They have picked up the pace recently — just last week they voted to stop the EPAs efforts to limit mercury and other hazardous pollutants from cement plants, boilers and incinerators — and it appears their campaign will continue for the foreseeable future.Using the economy as cover, and repeating unfounded claims that “regulations…
Category: Environment
8,000 Foot high dust storm roils through Texas South Plains
Dust kicked up by westerly breezes ahead of a strong cold front restricted visibility in Lubbock to about 5 miles all afternoon, said National Weather Service Lubbock meteorologist Matt Ziebell. That was nothing compared to the 8,000-foot-high rolling dust cloud that moved through the city just before 6 p.m., dropping visibility to between zero and…
Record Rains Don’t Ease Texas Drought, State Braces for Multi-Year Dust Bowl
Texas finally received rain over the first weekend in October. But as the Drought Monitor shows, while the portion of the state under exceptional drought has dropped a little, 99% of the state is still under severe drought, just as it was last week. The L.A. Times reported: Texas has finally received…
Flood-Gate: Perry Officials Try to Hide Sea Level Rise from Texans with “Clear-Cut Unadulterated Censorship”
In one of the most flagrant recent instances of scientific censorship, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) refused to publish a report chapter unless all mention of climate change and its impact on sea level rise were eliminated. The author — Rice University oceanographer John Anderson, a leading expert on sea level…
Masters on “Unprecedented” Arctic Ozone Hole: Inaction Risks “Future Nasty Climate Change Surprises Far More Serious”
An unprecedented ozone hole opened in the Arctic during 2011, researchers reported this week in the journal Nature. Holes in the Antarctic ozone layer have opened up each spring since the early 1980s, but the Arctic had only shown modest springtime ozone losses in the 5% – 30% range over the past twenty…
Eight Must-Have Charts Summarize the Evidence for a “Human Fingerprint” on Recent Climate Change
Last year, physicist John Cook, who runs the must-read website Skeptical Science, published “The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism.” It’s a good introduction to global warming science and skepticism. He sent me the 8 figures of the “human fingerprints on climate change,” which I repost below. The clever deniers these days don’t…
Organized Climate Change Denial “Played a Crucial Role in Blocking Domestic Legislation,” Top Scholars Conclude
Some try to downplay the central role of the denial machine in U.S. politics, but the fact is that what the deniers have accomplished in this country is unique in the world, going far beyond the spread of disinformation. They have allowed fossil fuel interests to “capture” almost an entire political party —…
Climate Change Could Make Chocolate A Luxury Item, Report Finds
The worlds $9 billion chocolate industry gets almost half of its cocoa from West African farmers in Ghana and Cote dIvoire Ivory Coast, reports Thinkprogress.org.According to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, if Ghana and the Ivory Coast experience a 2.3 Celsius degree jump in temperature by 2050, the climate wont be suitably cool enough…
NASA: It Rained So Hard the Oceans Fell
Sea levels have been rising steadily for over a century as the ever warmer ocean water expands and the world’s remaining glaciers and ice sheets melt. In fact sea levels are rising twice as fast now as they were a few decades ago. As the NASA chart above shows there have been some…
NYT: Forests dying off as worlds climate warms
From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to…
NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable.”
Climatologist Slams Media for “Silent Summer”: Poor Coverage of Link Between Extreme Weather and Human-Caused Climate Change The nation’s top climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has a new paper out — and he has been speaking out. At 350.org’s Moving Planet event in New York on Saturday, he said: “Climate change — human-made global…