"'An immediate and growing threat.' That’s how California’s lead environmental agency — and the Governor’s office — describe climate change in the latest in a series of periodic reports on the subject."
"WASHINGTON — As part of the climate change agenda he unveiled this year, President Obama made a commitment to significantly reduce the federal government’s dependence on fossil fuels. The government, he said in a speech in June at Georgetown University, 'must lead by example.' But just two miles from the White House stands the Capitol Power Plant, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the nation’s capital and a concrete example of the government’s inability to green its own turf."
"A year ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service was poised to use a scientifically flawed range map for the American burying beetle during a preliminary assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline's effect on the endangered insect."
"The beepocalypse is on the cover of TIME, but it looks like managed honeybees will still pull through. Wild bees—and wild species in general—won't be so lucky in a human-dominated planet."
"A viable, effective vaccine against malaria has long eluded scientists. Results from a preliminary study have ignited hope that a new type of vaccine could change that. The experimental vaccine offered strong protection against malaria when given at high doses, scientists Thursday in the journal Science."
The study was extremely small and short-term. And the candidate vaccine still has a long way to go before it could be used in the developing world.
"In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised to 535,000 its estimate of the number of American children with potentially dangerous levels of lead in their blood."
"The weather is one of those topics that is fairly easy for people to agree on. Climate, however, is something else. Most of the scientists who study the Earth say our climate is changing and humans are part of what's making that happen. But to a lot of nonscientists it's still murky. This week, two of the nation's most venerable scientific institutions tried to explain it better."
"MELBOURNE, Fla. — The first hint that something was amiss here, in the shallow lagoons and brackish streams that buffer inland Florida from the Atlantic’s salt water, came last summer in the Banana River, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Three manatees — the languid, plant-munching, over-upholstered mammals known as sea cows — died suddenly and inexplicably, one after another, in a spot where deaths were rare."
Research biologists are studying the elusive Cascades frog, which lives in alpine meltwater ponds in Washington's Olympic Mountains, to understand how warming climate might affect the ecosystems they depend on.
"California billionaire Thomas Steyer is taking his fight against climate change to Virginia, helping to buy TV ads criticizing Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli."
