Now that Mitt Romney’s campaign has officially declared the candidate’s desire to kill tax credits for wind while maintaining tax credits for the mature oil and gas industries, Midwestern Republicans are not happy. Iowa Republican Representative Tom Latham said Romney’s decision “shows a lack of full understanding of how important the wind energy tax credit…
Category: Environment
Study: Decline In Arctic Sea Ice Up To 95% Man-Made
Arctic ice loss has many harsh negative consequences for humanity and the local biodiversity. First, it eliminates a primary habitat for polar bears and other species. “The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover,” concludes the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from…
Greenland Ice Melt, Measured By NASA Satellites, Reaches Unprecedented Level
Unprecedented melting of Greenland’s ice sheet this month has stunned NASA scientists and has highlighted broader concerns that the region is losing a remarkable amount of ice overall. According to a NASA press release, about half of Greenland’s surface ice sheet naturally melts during an average summer. But the data from three independent satellites this…
U.S. Sees Hottest 12 Months And Hottest Half Year On Record: NOAA Calls Record Heat A One-In-1.6-Million Event
Like a baseball player on steroids, our atmosphere has been “juiced” with human emissions of greenhouse gases, which means we are going to be breaking heat records at an “unnatural” pace for a long, long time. Climatologist Richard Alley offers a different analogy in a column today: Humans have made some extreme weather events more…
Florida accused of concealing worst tuberculosis outbreak in 20 years
According to the Post, the coverup began as early as last February, “when Duval County Health Department officials felt so overwhelmed by the sudden spike in tuberculosis that they asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to become involved. Believing the outbreak affected only their underclass, the health officials made a conscious decision…
STUDY: Media Avoid Climate Context In Wildfire Coverage
While numerous factors determine the frequency, severity and cost of wildfires, scientific research indicates that human-induced climate change increases fire risks in parts of the Western U.S. by promoting warmer and drier conditions. Seven of nine fire experts contacted by Media Matters agreed journalists should explain the relationship between climate change and wildfires. But an…
Genetically modified grass blamed for mass cattle deaths in Texas
A form of genetically modified grass is being cited as the likely culprit in the sudden death of a herd of cattle in Central Texas, according to CBS News. Preliminary tests revealed that the grass, an altered form of Bermuda grass known as Tifton 85, had mysteriously begun producing cyanide gas. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are…
Climate models ignored by media (except for their critics)
The group also examined media sources favored by “high-political-knowledge audiences”. These included Time Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Newsweek, NPR, The Nation, The National Review, and The Rush Limbaugh Show. In 2007, contrarian viewpoints expressed in The Nation, The National Review, and The Rush Limbaugh Show accounted for one third of the stories mentioning…
The end of fish, in one chart
Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and…
Record-setting 2012 warmth largely confined to North America, western Europe
In March, high temperatures over two-thirds of the continental US set numerous records and made it the nations warmest March on record. April has been no slouch either, as high temperature records have continued to fall. But at the time of our last report, the services that track global temperatures hadnt analyzed the global extent…
Nuclear Experts Are Calling Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb
The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core’s reinforced containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean — just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored — but it’s also open to the elements…
Public Opinion Snapshot: The Death of Public Support for Global Warming Action Is Greatly Exaggerated
President Barack Obama recently observed that tackling climate change remains vitally important despite difficulties moving legislation forward. Conservatives, of course, are trying their utmost to remove the issue permanently from political discussion, claiming that the public is tired of the debate and no longer has an appetite for combating global warming. But a just-released poll…
Why you should care that 70% of antibiotics go into animal feed
This might not seem like a huge deal to you. But it is. And it gets to one of my favorite scary statistics: 70 percent of the antibiotics used in this country — 70 percent! — go into livestock production. And that’s before you even get to the antibiotics that are used on animals who…
It wasn’t your imagination: US experienced warmest March ever
As record temperatures swept through the Midwest and trees bloomed early across the Northeast, lots of talk focused on what an unusually warm start spring was having. The folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have now crunched the numbers, and found that it wasn’t just unusually warm—March was bizarrely hot. With 15,000 record…
Researchers recreate bee collapse with pesticide-laced corn syrup
Scientists with the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) have re-created the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder in several honeybee hives simply by giving them small doses of a popular pesticide, imidacloprid. Bee populations have been dying mysteriously throughout North America and Europe since 2006, but the cause behind the decline, known as Colony Collapse Disorder,…
March Heat Records Crush Cold Records by Over 35 To 1, Scientists Say Global Warming Loaded The Dice
The final data is in for the unprecedented March heat wave that was “unmatched in recorded history” for the U.S. and Canada. New heat records swamped cold records by the stunning ratio of 35.3 to 1. This ratio is almost off the charts, even with the brutally warm August we had, as this chart from Capital…
Arguing That Republicans Aren’t Science Deniers, S.E. Cupp Says Climate Change Is ‘Phony Studies’ | ThinkProgress
Arguing that Republicans don’t reflexively deny scientific facts, conservative MSNBC commentator S.E. Cupp repeated Climategate smears against climate science. Cupp was attacking the premise of author and Science Progress contributor Chris Mooney’s new book, The Republican Brain, which looks at how conservative propaganda and ideological tendencies have led to increasing distrust in science among the…
We Need to Transition Our Energy Infrastructure
Last year threw into stark relief America’s interlinked economic, energy security, and climate crises. On the economic front Americans called out those lawmakers who work relentlessly to build an economy that works for the wealthy few rather than for all of us, but faced determined resistance from conservatives bent on preserving the status quo. At…
It’s Not Your Imagination: Republicans Really Don’t Like Science | Mother Jones
The reason for this, according to Mooney and others, is that the “political neutrality of science began to unravel in the 1970s with the emergence of the new right”—a growing body of conservatives who were distrustful of science and the intellectual establishment, who were often religious and concerned about defending “traditional values” in the face…
Global Warming Denialism ‘Just Foolishness,’ Scientist Peter Raven Says
“There is virtually unanimous consensus among the world’s scientists who work in the area that human beings are the major reason that this is so the world’s average temperature rising,” writes Raven from London. “Because, just as first noted by the Swedish chemist Arrhenius in 1895, when you add more carbon dioxide or other co-called…