Bleached staghorn coral. Image credit: mattk1979/Flickr
A month of bitterly cold weather has had a devastating effect on marine life in Florida. Much of the coastal ecosystem, researchers said, was protected by deep water and a warm gulf stream. Important shallow-water areas, however, dropped to dangerous levels—with water temperatures as low as 52 degrees in places—for devastatingly long periods of time....Read the full story on TreeHugger
I grew up in California, so my family is familiar with earthquakes. However, I grew up in a coastal area that, while we felt the rattle when quakes hit north and south of us, we rarely experienced disastrous results. Even with that familiarity -- or perhaps because of it -- after I moved to San Francisco my family gave me a very large, very full backpack of emergency supplies. And after Haiti, I've also started questioning my disaster preparedness and wondered about the contents of this bag. I pulled it out of the closet today to take a closer look. T...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Well the emission reduction pledges are in and things are more or less as we left them in Copenhagen some six weeks ago. We may have what UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called an "essential first step" towards a greater legally-binding climate deal, and one which the Nature Conservancy's Duncan March says is a potential "real turning point," but it's a baby step and one which on its own won't actually result in holding temperature rise below 2°C.
In fact, there's already expectation management going on regarding whether there will be a global clima...Read the full story on TreeHugger
New York City’s health kick isn’t just limited to cigarettes, calorie labels and a possible sugar tax. Mayor Bloomberg and his forward-thinking administration are thinking carefully about how good “active design” — of sidewalks, streets and buildings — can not only c…Read the full story on TreeHugger
