and used floods to rip apart their city. The oelower bricks became soaked and failed to support those above them the wall began first to crack
It was then that the troublemakers neighborhood by neighborhood adopted Oct 30 as their day to pull pranks.
#Hit By Climate, Disaster Victims Call for Congressional Action (Op-Ed) Rocky Kistner is a communications associate for the NRDC.
As the world's climate scientists increasingly sound the alarm about the growing threats of climate change more and more people hard-hit by the rising tide of dangerous extreme weather events are demanding that Congress take action.
when the Congressional Safe Climate Caucus held a forum on climate change Sept. 17 2013 on Capitol hill as many told heart-wrenching stories about the punishing impacts of climate change hitting their communities across the United states
. Their stories were powerful and diverse telling tales of crop-crippling drought in farms across the midwest ravaging fires in the Sierra nevada mountains in the west and record-setting hurricanes and flooding along the east coast
climate change is real and fueling more dangerous extreme weather events. They implored Congress to take action to cut carbon pollution
and promote policies that will protect future generations from even greater climate threats predicted by scientists.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) chairman of the Safe Climate Caucus said these were voices that more Americans need to hear.
Your experiences are proof that climate change does have consequences Rep. Waxman told the witnesses.
and have you explain how a rapidly changing climate can exact a tremendous toll on communities across the country.
or two about a changing climate and what extreme weather can do. A fifth-generation farmer in Iowa he has witnessed repeated floods droughts
and record-breaking crop-damaging weather that has played havoc with agriculture in his state in recent years starting with a 500-year flood along the Missouri river in 2008
and extending to the historical crop-killing 2012 drought that burned through thousands of acres.
All of this adds up to massive losses in the fields losses that will continue to mount as climate change feeds off billions of tons of greenhouse gasses spewed into the global atmosphere every year.
Climate change is real it's happening it's going to get worse and it's already causing great harm to farms like mine.
I say let's stop wasting our time debating the existence of climate change. We need to use our time
and money to find ways to protect the climate we depend on. Stefanie Kravitz lives in Long beach N y. a barrier island south of Long island.
Her home was flooded during Hurricane Irene in 2011 so when Superstorm Sandy roared toward her vulnerable seaside community last October she and her husband evacuated.
But she had no idea it was going to turn out to be one of the most destructive storms in history.
She said many of the people in town are traumatized still by the destruction of Sandy a storm many are fearful could happen again.
I always knew about climate change but you do not really take it seriously until it happens to you.
People need to understand that climate change is not a clichã but a reality that is causing damage
a punishing drought brought on by a changing climate and a new threat to groundwater supplies hydraulic fracking that has invaded recently his state
In short we have a new man-made water crisis etched atop the man-made crisis of climate change that produced the crisis we're running on empty.
The Rim Fire illustrates the severity of fires that scientific experts anticipate will become more common as a result of climate change.
Experts say this is just a foretaste of major fires to come across the United states as altered forest ecology due to hotter and dryer conditions result in larger more destructive and more intense fires.
Reverend Tyronne Edwards grew up in Plaquemines Parish a flood-prone region at the southern tip of Louisiana that has some of the fastest land-loss rates in the world.
which he organized in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to help rebuild his hurricane-damaged community.
Now he is involved deeply in coastal restoration and learning more about the costs associated with a warming world and rising seas.
Edwards told the committee that climate change is a critical threat in his community a growing menace that needs to be addressed.
Climate change is nonpartisan it's not based race it's not based on religious affiliation political party
now that the whole beloved community get involved in climate change so the human beings and generations ahead of us have a safer place to live in.
These are wise words from voices on the front lines of climate change words that every politician needs to hear
As Earth entered a warming trend the glaciers of the late Paleolithic retreated. Tundra gave way to forest.
As the climate changed the very large mammals that had adapted to extreme cold like mammoth and wooly rhinoceros became extinct.
Evidence indicates that about 10800 years ago the climate underwent a sharp cold turn lasting for several years.
The glaciers did not return but game and plant materials would have been scarce. As temperatures began to rebound human population began to increase
Limiting factors in the environment such as availability of food water and shelter evolutionary relationships like predator/prey ratios or presence of pathogens provide natural balances to populations.
A population will generally expand until it reaches the carrying capacity the maximum number of individuals an environment can support without detrimental effects at
 Agriculture had increased the number of people that could be supported by the environment; we were the first animals to increase the carrying capacity of our existing habitat.
In the past global climate change has often been synchronous with mass extinction. Although there is some controversy about
whether humans are part of the cause for the current global warming trend there is no doubt that Earth is experiencing climate change.
These desert peoples used walls and ditches to collect rainwater during the area's infrequent rainfalls.
Likewise if CCD is linked to other components of the complex array of anthropogenic chemicals in pollen it will become even more difficult to protect bee colonies not to mention the other forms of life subjected to those chemicals as they spread through the food web and the broader environment.
It would make it nearly impossible for federal agencies to use science to protect public health safety and the environment.
or the environment or any document that interprets a statutory or regulatory issue. And if an agency doesn't follow those procedures?
The UCS Food and Environment program citing substantial scientific evidence has warned that the routine use of antibiotics in livestock is a major factor in antibiotic resistance in humans a huge and growing public-health problem.
The organisms belonging to this collective state would have shared genetic information from neighbor to neighbor rather than solely from parent to offspring.
Too little variation and organisms can't adapt to changes in the environment. Too much variation and organisms can't retain useful traits.
High humidity and light rainfall helped firefighters contain 75 percent of the Rim Fire by Tuesday morning (Sept. 3) the U s. Forest Service said.
Researchers predict that wildfires will tear through the western forests more often as a result of climate change:
and intensity is dramatic evidence that fire management is as important as climate change when it comes to wildfires
unless we get ahead of the fuels/restoration problem in forests that once experienced frequent fire wildfires influenced by climate change will burn them at severities
and dead dry wood and debris piled up on the forest floor according to studies by fire ecologists such as Stephens. Fires today burn hotter and higher up into the big trees (so-called crown fires).
I believe that climate change is drying out forests earlier and temperatures are up. However if fuels treatments had been used in this area we would not have had the tree mortality that has occurred probably.
Such data will help better inform forest management practices in the future particularly under a changing climate.
I had imagined never even said researcher Jean-Pierre Rossi an ecologist at France's National Institute for Agronomic Research.
#How Sandy Storm Damage Became NYC Playground NEW YORK Thousands of trees collapsed across New york city during Hurricane Sandy last year causing tangled messes that have left gaping voids throughout city sidewalks and parks.
Still some select projects have sprouted up across the city in the past year that make use of the storm's wreckage.
From debris to playground Christian Zimmerman vice president of design and construction with the Prospect Park Alliance spearheaded a new playground built from a small portion of the 500 trees that fell in Prospect Park during the storm.
Mandy Davis a mother of two who lives in a nearby Brooklyn neighborhood traveled to Prospect Park last week on a crisp afternoon to check out the new addition letting her 1-and 3-year-olds get dirty as they explored stumps
Others were glad to see something positive come from Hurricane Sandy's destruction. I think it's great that they have been able to do something good out of something that was said so tragic Brooklyn resident Annmarie Anderson as her 3-year-old son looked at her giggling completely soaked by a water pump attached to an overturned trunk.
Manhattan-based treehouse artist Roderick Romero created the installation from heaps of limbs strewn throughout the garden after the storm
It's a memorial to Hurricane Sandy in a way Romero told Livescience. A group of urban sustainability graduate students from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn stopped by the nest last week while perusing the garden chatting positively about the sculpture.
and support each other in future storms. The Scientist Who Helped Save New york's Subway from Sandy It's important for people to know that they have each other's back Kosty said.
when they find out that it was made from storm damage. Inspired by these positive reactions Zimmerman hopes to create a similar but larger playground elsewhere in the city within the next several years.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)' s latest findingson climate change confirm what we already know.
and harvest their products offer hope for not only attenuating climate change impacts but for providing economic security and better livelihoods for some of the world's poorest farmers.
Conserving the gum trees provides myriad benefits that help mitigate climate change from absorbing carbon to creating feedback loops that increase the amount of rainfall.
Just think of what hundreds more Produits du Sud companies could do to offer a bulwark against climate change
This article is adapted from'Truffula'Trees The IPCC and Climate Changeon the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship a premier international platform for accelerating entrepreneurial approaches and innovative solutions to the world
and is devastating forest ecosystems and the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. Illegal logging degrades vital habitat for Amur tigers and their prey.
FSC certification provides the assurance that legal environmental and social protections are in place and that forests have been managed responsibly.
Berger and his team found more wild yaks near glaciers which feed adjacent alpine meadows
And it stands out because of the social and environmental ramifications of human-powered vehicles which offer very tangible benefits to people in both developed and undeveloped nations.
The HPVC mission encourages engineering students to consider the social environmental and economic benefits of the vehicles they design.
 Students participating in the HPVC are designing transportation solutions for a world faced with economic stress and poverty climate change and strife over energy supplies.
Scientists concentrated on a tropical savannah region in the Bolivian Amazon that past researchers thought was too harsh of an environment for ancient peoples to inhabit.
The hunter-gatherers may have abandoned eventually these sites as the climate shifted toward wetter conditions later.
and adapted to new environments extremely fast or they started their journey quite a long time ago.
The data we have indicates that about 4200 years ago an important environmental change took place he said.
What caused this environmental change? The scientists detailed their findings online Aug 28 in the journal PLOS ONE.
The samples enabled the scientists to peer back into the Arctic's climate history dating from 2. 2 million to 3. 6 million years ago during the middle Pliocene and early Pleistocene epochs.
Understanding the vegetation in the area during that time helped the scientists piece together more clues about the precipitation and climate.
If this is the case Earth's climate may be more sensitive to carbon dioxide than scientists previously thought Brigham-Grette said.
and glaciers with tremendous ablation rate suggest that we're heading back to the Pliocene.
Rising greenhouse gases Climate scientists are expecting the atmospheric carbon dioxide level to exceed 400 parts per million any day now
if the climate system has real serious tipping points Brigham-Grette said. As we get warmer is there a tipping point where the climate would shift into a different kind of regime that we would be worried about?
Understanding the past helps inform us of what the future might hold for us. Earth in the Balance:
when previous studies estimated the start of expanding glaciers in the Northern hemisphere Moran said. These conflicting results mean scientists are still unclear
But researchers are slowly filling in the history of the Arctic's climate said Brigham-Grette.
#Iceland Volcano Eruption Fueled Ocean Blooms The explosive volcanic eruption Iceland saw in 2010 may have disrupted life in the air above Europe
Just as microscopes and telescopes help researchers see more about the world microphones can help them learn more about their surroundings via sound.
These acoustic emissions are very faint only exerting 10 to 1000 pascal in pressure in comparison atmospheric pressure is about 100000 pascals explained physicist Alexandre Ponomarenko at Grenoble University in France.
Those tortoises kept Madagascar's unique ecosystem in check by munching on low-lying foliage trampling vegetation and dispersing large seeds from native trees like the baobab.
With their demise the composition of Madagascar's ecosystems changed shrubs and vegetation clogged the forest floor
and they plan to transplant a few hundred of them to Madagascar to help fill the ecological gaps left by their extinct kin.
This project is not an ecological substitution with an analogous species like what's been done on other Indian ocean islands;
Wacky Madagascar Animals Ecological shoes to fill Using fossils from two species of extinct Madagascan giant tortoises Pedrono located a group of very similar giant tortoises living on the nearby Aldabra Atoll.
and genetically it's likely they'll fill the same roles in the Madagascan ecosystem Pedrono said.
and other ecological interactions before the tortoises can breed and disperse across the island. A'welcome breakthrough'The plan seems like a good one says Elizabeth Hunter an ecologist at the University of Georgia who has studied giant tortoise restoration on the Galapagos islands
but wasn't involved in Pedrono's research. I would fully support going forward with this plan Hunter said.
which to start testing these sorts of ecological replacements Hunter said. They're very easy to contain with fencing
The passenger pigeon the dodo and the woolly mammoth are just a few of the species wiped off the Earth by changing environments and human activities.
but the experiment proved de-extinction was possible. 6 Extinct Animals That Could Be brought Back to Life We can use some of these techniques to actually help endangered species improve their long-term viability said ecologist Stanley Temple of the University
Reviving the passenger pigeon The passenger pigeon filled the skies of North america in flocks of millions during the 19th century.
I don't think it has any merit at all said conservation ecologist Stuart Pimm of Duke university N c. It totally ignores the very practical realities of what conservation is about.
The environment is different in every respect Ehrenfeld said. Temple took a more moderate view.
Rainfall in Florida this year has been 40 percent to 70 percent below the average of the past 30 years Bloomberg reports.
Hurricanes canker disease (another bacterial infection of citrus fruits) hard freezes and the vagaries of the international orange market
No earthworms are native to North america's northern forests (massive ice age glaciers kept the land worm-free.
which could result in other indirect ecological consequences including a spike in insect populations that the birds would otherwise feed on.
and understand the ecological consequences of their potential decline in an effort to develop management plans in response to the invasive mink population.
Panel on Climate Change at a meeting in Batumi Georgia. One report improves the total greenhouse gas inventory for countries participating in the Kyoto Protocol the international treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
To mitigate climate change means to know well where the emissions of greenhouse gases come from
Both methodology reports went through the same multiyear review process as the IPCC's better-known climate change reports.
The IPCC released a summary of its fifth annual climate change report in September the first major assessment since 2007.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report on the science of global warming squarely blames humans as the primary cause of climate change saying it is extremely likely that human activities have caused most of the warming of the planet's surface
The assessment released today (Sept. 27) is the first major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
There's much stronger evidence connecting human activity to changes in temperature melting glaciers and ocean warming said Gerald Meehl a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the authors of the new report.
There's a lot more evidence that connects human activity to changes in the climate system. In the new summary climate scientists say they are at least 95 percent certain that people are responsible for the warming oceans rapidly melting ice
and rising sea levels that have been observed since the 1950s. The 2007 report linked human activities to climate change with 90 percent certainty which was a considerable leap from the 66 percent probability stated in the organization's 2001 report. 8 Ways Global
Warming is Already Changing the World Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean in changes in the global water cycle in reductions in snow and ice in global mean sea level rise and in changes in some climate extremes the new report says.
It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
The benchmark of 3. 6 degrees Fahrenheit was set by climate negotiators in Copenhagen in 2009.
The effects of climate change The new assessment also contains updated projections for various climate scenarios including sea level rise melting glaciers and rising global average temperatures.
IPCC's Upcoming Climate Change Report Explained If greenhouse gas emissions are curbed not sea levels could rise as much as 3 feet (0. 9 meters) by the year 2100 the scientists said.
and changes in all components of the climate system Stocker said. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
The report found that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide methane and nitrous oxide are now at levels that are unprecedented in at least the last 800000 years.
Panel members said they are hopeful the report will shape climate negotiations between nations particularly in the lead up to the UN Conference on Climate Change scheduled to take place in Paris in 2015.
Today's assessment is part of the IPCC's latest summary on climate change called the Fifth Assessment Report of AR5.
the Working group I report on the science of climate change; the Working group II report on the vulnerabilities and socioeconomic impacts;
the Working group III report on possible ways to mitigate climate change; and the Synthesis Report which reviews the findings from all the working groups
and put together comprehensive reports on the risks and impacts of climate change. The assessments undergo an extensive review process that involves thousands of scientists
#Is Genetics Key to Climate Change Solutions?(Op-Ed) Thomas Whitham is a regents'professor in the Department of Biological sciences and the executive director of the Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research at Northern Arizona University.
He contributed this article to Livescience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. As the effects of climate change rapidly alter communities economies and natural systems the need to advance new solutions to
what may be the most pressing biological challenge of our time has never been more urgent.
and protect the services provided by native ecosystems. Genetics holds the potential to benefit native systems that range from prairies to pine forests and coral reefs.
and temperature tolerance water-use efficiency and other traits that can prove critical for surviving climate changes
Changing climate conditions not only affect the plants themselves but also other organisms that influence plant communities.
For example changing climate conditions may increase pest and pathogen outbreaks or allow an invasive species to move into an area that was previously inhospitable.
The use of genetics will become increasingly important in regions suffering from climate change. For example in the western United states drought and higher temperatures have doubled the rate of tree mortality
and Arizona where climate change has made trees more susceptible to bark beetle outbreaks that in turn result in increased wildfires.
Fortunately plant genomes all of an organism's genetic information are a vast storehouse of genetic variability that can be used to help prevent the loss of species suffering from climate change.
and populations that will survive in the climates of the future and in the face of the myriad cascading effects of climate change.
Genetics-based environmental research is already helping to restore damaged and degraded landscapes. For more than 30 years a consortium of researchers has examined how genetic variation in the cottonwood tree can affect entire communities of organisms from microbes to mammals.
This research has been involved with a 50-year $626 million effort on the lower Colorado river that shows major genetics-based differences in the success of different populations that the Bureau of Reclamation
From such combined restoration-research experiments scientists can learn which genetic lines are most likely to survive future climates.
Understanding a plant's response to climate conditions requires the integration of diverse sciences to examine how changing conditions influence the plant through its life history
and that of its offspring Plant species become adapted to local conditions over thousands of years meaning that what is adapted locally today could do poorly tomorrow as the climate changes.
Thus genetics-based research can help identify those individuals that possess superior traits that will allow them to survive in a future climate.
This type of research involves interdisciplinary teams of climate-change scientists biologists geneticists modelers and engineers who are using
SEGA is a new genetics-based climate-change research platform that allows scientists to quantify the ecological and evolutionary responses of species exposed to changing climate conditions.
Because temperature and moisture predictably change with elevation these gardens reflect climate differences ranging from desert to alpine forest that mimic the effects of climate change.
and genotypes in different environments scientists can identify which ones perform best and are most likely to survive changing conditions.
when knowledge and technology can be used to ensure the survival of whole ecosystems and the people who depend upon them.
and mitigate climate and other global change impacts. While native ecosystems are being challenged as never before the use of genetics offers new solutions that hold great promise.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
and minimally stored in a cool dark environment and opened and used without too much exposure to air.
According to the Bible swarms of locusts were the eighth plague sent into ancient Egypt as a punishment for suppressing the Jews said Hendrik Bruins a researcher who studies the archaeology and environmental aspects of desert peoples at Israel's Ben-Gurion
By March 2 they had reached Cairo buffeted by winds out of the south. There were many thousands of locusts in the swarms that have arrived in southern Israel
On March 4 winds from the west brought a small swarm into Israel's Negev and another group arrived the same way the next day (March 5) Cressman added.
and the wind has shifted now blowing out of the northeast greatly reducing the threat the insects pose.
or hadrosaurs were large herbivores that filled the same ecological niche as deer or kangaroo today.
 A California company (Inovio) is in the early stage of developing a potential vaccine with plans to get access to the virus in a highly protected lab environment for its initial tests.
Before the accident caused by the massive tsunami that inundated the coast in 2011 the country's sole plan for achieving greenhouse gas reductions focused on nuclear power.
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