vegetation, which has accumulated over thousands of years. It is typically saturated with water and therefore virtually impossible to set alight. But when peatlands are...
New Desalination Technologies Spur Growth Recyling Water
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Cheryl Katz on June 3rd, 2014
Yale Environment 360: A ferry plows along San Francisco Bay, trailing a tail of churned up salt, sand, and sludge and further fouling the already murky liquid that John Webley intends to turn into drinking water. But Webley, CEO of a Bay Area start-up working on a new, energy-skimping desalination system, isn’t perturbed.
“Look at the color of this intake,” he says, pointing to a tube feeding brown fluid into a device the size of a home furnace. There, through a process called forward osmosis, a novel solution the...
Climate Change and Lake Michigan
Posted by Urban Milwaukee: Bruce Murphy on June 3rd, 2014
Urban Milwaukee: Comedian John Oliver recently did a hilarious piece on the issue of global climate change, culminating in a “statistically representative” debate on the issue, with 97 scientists arguing that climate change is occurring and 3 scientists disputing this who got drowned out by the throng. His point was that climate change was a fact on which there was an overwhelming scientific consensus, yet the media continues to treat this as a “belief” about which scientists disagree. Oliver had fun ridiculing...
Dead heat: Climate change brings killer heat waves
Posted by Grist: Sarah Laskow and Melinda Tracy Boyce on June 3rd, 2014
Grist: This comic was produced by Years of Living Dangerously and Symbolia Magazine. You can read more of their comics exploring the impacts of climate change here.