GlobalWarmingisReal contributor Anders Hellum-Alexander wraps-up and comments on the climate and environmental news headlines for the past week:
- The US government is placing a focus on the threats of climate change to national security. If the rate and severity of natural disasters increases then a great strain will be placed on the military resources of the US. Americans don’t sit by and watch people suffer from natural disasters, we give our money to non-profits to help and allow our government to send help via the military as well. With both an unstable climate and economy the US has many challenges ahead.
- A new threshold imminent for the Keeling Curve. The latest measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentrations from observations on Mauna Loa in Hawaii last week stand at 399.7 parts-per-million (ppm), poised to cross the 400 ppm threshold for the first time in human history.
- I feel that if you can just explain an idea clearly to someone and it holds logic and fact then they will understand, but politicized topics blind us to reality. A new study actually shows that if Republicans truly listen to the case behind anthropocentric climate change then they become believers.
- It turns out that plants are good for the environment and help combat global warming (in more ways than one), it’s like everything is connected – *Sarcasm.
- Tesla is growing from a small company producing a specialized product to a regular car manufacturer. The rise of Tesla is really good for the electric vehicle industry , Tesla brings with it a lot of good publicity.
- Fracking for natural gas is an environmentally risky business, and besides all the debate over carbon emissions fracking also uses a lot of water. While fracking ramps up, climate change is making fresh clean water less abundant in some areas. We should not be using a dwindling resource to extract a dirty fuel, these times demand a smarter approach to energy.
- Putting ethanol in gasoline is a strategy used to reduce the environmental damage of burning oil, the US government wants to get the mix of ethanol and oil to 30-70.
- The BP Gulf oil spill is an ongoing development, we have yet to see the full impact of spilling so much oil into a body of water. Killifish are a common food source for many sea creatures, and after being covered in oil for so long they are not doing well as a species.
- When we don’t regulate pipelines sufficiently companies don’t make routine upgrades on their equipment. Pipelines are notoriously bad and under-audited by the government. If pipeline companies started moving fossil fuels safely around the country then the price of oil would go up in America.
- Imagine using solar technology to make syngas (a low carbon natural gas product)? Weird idea to make a fossil fuel via solar, but every honest effort helps the cause I guess.
- You’d think a environmental non-profit organization would not invest in dirty energy companies, but they do, and it makes no sense. To solve this problem a movement has been created to encourage these organizations to divest they money and place their wallet where their rhetoric is.
- Nicaragua’s Cloud Forest is being threatened by logging. We use up our ecological endowment too fast; imagine a world with only a few reserves where natural beauty can be witnessed?
