Public

"An enormous cloud hits Lubbock, where residents compare it to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The ongoing drought helped produce the storm, an expert says."

Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the Los Angeles Times October 18, 2011.

"Children's asthma-related emergency room visits rise in the San Joaquin Valley at a similar rate as fine particulate levels do -- even on days where air quality is considered in the moderate range.

That's a key finding of a yearlong study by the Central Valley Health Policy Institute at Fresno State, which examined the short-term impacts of air quality changes in Bakersfield, Fresno and Modesto.

"A breakthrough in oil cleanup technology allows crews to skim spilled oil off the water's surface at a much faster rate. The new device wasn't developed by Exxon, BP or any of the major oil companies — it's the work of Elastec/American Marine, based in Illinois. And the design won the company a rich prize from the X Prize Foundation.

Oil is attracted to plastic. And water is not. That, in essence, is the basis of Elastec's new skimmer.

"Baljit Chadha, the entrepreneur behind Quebec’s controversial asbestos exports, has earned a rare public rebuke from an official with the World Health Organization for distorting its position on the safety of the carcinogenic product.

'We have been receiving a lot of expressions of concerns from around the world that the WHO has been misquoted,'Ivan Ivanov, the team leader of occupational health at the WHO Department of Public Health and Environment, said in a phone interview from Geneva.

"MILWAUKEE — Just a month before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is set to release new rules to protect the Great Lakes from overseas ships carrying in invasive species, legislation is moving through Congress that conservation groups say might roll back those protections."

"As exploratory oil drilling is set to begin in December off the coast of Cuba, the U.S. government acknowledged Tuesday that because of chilly diplomatic relations it could have a limited ability to control the response to an oil spill there, let alone one the magnitude of last year's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico."

"Gavin Schmidt, the climate modeler at NASA and Columbia University who has long endured the slings and arrows that come with blogging on climate, has now gained a laurel for his efforts — the inaugural $25,000 Climate Communications Prize of the American Geophysical Union. [The geophysical union release is now posted.]"

Don't feel too sorry for the farmers losing one federal subsidy -- they may simply be gaining another.

"With a decision expected by the end of the year from the Obama administration on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, members of Congress have sent two letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raising concerns over the State Department’s handling of a critical environmental review of the project."