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Heat Waves Around the US

Posted by EarthDude on Tuesday, 26 July 2011 in Climate Change

Americans withered under yet another day of searing sun Friday as a heat wave spread in earnest into the urban core of the Northeast, while excessive heat warnings stretched from Kansas to Maine and the Carolinas.Temperatures were forecast near or into the triple digits Friday and into the weekend. ...

Northeast Bakes Under Blistering Heat

Posted by kenk on Monday, 25 July 2011 in Climate Change

The ungodly weather that scorched the Midwest of the USA has travelled east, giving the large population centers along the Atlantic coast a chance to experience the skin-frying joy. Temperatures exceeding 100 degrees F (38 C) have lingered for several days. When factoring in humidity and other condi...

The World at 7 Billion: Can We Stop Growing Now?

Posted by henryfool on Monday, 25 July 2011 in Human Health

Demographers aren't known for their sense of humor, but the ones who work for the United Nations recently announced that the world's human population will hit 7 billion on Halloween this year. Since censuses and other surveys can scarcely justify such a precise calculation, it's tempting to imagine ...

Global Warming Panel to Earth's Rescue, on the UN's Dime?

Posted by plantitfilm on Sunday, 24 July 2011 in Climate Change

Hundreds of United Nations global warming scientists have just met in France via Earth-destroying air travel, ironically at a time of unseasonably cool temperatures across France, to once again justify their funding. Apparently the overall temperature of Earth is set to maybe rise 4 degrees Fa...

Montana Spill Clouds Pipeline Plan

Posted by plantitfilm on Sunday, 24 July 2011 in Earth Violators

The fallout from a ruptured oil pipeline in the Yellowstone River this month is spilling into a larger debate over whether the U.S. should allow the expansion of a pipeline that would carry more crude from Canada's oil sands to American refineries. The July 1 accident at Exxon Mobil Corp.'s Silvert...

Obama’s Chance to Reduce Auto Emissions and Our Thirst for Oil

Posted by EarthDude on Sunday, 24 July 2011 in Fossil Fuels

PRESIDENT Obama has promised to break the United States’ oil addiction and tackle global warming. With a decision he will make in coming days, he can do both, and help consumers cut gas costs as well. The right decision would be to order automakers to reduce tailpipe emissions by 6 percent, steerin...

Yellowstone Cleanup Will Take More People

Posted by EarthDude on Sunday, 24 July 2011 in Earth Violators

Exxon Mobil Corp will bring in more people to mop up oil from a broken pipeline beneath the Yellowstone River as receding floodwaters reveal new contamination, federal officials said Friday.Also Friday, Montana environmental regulators said the pipeline may have leaked up to 1,200 barrels of oil int...

The Deepwater Horizion and Silver Tip pipeline disasters: How many more?

Posted by peter.gephart@gmail.com on Friday, 22 July 2011 in Clean Water

April 20th, 2010 marks the day the worst oil spill in history occurred. This is the day the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded and spewed approximately 170 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This is roughly fifteen times more oil than spilled during the Exxon-Va...

Electricity generated by wind power may raise temperatures and costs

Posted by grant on Wednesday, 20 July 2011 in Wind

And the wind turbines chop up birds. A new study from M.I.T. indicates that vast wind farms to generate electricity may raise local temperatures as much as 1degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F) on land, but have the opposite effect over water. That’s significant considering the IPCC was all exercised abou...

Artists condemn British Council's decision to axe climate programme

Posted by lillianbarbeito on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 in General Environment

Well-known authors and artists publish an open letter demanding the council rethink its 'extraordinary' move A group of some of Britain's best-known authors and artists has condemned the British Council's "extraordinary" decision to all but end its groundbreaking international work on climate chang...

Forests revealed as climate giants

Posted by henryfool on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 in Forestry

FORESTS play a larger role in Earth's climate system than previously suspected for both the risks from deforestation and the potential gains from regrowth, a benchmark study released Thursday has shown. The study, published in Science, provides the most accurate measure so far of the amount of gree...

Woman hopes to walk across Africa for clean water

Posted by grant on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 in Environmental Heroes

Amy Russell isn't expecting her walk across Connecticut to pose much of challenge. She's just going 140 miles, starting Saturday in Granby and finishing next Friday in Greenwich. That is child's play compared to the 7,000-mile, two-year trek across Africa she starts in January in an effort to rais...

Tiger Poachers caught in Thailand

Posted by henryfool on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 in Wildlife Conservation

Two men suspected of killing endangered tigers in Thailand have been arrested, a U.S. conservation group said Thursday, and the key evidence turned out to be cell phone images of them with their prizes. A phone with the images was seized after a gun battle between Thai park rangers and suspected po...

Unbelievable Endangered Species

Posted by smashley1988 on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 in Animals

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) there are many endangered species all over the world and some more than others. The IUCN helps the world find pragmatic solutions to our most pressing environment and development challenges. The most critically endangered types ...

Sustainable Food and Community - Join us! September 15-18th, Port Townsend, WA

Posted by deborah@nwei.org on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 in Food

The Northwest Earth Institute (www.nwei.org) would like to personally invite you to our bi-annual conference in beautiful Port Townsend, Washington. This year's conference theme is building healthy communities and food systems one conversation at a time. Whether you have participated in an NWEI dis...

Change Begins With You! Join the Northwest Earth Institute EcoChallenge!

Posted by deborah@nwei.org on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 in General Environment

Change can be tough, and sometimes it takes a kick-start to make it happen. Take the EcoChallenge this October 1-15 and change your life for good. How does it work? This October, we challenge you to choose one action to reduce your environmental impact and stick with it for two weeks. As an indivi...

Wood products part of winning carbon-emissions equation, researchers say

Posted by Aaron on Monday, 18 July 2011 in Forestry

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to grow, so forests have long been proposed as a way to offset climate change. But rather than just letting the forest sit there for a hundred or more years, the amount of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere could be quadrupled in 100 years by ...

New research reveals soil microbes accelerate global warming

Posted by bchristo on Monday, 18 July 2011 in Climate Change

More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes soil to release the potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, new research published in this week's edition of Nature reveals. "This feedback to our changing atmosphere means that nature is not as efficient in slowing global warming as we previou...

Bold new approach to wind 'farm' design may provide efficiency gains

Posted by Aaron on Monday, 18 July 2011 in Wind

Conventional wisdom suggests that because we're approaching the theoretical limit on individual wind turbine efficiency, wind energy is now a mature technology. But California Institute of Technology researchers revisited some of the fundamental assumptions that guided the wind industry for the past...

Link found between increased crops and deforestation in Amazon, but issue not so cut and dry

Posted by lillianbarbeito on Sunday, 17 July 2011 in Agriculture

A Kansas State University geographer is part of a research team out to prove what environmental scientists have suspected for years: Increasing the production of soybean and biofuel crops in Brazil increases deforestation in the Amazon. Although this cause-and-effect finding seems fairly straightfo...