Climate Climate & Energy

Study predicts Australia's Aborigines to suffer most from climate change

SYDNEY — Australia’s outback Aborigines will be among the worst affected by climate change as soaring temperatures likely cause more disease and spur distress about the changing landscape, a new report shows. The expert report, published in the latest edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, argues that the country’s remote indigenous communities are the […]

Experts plead to save tropical forests in peril

U.S. experts Monday pleaded for boosted efforts to protect tropical forests, which are key to ensuring biodiversity and fighting climate change but are increasingly threatened by deforestation. “I am gravely concerned about what is happening with tropical forests,” William Laurance, a researcher with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama told AFP. “There is a […]

Massive Greenland meltdown? Not so fast, say scientists

The recent acceleration of glacier melt-off in Greenland, which some scientists fear could dramatically raise sea levels, may only be a temporary phenomenon, according to a study published Sunday. Researchers in Britain and the United States devised computer models to test three scenarios that could account for rapid — by the standards applied to glaciers […]

U.N. says ignore the cold, warming is still a problem

GENEVA — Icy conditions that have claimed dozens of lives across Europe since November are partly due to La Nina, an upsurge of cooler water to the Pacific Ocean surface, the UN’s weather agency said Friday. “The cold snap currently being experienced can be partly attributed to the La Nina phenomenon, which is a cooling […]

Tennessee coal ash spill contains high levels of toxic heavy metals

According to some just-released test results, the coal ash at the Harriman sludge spill contains high levels of toxic heavy metals, some up to 300 times the legal limit:

According to the tests, arsenic levels from the Kingston power plant intake canal tested at close to 300 times the allowable amounts in drinking water, while a sample from two miles downstream still revealed arsenic at approximately 30 times the allowed limits. Lead was present at between twice to 21 times the legal drinking water limits, and thallium levels tested at three to four times the allowable amounts.

All water samples were found to contain elevated levels of arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and thallium. The samples were taken from the immediate area of the coal waste spill, in front of the Kingston Fossil plant intake canal just downstream from the spill site, and at a power line crossing two miles downstream from the spill.

This comes via the Appalachian Voices blog, a great source of breaking info and pictures from the spill. Full release beneath the fold:

Images of oil addiction in Canada’s tar sands

Pop quiz: After Saudi Arabia, which country has the most proven oil reserves? Wrong. Not only wrong, but wrong part of the world. Unless you are among the .00001 percent who guessed Canada — in which case, congratulations! Canada has 179 billion barrels of proven “oil” reserves. I use quotes because it is not normal […]

CO2 — but not the sun — ‘is significantly correlated’ with temperature since 1850

The lead author of a new study ($ub. req’d) says Inhofe’s office mischaracterized her work with its blaring headline, “Study: Half of warming due to Sun!” Far from supporting Inhofe’s denialist fantasies, the research, led by Anja Eichler, senior scientist at the Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, is actually one more piece of observation-driven analysis that […]

Gore embraces 350 ppm target at Poznan

[This post is from Bill McKibben in Poland. For background on the science behind the 350 target and the challenge it poses see here and here.] Al Gore gave the international climate talks in Poznan a new set of marching orders this afternoon, declaring that old targets for fighting global warming had been made obsolete […]

A carbon tax has efficient sticks, but what about carrots?

I’m finding the carbon tax vs. cap-and-trade debate unsatisfying, for several reasons. Here I’ll try to get at just one of them. In broad terms, you want greenhouse gas policy to do two things (well, more than two, but let’s focus): penalize the emission of GHGs and reward the prevention of GHG emissions. Sticks and […]

Inhofe recycles long-debunked denier talking points

Who will the media believe this time: The Senate’s leading climate denier, James Inhofe (R-Okla.), or their own lying eyes? Deniers like Inhofe have a serious media problem — an ever growing number of studies, real-world observations, and credible scientific bodies all point to human-caused emissions as the increasingly dominant cause of planetary warming and […]