Biology
Breach
December 20, 2011, from Greenwire
...More than 40 percent of officials regulating oil and gas production in the top drilling states, records show, come from the industry they are charged with policing.
It is a degree of self-regulation enjoyed by few other industries, if any. And it heightens suspicion among critics of the nation's drilling boom that companies are allowed to damage the environment with impunity.
Supporters of the industry, and the regulators themselves, say it simply makes sense to have technical experts deciding technical issues.
December 20, 2011, from Science News
Bisphenol A toys with the female heart, a new study finds. And under the right conditions, its authors worry, this near-ubiquitous pollutant might even prove deadly.
BPA is a building block of clear hard plastics, dental sealants and the resins lining food cans. Studies have shown that throughout the industrial world, nearly everyone regularly encounters the compound, albeit at trace concentrations.
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Climate
Chaos
December 20, 2012, from New York Times
For those who might be keeping score, we just passed the 333rd consecutive month of global temperatures above the 20th-century average.
November 2012 was the fifth-warmest November since records began in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its monthly climate report. The agency calculated that the 10 warmest Novembers on record have all occurred within the past 12 years.
The last time global temperatures came in below the 20th-century average for the month of November was in 1976, and the last time any month came in below the average was February 1985.
December 20, 2012, from Mother Jones
The fossil fuel industry has long been a source of talking points and "studies" aimed at spreading doubt about climate change, and over the past few years, it has broadened its scope to undermine support for clean energy, as well. Often, this criticism is published in the form of articles in major media outlets -- penned by employees of think tanks who don't disclose their groups' industry funding, a new study finds.
The Checks and Balances Project, a pro-clean-energy watchdog group, surveyed stories published over the past five years in 60 news outlets, including national and regional newspapers, the Associated Press, and Politico. Researchers found that only 6 percent of the stories disclosed the funding when they cited "experts" from those think tanks. Typically, the stories referred to the groups as "free-market" or "libertarian," without mentioning the dirty-energy support.
December 20, 2012, from Reuters
A growing body of scientific evidence ranks Mexico and its southern neighbors near the top of the list of countries most vulnerable to global warming, and advances in micro-forecasting foresee a grim future in alarming detail.
According to two new studies, a deadly combination of warmer weather and less rainfall in the years ahead will devastate yields of traditional crops like corn and beans, as well as the region's market-critical coffee harvest.
December 20, 2012, from The Hill
President Obama has identified climate change as one of his top three priorities in his second term after coming under fire from environmentalists for giving the issue short shrift during the campaign.
The president, in an interview for TIME's Person of the Year award, said the economy, immigration, climate change and energy would be at the top of his agenda for the next four years.
The interview took place before the fatal shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, an incident that had pushed gun control to a top spot on Obama's agenda.
Obama said his daughters have influenced his thinking about the need to tackle climate change.
December 20, 2011, from Greenwire
In a sign that the Obama administration is willing to clear the regulatory decks for oil drilling in Alaska's remote Arctic waters, the Interior Department on Friday gave a conditional green light allowing Royal Dutch Shell PLC to explore for oil this summer in Alaska's Chukchi Sea.
More than 20 years after sinking its first exploratory well in the Chukchi, only to later abandon the project, Shell is seeking to reopen drilling in the nation's northern-most federal waters. The campaign has already had a colossal price tag. So far, Shell officials say they have sunk $4 billion in the project, including $350 million to build two of their own ice-breaking ships.
If exploration is successful, it will take 10-12 years before Shell can begin producing oil. During that time, the company would have to build a new ice-resistant drilling facility, install 100 miles of subsea pipeline from the pumping rig to the tiny community of Wainwright and construct a 500-mile pipeline from the shoreline to the beginning of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in Prudhoe Bay.
December 20, 2011, from Associated Press
Thousands of people besieged a government office in a southern Chinese town Tuesday and blocked a highway to demand a halt to a planned coal-fired power plant because of concerns about pollution, protesters said.
Riot police used tear gas in an attempt to disperse the protesters at the highway in the town of Haimen in Guangdong province, and the demonstrators hurled rocks, water bottles and bricks in return...
December 20, 2009, from China Daily
No matter what the outcome of the UN climate change conference is, China will remain committed to achieving and even exceeding the emission reduction targets it has said for itself, Premier Wen Jiabao said on Friday.
"We will honour our word with real action," Wen told 119 heads of state and government attending the UN climate change conference, or COP15.
Before the conference began, China announced that it would reduce its carbon intensity emission per unit of GDP ... by 40 and 45 percent by 2020, taking 2005 as the base year...
Stressing that this is a voluntary move taken by China, Wen said: "We have not attached any condition to the target, nor have we linked it to the target of any other country."
December 20, 2009, from New Scientist
A physicist whose work is often highlighted by climate-change sceptics is refusing to provide the software he used to other climate researchers attempting to replicate his results.
Nicola Scafetta, a physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has published a series of papers over the past few years that suggest the sun played a much bigger role in warming over the 20th century than is generally accepted. In particular, one 2006 paper he co-authored concluded that: "The sun might have contributed approximately 50 per cent of the observed global warming since 1900" (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2006GL027142).
This paper has been widely cited by those seeking to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the cause of climate change, including US senator James Inhofe. Scafetta has also contributed to a book that claimed that "carbon dioxide probably is not the driving factor behind climate change".
December 20, 2009, from Associated Press
Around the world, countries and capitalism are already working to curb global warming on their own, with or without a global treaty.... But the impact of such piecemeal, voluntary efforts is small. Experts say it will never be enough without the kind of strong global agreement that eluded negotiators at the U.N. summit this past week in Copenhagen... Dozens of countries - including the top two carbon polluters, China and the United States - came to the climate talks with proposals to ratchet down pollution levels.
But analysis by the United Nations and outside management systems experts show that those voluntary reductions will not keep temperatures from increasing by more than 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with now.
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
December 20, 2012, from E&E Publishing
For Julia Olson, it all started with "An Inconvenient Truth."
The then-thirtysomething environmental lawyer watched Al Gore's climate change documentary while eight months pregnant with her second child.
By her own admission, she "cried through the whole film" and spent several sleepless nights plotting a way to increase public awareness of climate change. Her initial idea was to plan public marches on Washington, D.C., but she ending up launching a national legal campaign aimed at forcing government action on climate change.
Enlisting children as plaintiffs, she advanced the novel legal theory that the atmosphere is a "public trust" under common law and that the states and federal government have a duty to preserve it.
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