"Insurance commissioners in California, New York and Washington State will require that companies disclose how they intend to respond to the risks their businesses and customers face from increasingly severe storms and wildfires, rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change, California’s commissioner said Wednesday."
"Half the authors of a controversial Wall Street Journal opinion piece denying the Earth's warming trend have ties to the oil and gas industry, a DailyClimate.org investigation finds."
NOAA, the USFWS, and the NY State Dept. of Environmental Conservation (representing all state and wildlife agencies) released on Jan. 19, 2012, a draft of the first national strategy for responding to climate change effects on plants, fish and wildlife. The public comment period is open until March 5, 2012, and public meetings and a webinar will occur until Feb. 22, 2012.
Finally, after numerous delays amid allegations of political interference by people who don't want to see documented evidence of climate shifts, the wait is over. The new detailed interactive map is based on data from 1976-2005, and is the first official revision since the 1990 update.
The American Horticultural Society and the National Arbor Day Foundation offer generalized hardiness maps as a starting point, until the US Department of Agriculture gets around to unveiling its own update.
One day, EPA may propose rules for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and petroleum refineries. But the process continues to drag out, with the consent of the state and local governments and environmental advocacy groups that have been litigating for about five years to make the agency take action.
TV weathercasters, who are not trained in climate science, are often misleading many members of the public into doubting the well-established science which indicates that human activities are warming the planet.
"For more than a century, through a dozen dry spells when lakes disappeared and the land died, thousands of cows from the Swenson Land & Cattle Co have roamed the fields of Texas. Yet the drought currently ravaging the southern Plains has done what the Dust Bowl could not: chased them off this land and driven them more than 600 miles north to Nebraska."
"Companies that disclose greenhouse gas emissions see a small rise in stock price following disclosure, compared to similar companies that keep mum, researchers say."
"A team of Louisiana scientists is laying the groundwork for creating a new carbon storage industry that could both reduce the effects of global warming and rebuild wetlands along the state’s coastline. Sarah Mack, founder of New Orleans-based Tierra Resources, and Louisiana State University wetlands scientists John W. Day and Robert Lane have come up with a method for measuring the molecules of carbon removed from the atmosphere by the soils and plants that are created with coastal restoration projects."
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