A prominent climate change skeptic told Congress on Monday he no longer doubts that global warming is real and caused by humans, and joined other scientists in urging action to stop it. Physicist Richard Muller, director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, whose two-year research was funded in part by a foundation formed by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, said he could find no bias in other studies. “We confirm that over the...
It takes a long time to cross the Pacific Ocean if you’re a couch, a fridge, or a piece of a house. Roughly 20 tons of debris sucked into the ocean during Japan’s massive tsunami is due to hit U.S. shores sometime in 2014, acording to University of Hawaii scientists. Nikolai Maximenko, a senior researcher at the International Pacific Research Center in Hawaii, developed a model of how the tsunami debris is likely to...
“We are following the long-term effects of fire in the Yellowstone area and encountering some lessons and surprises that challenge the way we think about fire in the area,” said Erica A. H. Smithwick, assistant professor of geography and ecology, Penn State, and principle investigator on the project. “Yellowstone National Park is the first national park in the world and is now a wonderful natural laboratory for studying natural processes.” The Greater Yellowstone...
by: Rosanne Skirble via commondreams.org Scientists say storms likely to become more frequent and intense The powerful tornadoes and other extreme weather events that have cut swaths of destruction across the United States over the past month have prompted many to wonder if they are part of a new trend. Are these violent storms the result of climate change, or can they be explained as normal weather variations? This has been a record year...
An ancient living laboratory of our planet’s past in Antarctica may have provided a preview of what we can expect to find deep below the barren surface of Mars and in the ice-shrouded seas of Jupiter’s Europa. Two of the world’s leading experts on life at the lower temperature extremes, Buford Price of the University of California, Berkeley and Todd Sowers of Penn State observed that microbes colonizing life appear to have two levels...
The huge tsunami triggered by the 9.0 Tohoku Earthquake destroyed coastal towns near Sendai in Japan, washing such things as houses and cars into the ocean. Projections of where this debris might head have been made by Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Maximenko has developed a model based on the behavior of drifting buoys deployed over years in the ocean for scientific purposes....
The 4.7 magnitude temblors felt last Sunday in Arkansas, part of a recent “swarm” of earthquakes in the area, could be just a prelude to something much more devastating. The threat would be lessened if oil and gas companies are barred from injecting post-fracking wastewater into the earth. Arkansas once had an earthquake so big it caused the Mississippi river to run backwards. There are several faults in Arkansas including one not far from...
Russian scientists used kerosene to keep a drilled hole open in the remote Antarctic Lake Vostok writes Eric Niiler for Discovery News. The big mystery of Lake Vostok and whether it holds ancient microbial life will have to wait for another Antarctic winter to pass. A team of Russian researchers left their remote drilling site this week with less than 50 feet to go to break into the surface of a vast underground lake...
Yellowstone National Park’s caldera, which covers a 25- by 37-mile (40- by 60-kilometer) swath of Wyoming, is an ancient crater formed after the last big blast, some 640,000 years ago. The simmering volcano has produced major eruptions—each a thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens’s 1980 eruption—three times in the past 2.1 million years. The supervolcano has recently caused miles of ground to rise dramatically, scientists report beginning in 2004, which saw the...
Big Oil’s Greed Costs American Jobs
Taylor Oil’s Seven Year long Gulf Oil Spill Still Leaking
Is Your Wallet Causing Back Pain
Sea Shepherds Find Japanese Harpoon Ship Yushin Maru 3
Deadly Toxins From Monsanto’s Genetically Modified Plants Found in Women and Fetuses