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Archive for October 14th, 2015
Chesapeake waters are warming, study finds, posing challenges for healing ailing bay
Posted by Baltimore Sun: Timothy B. Wheeler on October 14th, 2015
Baltimore Sun: The Chesapeake Bay's waters are warming up, in some places rising more rapidly even than the region's air temperatures, a new University of Maryland study finds. If unchecked, scientists say the trend could complicate costly, long-running efforts to restore the ailing estuary, worsen fish-suffocating dead zones and even alter the food web on which the bay's fish and crabs depend. Drawing on remote sensing by satellites, researchers at UM's Center for Environmental Science found that water temperatures...
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Gas pipeline foes got a lesson in protest tactics from Keystone
Posted by Bloomberg: Environmental Activists Prepared To Risk Arrest To Block Lines on October 14th, 2015
Bloomberg: The battle to build natural gas pipelines in the post-Keystone XL world has moved from the hearing room into the streets.
Developers are squaring off against activists like Nick Katkevich, who’s prepared to risk jail time to block new pipelines. Their actions have forced companies like Spectra Energy Corp. to take counter measures that include training staff and contractors to cope with acts of civil disobedience, arranging undercover security and monitoring opponents’ websites and social media...
In dryland African regions, limiting wildlife water access reduce water quality
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 14th, 2015
ScienceDaily: Water-dependent wildlife populations in sensitive African dryland regions need continued access to limited surface water resources -- even as human development increases in these areas -- because restricting access and concentrating wildlife populations along riparian regions can impact water quality and, potentially, human health, according to Virginia Tech research published this week in the journal PLOS ONE.
While concentrated wildlife can be a boon for ecotourism operations, there can be substantial...
What does it take to escape the water? Plankton have clues
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 14th, 2015
ScienceDaily: Dolphins and whales may attract a lot of attention when they leap dramatically out of the water. But aquatic animals thousands of times smaller are accomplished jumpers, too. Their acrobatics often go unnoticed, but understanding them could help improve engineering processes, like oil refining and wastewater treatment, that rely on controlling the interaction of small particles with air-water interfaces. Sunghwan Jung, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics in Virginia Tech's...
Rate of Antarctic ice melt to double by 2050 – study
Posted by Climate Home: Tim Radford on October 14th, 2015
Climate Home: Antarctica, the planet’s largest desert, is home to 90% of the world’s ice – enough to raise global sea levels by at least 60 metres. So what happens to its ice and snow is a matter of serious concern to all of us.
One group has just predicted that, by 2050, the rate at which the ice shelves melt will double. Another reports that powerful winds are not just shifting Antarctica’s snow, but are also blowing 80 billion tonnes of it away, into the sea or the atmosphere.
Both cases exemplify the...
California Leads the Way on Climate Change
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 14th, 2015
New York Times: On the whole, state governments, especially those with Republican-dominated legislatures, have been remarkably passive and uninventive in recent years on the matter of climate change. Indeed, at least a dozen states have challenged the Obama administration’s new rule regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and have vowed to do everything they can to see it overturned in court. And then there is California, which stands apart in its commitment to a healthier, cleaner and less carbon-intensive...
U.S. Cities We Could Lose to the Sea
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 14th, 2015
Climate Central: Historic carbon emissions have already locked in enough future sea level rise to submerge most of the homes in each of several hundred American towns and cities, according to Climate Central-led research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The animated timeline on this page maps, year by year, how the total number of locked-in cities could climb to more than 1,500, if pollution continues unchecked through the end of the century. It also lays out an alternative timeline...
France warns of security risks caused by global warming
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 14th, 2015
Associated Press: A UN conference on climate in Paris this year will also be a “conference for peace”, given that global warming threatens the world’s security, a top French official said on Wednesday. Government officials from several African and island nations gathered in Paris on Wednesday to discuss the implications of climate change for defense issues. “Climate and international security are closely linked,” French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said. Major droughts, floods and famines force people to migrate...
Dire glimpses of what pollution doing in Bangladesh
Posted by Wired: None Given on October 14th, 2015
Wired: Bangladesh is dominated by a vast river delta of rich, fertile and flat land no more than 40 feet above sea level. That makes it especially susceptible to climate change. Scientists estimate that rising sea levels will claim as much as 17 percent of the country by 2050, displacing as many as 18 million people.
Bangladeshi photojournalist Probal Rashid was born in the rice-growing district of Gazipur in 1979, and has seen this threat first-hand. He`s made it his mission to document the threat industrialization,...
Sizzling September Keeps 2015 on Track for Hottest Year on Record
Posted by ThinkProgress: Joe Romm on October 14th, 2015
ThinkProgress: Once again, it`s the hottest year on record by far through last month, NASA reports. We`re running out of headlines for this repetitive monthly warm up, but with the recent death of the legendary Yogi Berra, one of his classic lines comes to mind, "It`s like deja-vu, all over again."
Last month was second only to 2014 for hottest September in the NASA dataset.
With the long-term warming trend caused by human activity boosted by the short-term warming caused by the strongest El Niño since the...