Friday, Nov 28th
Last update08:52:58 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
How clean is your air? Most U.S. cities with the dirtiest air are getting cleaner but half of Americans still live in in areas where it's often difficult to breathe, the American Lung Association reports today.
Los Angeles remains the smoggiest metro area, although it's improved significantly in the last decade, and Bakersfield, Calif., has the worst particle pollution such as soot and ash, both on a daily and annual level, according to the ALA's 12th annual "State of the Air" report.
How climate science became the target of "the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known."
It's difficult to imagine how a guy who spends most of his time looking at endless columns of temperature records became a "fucking terrorist," "killer," or "one-world-government socialist." It's even harder when you meet Michael Mann, a balding 45-year-old climate scientist who speaks haltingly and has a habit of nervously clearing his throat. And when you realize that the reason for all the hostility is a 12-year-old chart, it seems more than a little surreal.
The Antarctic ozone hole is about one-third to blame for Australia's recent series of droughts, scientists say. Writing in the journal Science, they conclude that the hole has shifted wind and rainfall patterns right across the Southern Hemisphere, even the tropics.
Their climate models suggest the effect has been notably strong over Australia. Many parts of the country have seen drought in recent years, with cities forced to invest in technologies such as desalination, and farms closing.
Earth Day activists rallied on Main Street to protest against the practice of fracking in natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania, though others were completely opposed to any drilling in Marcellus Shale regions of the state.
Late Thursday afternoon, about three dozen Green Party of Pennsylvania members held up signs to ban fracking and protect water and other natural resources as they stood outside the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) office building and around the corner of Main and Swede streets.
Near my home in Utah, Rio Tinto's massive Bingham Canyon Mine is one of the biggest man-made excavations on Earth and has rendered a large area of local groundwater too polluted for human consumption.
Now, the Rio Tinto and Anglo American companies want to put a mine even bigger than Bingham at the headwaters of our planet's greatest wild salmon river systems in Bristol Bay, Alaska. It's an environmental tragedy waiting to happen.
Their Pebble Mine would be gouged out of an American paradise -- filled with salmon, bears, moose, caribou, wolves and whales -- that has sustained Native communities for thousands of years.
"The reactors at Fukushima are the largest in the world, and six of them are in total meltdown. They have been melting down since thirty-minutes after the Tsunami' because the cooling systems went off when the earthquake happened and 90 minutes after the cooling stopped-the reactors went into meltdown. This is all a cover-up, this is a false-flag, this is a poisoning of the oceans the atmosphere and the biosphere. No one can escape."
Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats.
The chemicals were used by companies during a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives into rock formations deep underground. The process, which is being used to tap into large reserves of natural gas around the country, opens fissures in the rock to stimulate the release of oil and gas.
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