Guardian: “Climate change has already left its mark “on all continents and across the oceans“, damaging food crops, spreading disease, and melting glaciers, according to the leaked text of a blockbuster UN climate science report due out on Monday. Government officials and scientists are gathered in Yokohama this week to wrangle over every line of a summary of the report before… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Climate Change
On Ravaged Tar Sands Lands, Big Challenges for Reclamation
Ed Struzik: “The challenges of restoring a landscape uprooted by the destructive practice of oil sands mining — which involves strip mining the earth to depths of up to 250 feet — are enormous. Oil sands mining occurs primarily in complex wetland ecosystems of boreal swamps, bogs, and peatland fens that were formed over thousands of… Continue Reading
Scout – Open Source tool to get alerts on issues you care about
“Scout is a free service that provides daily insight to how our laws and regulations are shaped in Washington, DC and our state capitols. These days, you can receive electronic alerts to know when a company is in the news, when a TV show is scheduled to air or when a sports team wins. Now, you… Continue Reading
CRS – Cars, Trucks, and Climate
Cars, Trucks, and Climate: EPA Regulation of Greenhouse Gases from Mobile Sources. James E. McCarthy, Specialist in Environmental Policy; Brent D. Yacobucci, Section Research Manager. March 13, 2014. “By issuing endangerment findings similar to the one it issued for motor vehicles, EPA could move forward to control GHG emissions from other categories of mobile sources and/or their fuels. On the other hand,… Continue Reading
Climate Change Briefer – What We Know
“The overwhelming evidence of human-caused climate change documents both current impacts with significant costs and extraordinary future risks to society and natural systems. The scientific community has convened conferences, published reports, spoken out at forums and proclaimed, through statements by virtually every national scientific academy and relevant major scientific organization — including the American Association… Continue Reading
White House Launches Climate Data Initiative
News release: “…we are launching the Climate Data Initiative, an ambitious new effort bringing together extensive open government data and design competitions with commitments from the private and philanthropic sectors to develop data-driven planning and resilience tools for local communities. This effort will help give communities across America the information and tools they need to… Continue Reading
The Association of Ambient Air Pollution and Physical Inactivity in the United States
Roberts JD, Voss JD, Knight B (2014) The Association of Ambient Air Pollution and Physical Inactivity in the United States. PLoS ONE 9(3): e90143. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0090143 “In this cross-sectional study, we assessed leisure-time physical inactivity using individual self-reported survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. These data… Continue Reading
Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources
“The waste of a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year is not only causing major economic losses but also wreaking significant harm on the natural resources that humanity relies upon to feed itself, says a new FAO [Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations] report. Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources is the… Continue Reading
New Government Report Warns of ‘Cascading System Failures’ Caused By Climate Change
Kate Sheppard: “From roads and bridges to power plants and gas pipelines, American infrastructure is vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according to a pair of government reports released Thursday. The reports are technical documents supporting the National Climate Assessment, a major review compiled by 13 government agencies that the U.S. Global Change Research Program is expected… Continue Reading
Loss of cultural world heritage and currently inhabited places to sea-level rise
“The world population is concentrated near the coasts, as are a large number of Cultural World Heritage sites, defined by the UNESCO. Using spatially explicit sea-level estimates for the next 2000 years and high-resolution topography data, we compute which current cultural heritage sites will be affected by sea-level rise at different levels of sustained future warming.… Continue Reading
Climate Change: Evidence and Causes
“Climate Change: Evidence and Causes is a jointly produced publication of The US National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Society. Written by a UK-US team of leading climate scientists and reviewed by climate scientists and others, the publication is intended as a brief, readable reference document for decision makers, policy makers, educators, and other individuals… Continue Reading
New GAO Reports – Medicare, National Defense, Overseas Threats, Climate Change
MEDICARE: Contractors and Private Plans Play a Major Role in Administering Benefits, GAO-14-417T: Published: Mar 4, 2014. Publicly Released: Mar 4, 2014. NATIONAL DEFENSE: The Air Force’s Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Competitive Procurement, GAO-14-377R: Published: Mar 4, 2014. Publicly Released: Mar 4, 2014. COUNTERING OVERSEAS THREATS: DOD and State Need to Address Gaps in Monitoring of Security Equipment… Continue Reading
