Climate Climate & Energy

Paid in the shade

You’ve got to give credit to Felicity Barringer for this sentence: If he succeeds, the state that legalized medical marijuana may soon do the same for shade.

Uranium mine near Grand Canyon blocked

A judge has blocked a British mining company’s plan to build an exploratory uranium mine near the Grand Canyon. U.S. District Judge Mary Murguia agreed with litigious environmental groups that considering the location of the proposed mine and the risks associated with uranium mining, VANE Minerals Group should be required to conduct further environmental reviews […]

Hansen paper released; WaPo fails to link to Grist

Several posts on this site have mentioned a recent paper from James Hansen et al. — Target CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? (PDF) — which argues that the official E.U. target of 550 ppm global atmospheric CO2 is far too high, and that anything over 350 ppm risks putting human beings in a world radically […]

World Health Organization says climate change bad for world health

Officials at the World Health Organization used the occasion of World Health Day today to stress climate change’s negative impacts on human health, warning that warming temperatures are already affecting the spread of disease. Increased temperatures have slowly expanded the range of malaria-carrying mosquitoes into new areas, including South Korea and the highlands of Papua […]

Notable quotable

“We’ll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.” — CNN founder Ted Turner, on what will happen if global warming is not quickly addressed (video under […]

Your used fry grease or your life

And so it's come to this -- Mad Max is after used fry grease.

Research finds (once again) that climate change is not caused by cosmic rays

One more denier talking point has been debunked by scientists using actual observations. You can read the Science News article here, which explains, "New research has dealt a blow to the skeptics who argue that climate change is all due to cosmic rays rather than to man-made greenhouse gases."

You can read the original article, just published by the Institute of Physics' Environmental Research Letters, "Testing the proposed causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover," online here. The major finding:

[N]o evidence could be found of changes in the cloud cover from known changes in the cosmic ray ionization rate.

Here is the full abstract:

Corn hits a new record — $6 a bushel

At the end of February, I blogged on a Fortune article that had the subhead "The ethanol boom is running out of gas as corn prices spike." That article noted:

Spurred by an ethanol plant construction binge, corn prices have gone stratospheric, soaring from below $2 a bushel in 2006 to over $5.25 a bushel today. As a result, it's become difficult for ethanol plants to make a healthy profit, even with oil at $100 a barrel.

Just six weeks later, we have an AP article with the subhead "Corn Prices Jump to Record $6 a Bushel, Driving Up Costs for Food, Alternative Energy."

And it gets better worse:

Mississippi town not enthusiastic about storing strategic petroleum

Richton, Miss., is the lucky town picked as the fifth storage site for the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. To create space to store strategic petroleum, the Department of Energy will drain 50 million gallons of water a day for five years from the Pascagoula River to dissolve underground salt caverns, pumping the resulting brine through […]

Wow

This is the kind of article where you’d really like to be able to see the full text!