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Archive for July 19th, 2012
‘Climate change’ absent from talk about drought
Posted by Iowa City Press Citizen: None Given on July 19th, 2012
Iowa City Press Citizen: The 800-pound gorilla in the Mount Pleasant High School Gymnasium Tuesday was the subject of climate change.
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad called for a public discussion on drought conditions in Iowa, and all of the governmental players were there:
• U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
• Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.
• Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
• And the Farm Services Administration.
The...
Posted in 
United States: Climate change and angry ‘earth gods’
Posted by Kitsap Sun: Pam Dzama on July 19th, 2012
Kitsap Sun: October 1987 found parts of Western Washington in a continued drought condition. We lived in Edmonds at the time and any outdoor grass or garden watering was very limited. Although we managed to save the vegetable garden, the flowers and grass suffered. Washington and drought are two words normally not included in the same sentence.
The weather was completely different in 1993, which proved to be cooler and rainy much of the time. We had a special trip planned to Fort Riley, Kansas, in September...
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
Posted by Rolling Stone: Bill McKibben on July 19th, 2012
Rolling Stone: If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably...
Drought brings misery to Arkansas River basin
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on July 19th, 2012
National Public Radio: Drought has set in early and hard across the Midwest, parching the Arkansas River basin. The river trickling out of the mountains is dry before it reaches some of the major agricultural uses downstream. And the drought is torching crops, sapping tourism and threatening supplies of drinking water.
High in the Rocky Mountains, about 10 miles north of Leadville, Colo., the Arkansas River starts as a trickle running off some of the tallest peaks in the continental United States.
In a normal year,...
Mapping the US drought
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on July 19th, 2012
National Public Radio: Texas experienced its worst drought on record last year. Now that the state is seeing some relief, drought conditions have consumed more than half the United States. Use this interactive map and chart to see how conditions have changed over time.
Review of coal export proposals needed, senator says
Posted by Oregonian: Scott Learn on July 19th, 2012
Oregonian: Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, following in the footsteps of Gov. John Kitzhaber, called today for a sweeping federal review of coal exports from the Northwest.
Merkley's letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Land Management requested an expedited "programmatic environmental impact statement."
The government should look at the effects of large-scale exports from all the Northwest coal export projects in the hopper, and evaluate mining, local impacts such as train and barge...
Drought to drive up cost of dairy
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on July 19th, 2012
USA Today: The heat and drought ravaging much of the nation will soon hit America at the supermarket counter: Cheese and milk prices will rise first and corn and meat are probably not far behind.
Price hikes in basic food staples are causing huge concern to milk producers and others who rely on dairy to sustain an important part of the national farming economy.
The rises foreshadow price hikes in coming months for other food staples, such as meat, says Bruce Jones, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison....
In North Dakota, the gritty side of an oil boom
Posted by Washington Post: Steven Mufson on July 19th, 2012
Washington Post: Donny Nelson is the epitome of old-time North Dakota. A lean, sharp-featured man sporting a thick goatee, jeans and dirty boots, Nelson is the grandson of homesteaders. Over the past century his family has collected 8,000 acres of prime cattle grazing acreage and cropland. But now Nelson has some unwanted company: Oil prospectors. This remote corner of North Dakota is the site of the biggest U.S. oil rush in decades. It is pumping new supplies into oil markets and swelling state coffers; advocates...
Drought spreads, boosts corn to record price
Posted by Reuters: Sam Nelson on July 19th, 2012
Reuters: The worst drought in a half century will continue to plague most of the U.S. Midwest crop region for at least the next 10 days, with only occasional showers providing some relief mainly in the east, an agricultural meteorologist said on Thursday.
America's top two corn and soybean producing states, Iowa and Illinois, are now in the center of the drought as the dryness spreads to the northwest to leech what little moisture remains in already parched soils.
"It looks a little wetter today for...
Petermann glacier in Greenland: Is it serious?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on July 19th, 2012
BBC: The increasingly detailed and immediate pictures that we get of vast movements of ice at the Earth's poles make for a dramatic sight.
But whether that drama is cause for worry is an open question.
Floating "tongues" of ice, like the one that has broken off the Petermann glacier reported on Thursday, extend beyond the glaciers, and are constantly fed by ice pouring off the ice sheet.
Eventually parts of these tongues break off under the forces surrounding them and become free-floating icebergs....