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	<title>Science &#38; Space &#187; Bryan Walsh &#124; TIME.com</title>
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		<title>Science &#38; Space &#187; Bryan Walsh &#124; TIME.com</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com</link>
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		<title>Tornadoes Were Just the Beginning. This Hurricane Season Is Going to be Stormy</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/24/tornadoes-were-just-the-beginning-this-hurricane-season-is-going-to-be-stormy/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/24/tornadoes-were-just-the-beginning-this-hurricane-season-is-going-to-be-stormy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 24 May 2013 09:45:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Disasters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[adaptation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disasters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[forecasting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hurricane]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sandy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15463</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The residents of Moore, Oklahoma are still cleaning up from the EF5 tornado that tore through their town on May 20. 24 people died in the twisters, and thousands of homes and buildings were damaged or destroyed. The total bill may come in at over $2 billion, which would make the Moore tornado the most expensive in American history. So this may not be the best time, but the Moore tornado almost surely won&#8217;t be the last billion-dollar weather the U.S. faces in 2013. On Thursday the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its annual outlook on the summer Atlantic hurricane season—and it is not good. Technically it will be &#8220;active or extremely active,&#8221; which is fine if you&#8217;re talking about a workout session, and less good if you&#8217;re projecting how many potentially devastating tropical storms will hit the U.S. mainland. (MORE: Tornado Warning: Despite Oklahoma Alert, U.S. Weather Forecasting Service Needs Major Upgrades) Altogether NOAA predicts a 70% likelihood that 13 to 20 named storms—which have winds that sustain at 39 mph or higher—will occur, of which 7 to 11 could become hurricanes (winds higher than 74 mph). Of those three to six may become major hurricanes, which means Category 3 to 5, with winds above 11 mph. That&#8217;s all well above the average for an Atlantic hurricane season, which lasts from June 1 to the end of November. Why will this summer potentially be so stormy? For one, an atmospheric climate pattern, including a strong African monsoon, that&#8217;s been ongoing since 1995 will help supercharge the atmosphere for tropical storms. Warmer-than-average water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea will lead to more of the wet, hot air that provides the fuel for hurricanes. And there is no El Nino—the alternating climate pattern that means unusually warm sea temperatures—which would usually suppress the formation of hurricanes. It&#8217;s important to remember that NOAA is only predicting whether or not hurricanes and tropical storms will develop—not whether they will make landfall like Superstorm Sandy did last fall.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15463&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Disasters</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/disasters/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/154976853.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>The Most Endangered Freshwater Turtles and Tortoises</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/23/the-most-endangered-freshwater-turtles-and-tortoises/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/23/the-most-endangered-freshwater-turtles-and-tortoises/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 23 May 2013 12:54:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Animals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[animals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[endangered species]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[turtles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15417</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is there anything more harmless than a turtle? (Unless, I suppose, you&#8217;re a nice, leafy vegetable.) Turtles and tortoises—the main difference is that turtles dwell at least partially in water, while tortoises live exclusively on land—are slow-moving, peaceful animals whose main form of protection from the outside world is a hard shell. Not for nothing do we have the fable of the slow and steady tortoise winning the race. Turtles have existed in some form for more than 220 million years, outlasting their early contemporaries the dinosaurs. Long-lived turtles and tortoises are symbols of perseverance in the natural world. Unfortunately, the rules of the race are changing. Turtles and tortoises are among the world&#8217;s most endangered vertebrates, with about half their more than 300 species threatened with extinction. Only primates—human beings expected—are at greater risk of being wiped off the planet. The threats are many. The animals are collected by traders, eaten in the wild and in fine restaurants, used as pets or for traditional medicine, and sometimes simply killed. The very adaptations that once made them so successful—their long adult life span and delayed sexual maturity—has made them vulnerable as the world around them changed, mostly thanks to human beings. A 2011 report from the Turtle Conservation Coalition makes it clear: we need to act now if we&#8217;re to save the turtles and the tortoises: We are facing a turtle survival crisis unprecedented in its severity and risk. Humans are the problem, and must therefore also be the solution. Without concerted conservation action, many of the world’s turtles and tortoises will become extinct within the next few decades. It is now up to us to prevent the loss of these remarkable, unique jewels of evolution. As we mark World Turtle Day on May 23, spare a thought for these armored but endangered creatures.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15417&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Endangered Species</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/animals-2/endangered-species/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/42-18396195.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">A worker in a zoo holds a tiny Testudo Kleinmanni hatchling. The endangered species is also known as the Egyptian tortoise, and was rescued from the suitcase of a smuggler found in Rome.</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Tornado-Proofing Cities in the Age of Extreme Weather</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/21/tornado-proofing-cities-in-the-age-of-extreme-weather/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/21/tornado-proofing-cities-in-the-age-of-extreme-weather/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2013 22:06:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Disasters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[adaptation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[building]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death toll]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disasters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oklahoma]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[resilience]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tornado]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15373</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Right now the death toll from the massive tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma on May 20 seems—thankfully—to be less than first thought. City officials now say that 24 people have been confirmed dead, down from 51 people last night, due to double counting of some bodies in the confusion. But the new number still includes 9 children, and the toll could rise as rescuers search through the rubble. This is the second time in less than 15 years that the town of Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City, has been hit squarely by a major tornado. That&#8217;s mostly down to bad luck—although Oklahoma City area might as well be the buckle of the tornado belt, as Alexis Madrigal points out in the Atlantic, the chances of actually being hit by a major tornado even in this danger zone remain low. Though I doubt that will provide much comfort to the grieving residents of Moore as they dig out from yet another destructive twister. But as unlikely as a major tornado remains, the hundreds of twisters that touch down in the U.S. still cause major damage—second only to hurricanes, according to the reinsurer Munich Re. Few ordinary structures can withstand a direct hit from a tornado as strong as the one that passed through Moore yesterday, which now ranks as an EF5, with winds above 200 mph. Not much could have saved the homes and businesses destroyed by the Moore twister, but is there a way to ensure that the lives of people in tornado country can be protected from extreme weather? The answer is yes—with the right policy and the right incentives. But first we have to understand how the risks from extreme weather are changing—and for the most part, increasing. (Hat tip to Andrew Revkin of Dot Earth, whose post earlier today touched on much of this material.) As I wrote yesterday, there&#8217;s no clear trend on the frequency or strength of tornadoes hitting the U.S. It had actually been a historically quiet 12 months for tornadoes until recently.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15373&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Disasters</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/disasters/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/0628876a9d694dd680f12bf81ab97b2a-0.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">A soldier walks past a home destroyed by the tornado that hit Moore, Okla., the day before, on May 21, 2013.</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>The Oklahoma Mega-Twister Is More Weather Than Climate Change</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/21/tornado/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/21/tornado/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2013 09:45:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Disasters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death toll]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disaster gap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disasters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[storm warning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tornado]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15351</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When do you hope a drought will last as long as possible? When it&#8217;s a tornado drought—and a historic tornado drought is exactly what the U.S. experienced between May 2012 and April 2013. During that 12-month period the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated that just 197 tornadoes hit the U.S. rated EF1 or stronger. (Tornadoes are ranked on a scale of EF0 to EF5, with sustained gusts between 65 and 85 mph for the lowest ranking and above 200 mph for the highest ranking cyclone.) Going back to 1954, which is about when decent records on tornado hits began being kept, this is the fewest number of tornadoes to hit the U.S. over a one-year period. The previous low for a 12-month consecutive period? 247, between June 1991 and May 1992, which shows just how unusual the last 12 months have been. Consider that drought over. A massive, mile-wide supercell tornado ripped through the suburbs of Oklahoma City, destroying homes, schools and other buildings. The tornado was on the ground for some 40 minutes, according to the National Weather Service (NWS), and police reported that an occupied elementary school was in the path of the cyclone. Early estimates had winds on the ground near 200 mph, which would have made the cyclone an F4 or higher. Witnesses said the damage was like something out of an atomic bomb strike, and there are at least 24 people dead, including many young children, with a toll that could eventually be far higher. Nor is the Oklahoma City cyclone the only one to strike—more tornadoes hit the area, and last week at least 10 twisters struck north-central Texas, killing at least six people and injuring dozens more. Right now rescuers are doing their best to sift through the wreckage amid hopes that Moore, Oklahoma—ground zero for the cyclones today—doesn&#8217;t become another Joplin, the Missouri town that was essentially flattened in a May 2011 tornado that killed over 150 people. But it&#8217;s impossible to avoid wondering in this year of strange weather<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15351&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Disasters</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/disasters/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/oklahoma-tornado-gallery-jw-04.jpeg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Corrie Griffith stands in the driveway of her family&#039;s home after a deadly tornado struck Moore, Okla., on May 20, 2013.</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Why Summer in the City Will Get Deadlier</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/20/why-summer-in-the-city-will-get-more-deadly/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/20/why-summer-in-the-city-will-get-more-deadly/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 May 2013 09:45:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[city]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[heat waves]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[summer]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15329</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Heat kills. In 1995 five days of stifling heat led to more than 750 deaths in Chicago, as mostly elderly and sick people died in their oven-like apartments. In 2003, a record heat wave struck much of Europe, which led to as many as 70,000 additional deaths due in part to heat. France, which was unused to lingering heat in the summers and which mostly lacks air-conditioning, was hardest hit. Thousands of elderly people died during the heat wave in August of that year, so many that some bodies were left unclaimed for weeks. Undertakers in Paris ran out of space to store all the corpses. So you can imagine that researchers — and officials in big cities — are worried about the effect of killer heat waves in the future, supercharged by climate change. They have reason to fear. A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change by researchers at Columbia University&#8217;s Earth Institute and Mailman School of Public Health looked at Manhattan and found that temperature-related deaths could rise by some 20% by the 2020s and — if worst-case scenarios hold — could rise by more than 90% by the 2080s. And that&#8217;s despite the fact that rising temperatures in the winter would be expected to reduce deaths from cold. Heat in a hot and crowded world could be that deadly. Study co-author Radley Horton, a climate scientist at the Earth Institute, said in a statement: This serves as a reminder that heat events are one of the greatest hazards faced by urban populations around the globe. The Nature Climate Change study is hardly the first to try to project how rising temperatures could impact heat-wave-related deaths, but it is unusually detailed, thanks in part to the minute weather data kept in the city. Monthly average temperatures in New York&#8217;s Central Park rose 3.6ºF between 1901 and 2000 — significantly more than the global and U.S. average. That&#8217;s likely due in part to the urban-heat-island effect: the concrete of a major city holds in heat, causing temperatures to rise and stay hotter than<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15329&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Adaptation</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/adaptation-2/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/10119238.jpeg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">10119238</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Why Warming Oceans Could Mean Dwindling Fish</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/16/why-warming-oceans-could-mean-dwindling-fish/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/16/why-warming-oceans-could-mean-dwindling-fish/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 09:45:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oceans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fishing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[global warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oceans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15272</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s easy to forget that global warming doesn’t just refer to the rising temperature of the air. Climate change is having an enormous, if less understood, impact on the oceans, which already absorb far more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere. Like so much of what goes on in the vast depths that cover more than two-thirds of our planet’s surface, the effect of climate change on the oceans remains a black box, albeit one that scientists are working to illuminate. Here’s one way: fisheries. Wild fish remain a major source of protein for humanity — as well as a major source of reality-TV shows — and for some coastal communities, fish mean even more. Scientists aren’t clear about what effect climate change, including the warming of the oceans, will have on wild fisheries. As Mark Payne of the National Institute of Aquatic Resources writes in a new piece in Nature, ocean researchers “tend to view climate change as a dark cloud on the horizon: potentially problematic in the future, but not of immediate concern” — especially compared with the much more pressing threat of simple overfishing. But now a new study in Nature makes the case that climate change — including the warming of the oceans — is already having a direct impact on global fisheries. Researchers led by William Cheung at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre created a new model that took the known temperature preferences of different species of commercial fish and compared those figures with catch numbers from around the world. They found that species comfortable in warmer waters have been replacing fish that are more accustomed to cool temperatures. That means climate change is altering the makeup of fisheries around the world — and that could be particularly bad for the tropics, which may eventually become too hot for even for fish that tend to prefer it on the warmer side. As Cheung’s co-author Daniel Pauly put it in a statement: We’ve been talking about climate change as if it’s something that’s going to<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15272&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Oceans</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/oceans/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/166638083.jpeg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>The IEA Says Peak Oil Is Dead. That&#8217;s Bad News for Climate Policy</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/15/the-iea-says-peak-oil-is-dead-thats-bad-news-for-climate-policy/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/15/the-iea-says-peak-oil-is-dead-thats-bad-news-for-climate-policy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2013 09:45:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oil]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extreme energy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IEA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oil]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[peak oil]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15240</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[No one—aside maybe from survivalists who&#8217;d stocked up on MREs and assault rifles—was really looking forward to a peak-oil world. Read this 2007 GQ piece by Benjamin Kunkel—while we&#8217;re discussing topics from the mid-2000s—that imagines what a world without oil would really be like. Think uncomfortable and violent. Oil is in nearly every modern product we use, and it&#8217;s still what gets us from point A to point B—especially if you need to get from A to B in a plane. If we were really to see the global oil supply peak and decline sharply, even as demand continued to go up, well, apocalyptic might not be too large a word. And for several years in the middle of the last decade, as oil prices climbed past $100 a barrel and analysts were betting it would break $200, that scenario seemed entirely plausible. But there was an upside to peak oil. Crude oil was responsible for a significant chunk of global carbon emissions, second only to coal. Only the shock of being severed from the main fuel of modernity would be enough to make us get serious about tackling climate change and shifting to an economy powered by renewable energy and efficiency. We&#8217;d have to because we&#8217;d have no other choice, save a future that might look something like Mad Max. We&#8217;d lose oil but save the world. Increasingly, though, that doesn&#8217;t seem likely to happen. New oil sources, many of them unlocked by new technology—the Canadian oil sands, tight oil in North Dakota and Texas, ultra-deepwater oil in the Atlantic—has helped keep the supply of oil growing, even as greater efficiency measures and other social shifts have helped blunt demand in rich countries like the U.S. Oil isn&#8217;t likely to be cheap—a barrel of Brent crude is $102—and getting it out of the ground isn&#8217;t going to get any easier. But it&#8217;s increasingly likely that we will have more than enough oil in the future to keep the global economy growing and stave off any Mel Gibson-esque apocalypses. Indeed, a new assessment released<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15240&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Oil</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/energy/oil/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/166074732.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Suncor base plant, in the Athabasca Oil Sands, near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, on March 26, 2013.</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Modifying the Endless Debate Over Genetically Modified Crops</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/14/modifying-the-endless-genetically-modified-crop-debate/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/14/modifying-the-endless-genetically-modified-crop-debate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 09:45:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Going Green]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[genetically modified crops]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gm crops]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GM food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GMOs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Monsanto]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15217</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ll admit—I&#8217;ve never quite understood the obsession surrounding genetically modified (GM) crops. To environmentalist opponents, GM foods are simply evil, an understudied, possibly harmful tool used by big agribusiness to control global seed markets and crush local farmers. They argue that GM foods have never delivered on their supposed promise, that money spent on GM crops would be better funneled to organic farming and that consumers should be protected with warning labels on any products that contain genetically modified ingredients. To supporters, GM crops are a key part of the effort to sustainably provide food to meet a global population that is growing by the billions. But more than that, supporters see the knee-jerk GM opposition of many environmentalists as fundamentally anti-science, no different than the deniers on the other side of the political spectrum who question the basics of man-made climate change. For both sides, GM foods seem to act as a symbol: you&#8217;re pro-agribusiness or anti-science. But science is exactly what we need more of when it comes to GM foods, which is why I was happy to see the venerable journal Nature devote a special series of articles to the GM food controversy. You can download most of them for free here, and they&#8217;re well worth reading. The upshot: while GM crops haven&#8217;t yet realized their initial promise and have been dominated by agribusiness, there is reason to continue to use and develop them to help meet the enormous challenge of sustainably feeding a growing planet. (LIST: 6 Genetically Modified Foods That Changed the World) That doesn&#8217;t mean GM crops are perfect, or a one sizes fits all solution to global agriculture woes. Nature points out that most of the benefit of GM technology so far has indeed gone to big agribusiness, much of it in the form of herbicide-resistant crops like Monsanto&#8217;s Roundup Ready soybeans or cotton. Of course, just because something benefits Monsanto doesn&#8217;t automatically make it wrong—though clearly not everyone would believe that—and advocates say that GM crops have increased agriculture production by nearly $100 billion and prevented<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15217&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Food</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/food/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/154506257.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Non-GMO food products, in Los Angeles, Calif., on October 19, 2012.</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Why a Hotter World Will Mean More Extinctions</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/13/why-a-hotter-world-will-mean-more-extinctions/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/13/why-a-hotter-world-will-mean-more-extinctions/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 09:45:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Animals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Endangered Species]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[animals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[endangered species]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extinction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15191</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The end of last week saw the carbon concentrations in the atmosphere finally pass the 400-part-per-million threshold. That means carbon levels are higher now than they&#8217;ve been for at least 800,000 years, and most likely far longer. There&#8217;s nothing special per se about 400 parts per million — other than giving all of us a change to note it in article like this one — but it&#8217;s a reminder that we are headed very fast into a very uncertain future. Parts per million and global temperature change, though, are just numbers. What matters is the effect they will have on life — ours, of course, but also everything else that lives on the planet earth. I&#8217;ve written before that while I certainly worry and fear the impact that unchecked climate change will have on humanity, I also feel relatively — relatively — confident that we will, in some ways, muddle through. Human beings have already proved that they are extremely adaptable, living — with various degrees of success — from the hottest desert to the coldest corner of the Arctic. I don&#8217;t think a future where temperatures are 4˚F or 5˚F or 6˚F warmer on average will be an optimal one for humanity, to say the least. But I don&#8217;t think it will be the end of our species either. (I&#8217;ve always favored asteroids for that.) (PHOTOS: Up in the Air: Celebrate World Migratory Bird Day) But the plants and animals that share this planet with us are a different story. Even before climate change has really kicked in, human expansion had led to the destruction of habitat on land and in the sea, as we crowd out other species. By some estimates we&#8217;re already in the midst of the sixth great extinction wave, one that&#8217;s largely human caused, with extinction rates that are 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the background rate of species loss. So what will happen to those plants and animals if and when the climate really starts warming? According to a new study in Nature Climate Change, the answer is pretty simple: they will run out of habitable space, and many of them will die.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15191&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Endangered Species</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/animals-2/endangered-species/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/138343068.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Polar Bear</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">More...</media:title>
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		<title>Studies of the Past Show an Ice-Free Arctic Could Be in Our Future [UPDATE]</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/10/studies-of-the-past-show-an-ice-free-arctic-could-be-in-our-future/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/10/studies-of-the-past-show-an-ice-free-arctic-could-be-in-our-future/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 10 May 2013 09:45:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Climate Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arctic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate past]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CO2]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Keeling Curve]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15169</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[UPDATE 5/10/13 10:30 AM: And so the threshold has been passed—at least according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The agency reported that the daily average of carbon concentration levels at the Mauna Loa observatory on May 9 was 400.3 ppm—as far as I know, the first time carbon has passed the 400 ppm mark since well before modern humans were making a mark on the planet. It&#8217;s all new from here on in. As I wrote last week, the carbon concentration in the Earth&#8217;s atmosphere is nearing 400 parts per million (ppm). (399.71 ppm right now, according to the Scripps readings Mauna Loa.) The last time carbon levels in the atmosphere were that high was at least 800,000 years ago, and quite possibly much, much longer. What we do know is that the climate was much warmer—up to 11 F warmer on average—and very, very different than the one we&#8217;ve lived in rather successfully for thousands of years. Just how different the climate was is underscored by a new study published in the May 9 Science. Researchers at American, Russian and German universities traveled in the winter of 2009 to the ice-covered Lake El&#8217;gygytgyn in far northeastern Russia, more than 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The lake was formed some 3.6 million years ago when a massive meteorite struck the Earth&#8217;s surface, gauging out a deep crater. Sediment collected in the crater over time, which has made the lake a gold mine for geoscientists, who are able to analyze the past climate of the surrounding area through the rock record. (MORE: Exclusive: Timelapse Satellite Videos Show Decades of Drastic Changes on Earth) The scientists took core samples of the sediment—records in rock of the past that go back millions of years ago. And their findings suggest that the Arctic was very warm between 3.6 and 2.2 million years ago, during the middle Pliocene and Early Pleistocene epochs. So warm in fact—with balmy summer temperatures in the between 59 and 61 F, more than 14 F warmer than they<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15169&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Climate Science</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/climate-science/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/brigham5hr.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">brigham5HR</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Get the Lead Out: Why the Best Way to Improve Health in Poor Countries Is to Clean Up Industrial Pollution</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/08/get-the-lead-out-why-the-best-way-to-improve-health-in-poor-countries-is-to-clean-up-industrial-pollution/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/08/get-the-lead-out-why-the-best-way-to-improve-health-in-poor-countries-is-to-clean-up-industrial-pollution/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2013 09:45:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pollution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blacksmith]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Blacksmith Institute]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[developing countries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[industrial waste]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lead contamination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pollution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15110</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Most of the attention on global environmental issues goes to climate change, and not without reason. The carbon dioxide we&#8217;re adding to the atmosphere — where carbon-concentration levels have almost passed the 400-ppm threshold — is already changing the climate for the worse and will likely screw us over in the future in ways that we can&#8217;t even imagine. But there are far more pressing environmental threats for the average person in a poor country — threats that directly impact human health and well-being in the hear and now. Take lead, a known neurotoxin. High lead exposure in small children has been linked to a whole mess of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems and learning disabilities. Overwhelmingly a disorder of the poor — who live in the crowded urban tenements and near toxic industrial sites where lead exposure is too common — lead contamination can alter the course of entire lives and maybe even change the fabric of societies, all for the worse. In the postwar era, lead contamination was common even in a rich country like the U.S., thanks largely to the widespread use of leaded gasoline, which wasn&#8217;t phased out until the  1970s, as well as lead paint and lead in soil. Once that happened, lead contamination plummeted—blood lead levels among children 5 years and younger dropped from 16.5 micrograms per deciliter between 1976 and 1980 to just 3.6 micrograms per deciliter between 1992 and 1994. As Kevin Drum of Mother Jones argued in a great piece earlier this year, getting lead out of the environment might have been one of the most important public-health actions the U.S. has ever taken. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the 1940s and ’50s were more likely to become violent criminals as adults in the 1970s and ’80s — and when they were replaced in the 1990s by young people who had never been exposed to such high levels of lead, violent crime rapidly waned. All because of one molecule. Other countries — and the children who live<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15110&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Pollution</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/pollution-2/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/150952255-jpeg.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">A view of the Doe Run Metallurgical Plant which processes metals like gold and silver, in Oroya, Peru, on July 28, 2008.</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Beepocalypse Redux: Honeybees Are Still Dying — and We Still Don&#8217;t Know Why</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/07/beepocalypse-redux-honey-bees-are-still-dying-and-we-still-dont-know-why/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/07/beepocalypse-redux-honey-bees-are-still-dying-and-we-still-dont-know-why/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2013 09:45:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Going Green]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bees]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CCD]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chemical regulation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[collapse disorder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colony]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[honey bees]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pesticides]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15091</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The honeybees are dying — and we don&#8217;t really know why. That&#8217;s the conclusion of a massive Department of Agriculture (USDA) report that came out late last week on colony-collapse disorder (CCD), the catchall term for the large-scale deaths of honeybee groups throughout the U.S. And given how important honeybees are to the food that we eat — bees help pollinate crops that are worth more than $200 billion a year — the fact that they are dying in large numbers, and we can&#8217;t say why, is very, very worrying. CCD was first reported in 2006, when commercial beekeepers began noticing that their adult worker honeybees would suddenly flee the hive, ending up dead somewhere else and leading to the rapid loss of the colony. On normal years, commercial beekeepers might expect to lose 10% to 15% of their colony, but over the past five years, mortality rates for commercial operations in the U.S. have ranged from 28% to 33%. Since 2006 an estimated 10 million beehives worth about $200 each have been lost, costing beekeepers some $2 billion. There are now 2.5 million honeybee colonies in the U.S., down from 6 million 60 years ago. And if CCD continues, the consequences for the agricultural economy — and even for our ability to feed ourselves — could be dire. &#8220;Currently, the survivorship of honeybee colonies is too low for us to be confident in our ability to meet the pollination demands of U.S. agricultural crops,&#8221; the USDA report said. So what&#8217;s causing CCD — and how can we stop it? (MORE: What’s the Buzz: Study Links Pesticide With Honeybee Collapse) The problem is that there doesn&#8217;t seem to be a single smoking gun behind CCD. The USDA report points at a range of possible causes, including: A parasitic mite called Varroa destructor that has often been found in decimated colonies Several viruses A bacterial disease called European foulbrood that is increasingly being detected in U.S. bee colonies The use of pesticides, including neonicotinoids, a neuroactive chemical Since CCD isn&#8217;t so much a<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15091&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Food</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/food/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/73906961-jpeg.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Energy Independence and Other Myths: A Q&amp;A With Michael Levi, Author of The Power Surge</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/06/energy-independence-and-other-myths-a-qa-with-michael-levi-author-of-power-surge/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/06/energy-independence-and-other-myths-a-qa-with-michael-levi-author-of-power-surge/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2013 09:45:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Energy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15064</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Michael Levi is my favorite energy wonk — and not just because we both had to endure waiting for hours in the cold outside the 2009 U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen. (Though he got in first.) Levi, the senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a smart, pragmatic observer of the energy wars — and he&#8217;s an excellent blogger. He knows how to cut through specious arguments on both sides of the energy-and-climate debate while keeping in target the bigger challenges facing the U.S. and the world. Levi has a new book out on the energy debate called The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity and the Battle for America&#8217;s Future. It&#8217;s one of the best analyses of the amazing changes taking place in the energy sphere today, touching on everything from fracking to climate change to the Keystone XL pipeline debate. I had a chance to talk with him about Canadian oil sands, the myth of energy independence and why we need a negotiated peace settlement to end the energy wars. We’ve seen other energy revolutions go through a boom and bust cycle. What makes this moment different? Two things make this moment special. The first is the diversity of changes that are happening. This isn&#8217;t just one isolated area. Today you&#8217;ve got booming production of oil, natural gas. You have oil consumption, rapidly falling, rising renewable energy. It&#8217;s not just one boom, it&#8217;s several at the same time. The other thing is that there are multiple forces driving the change. In oil it’s not just fracking, it&#8217;s expanded offshore drilling. In renewables, it&#8217;s not just one technology. It&#8217;s wind, it&#8217;s solar, both centralized and distributed. On the car front, it is everything from better traditional engines to electric vehicles and natural gas for long-distance trucking. So when you have multiple trends and drivers, the transformation is more robust. (MORE: State Dept: Build the Keystone Pipeline or Not, the Oil-Sands Crude Will Flow) Your point is that the best future for America is to capitalize<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15064&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Energy</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/energy/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/166895133.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Aerial View of the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm under construction in the Mojave Desert, that will use approximately 8.8 million cadmium telluride thin-film solar photovoltaic modules made by First Solar, on April 5, 2013.</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>California Kindling: A Dry Winter and Reduced Snowpack Means Wildfires for the Golden State</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/03/california-kindling-a-dry-winter-and-reduce-snowpack-means-fires-for-the-golden-state/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/03/california-kindling-a-dry-winter-and-reduce-snowpack-means-fires-for-the-golden-state/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2013 18:12:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Water]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[drought]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[global warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[snowpack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wildfire]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=15042</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Wildfires are just a part of life in Southern California, like earthquakes or glimpsing Adam Sandler shopping at the Santa Monica Place mall. (OK, that one just happened to me yesterday.) But what&#8217;s not normal is a wildfire season that begins at the start of May, when kids are still at school and temperatures should just be warming up. Yet that&#8217;s exactly what&#8217;s happening now northwest of Los Angeles, where an unusually early wildfire has already forced thousands of residents to flee and threatened the Naval Base Ventura County. From USA Today: More than 10,000 acres of rugged, brush-covered terrain have been burned by the fire that began during the morning rush hour near the major highway and commuter route into Los Angeles&#8217; San Fernando Valley on Thursday. Thousands of people have fled the area as the wildfire, which has damaged 15 homes, threatened 2,000 more and 100 businesses in its race toward Malibu. The hope is that the gusting winds that have stoked the fires will begin to taper off on Friday, and cooler temperatures could halt the progression of the flames. But regardless, chances are that this week&#8217;s wildfires may just be a rehearsal for what could be a long, hot summer. California is primed to burn. (Photos: Wildfires Ravage California Coast) That&#8217;s due in part to the fact that an unusually dry winter and spring has left California&#8217;s vital snowpack at just 17% of normal levels as of the beginning of May. The melting snows of the Sierra Nevada mountains have long fed both farmers and city dwellers in California, a state that usually doesn&#8217;t get a lot of precipitation on its own. Think of the snows as a natural reservoir that&#8217;s opened each spring—only this year, the reservoir is almost empty. As Frank Gehrke, the chief surveyor of the state&#8217;s Department of Water Resources, told the AP: I&#8217;m finding nothing. Seriously, there is no snow on the course at all. Right now it&#8217;s not officially a drought, but the state is still projecting that it will<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15042&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Water</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/water-2/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/167940028.jpeg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Greenhouse Effect: CO2 Concentrations Set to Hit Record High of 400 PPM</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/02/greenhouse-effect-co2-concentrations-set-to-hit-record-high/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/02/greenhouse-effect-co2-concentrations-set-to-hit-record-high/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2013 09:45:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Climate Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[carbon dioxide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[carbon emissions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Charles David Keeling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[global warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[greenhouse effect]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Keeling Curve]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mauna Loa]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=14991</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Climate change is, first and foremost, a consequence of the addition of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We emit carbon dioxide, through burning fossil fuels or forests, and some of that carbon stays in the atmosphere, intensifying the heat-trapping greenhouse effect and warming the climate. What kind of global warming we&#8217;ll see in the future will largely be due to how much carbon dioxide—and to a lesser extent, other greenhouse gases like methane—we add to the atmosphere. And to fully understand the future, we need to understand the present and the past, and track the concentration of CO2 in the Earth&#8217;s atmosphere. The fact that we can and have been tracking that very important number is due largely to the efforts of the geochemist Charles David Keeling. As a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology in the 1950s, Keeling developed the first instrument that could accurately measure the CO2 levels in the entire atmosphere through sampling. When he got to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography a few years later, Keeling began taking regularly CO2 measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Keeling discovered that atmospheric CO2 underwent a seasonal cycle, as plants bloomed and decayed in the Northern Hemisphere, and more importantly, that CO2 was rising fast. In 1958, CO2 levels recorded at Mauna Loa were about 316 parts per million (ppm). By 2005, when Keeling died—and his son, Ralph Keeling, took up the project—CO2 levels were just under 380 ppm. Plotted on a graph, the readings over time curve upwards sharply as humans added more and more CO2 to the atmosphere—which is why the readings came to be known as the Keeling Curve. (MORE: As the World Keeps Getting Warmer, California Begins to Cap Carbon) Now, thanks to Keeling&#8217;s successors at Scripps, we know that global CO2 levels are about to pass a major threshold: 400 ppm. It&#8217;s a momentous enough occasion, at least for scientists, that Scripps has begun releasing daily readings—today the level is 399.50 ppm—on a website and via a Twitter account. We<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=14991&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Climate Science</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/climate-science/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/143384846-jpeg.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Leaks, Rats and Radioactivity: Fukushima&#8217;s Nuclear Cleanup Is Faltering</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/01/leaks-rats-and-radioactivity-why-fukushimas-nuclear-cleanup-is-faltering/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/05/01/leaks-rats-and-radioactivity-why-fukushimas-nuclear-cleanup-is-faltering/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 01 May 2013 04:00:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Energy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cleanup]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disaster]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fukushima]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meltdown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[radiation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[water]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=14931</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Honestly, if the consequences weren&#8217;t potentially so dire, the ongoing struggles to clean up the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan would be the stuff of comedy. In March, an extended blackout disabled power to a vital cooling system for days. The cause: a rat that had apparently been chewing on cables in a switchboard. As if that&#8217;s not enough, another dead rat was found in the plant&#8217;s electrical works just a few weeks ago, which led to another blackout, albeit of a less important system. The dead rats were just the latest screwups in a series of screwups by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the owner of the Fukushima plant, that goes back to the day of March 11, 2011, when an earthquake and the resulting tsunami touched off a nuclear disaster that isn&#8217;t actually finished yet. I&#8217;m not sure things could be much worse if Wile E. Coyote were TEPCO&#8217;s CEO. But it&#8217;s not funny, not really, because the consequences of the meltdown and TEPCO&#8217;s mismanagement are very real. The latest threat comes from nearby groundwater that is pouring into the damaged reactor buildings. Once the water reaches the reactor it becomes highly contaminated by radioactivity. TEPCO workers have to pump the water out of the reactor to avoid submerging the important cooling system — the plant&#8217;s melted reactor cores, while less dangerous than they were in the immediate aftermath of the meltdown, still needed to be further cooled down. TEPCO can&#8217;t simply dump the irradiated groundwater into the nearby sea — the public outcry would be too great — so the company has been forced to jury-rig yet another temporary solution, building hundreds of tanks, each able to hold 112 Olympic-size pools worth of liquid, to hold the groundwater. So TEPCO finds itself in a race: Can its workers build enough tanks and clear enough nearby space to store the irradiated water — water that keeps pouring into the reactor at the rate of some 75 gal. a minute? More than two years after the tsunami,<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=14931&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Nuclear</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/energy/nuclear-energy-2/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/519008431.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Juan Carlos Lentijo, the leader of the IAEA Division of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology, inspecting the unit four reactor building of the TEPCO Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, on April 17, 2013.</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Fast, Cheap, Dead: Shopping and the Bangladesh Factory Collapse</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/04/29/fast-cheap-dead-shopping-and-the-bangladesh-factory-collapse/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/04/29/fast-cheap-dead-shopping-and-the-bangladesh-factory-collapse/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 03:00:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Globalization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Going Green]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bangladesh building collapse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disasters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fashion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[labor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sustainability]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sweatshops]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=14899</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The collapse of a factory building near Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed at least 362 people, is almost certainly the worst accident in the history of the garment industry. It&#8217;s worse than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 that you learned about in American history class and which helped lead to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards. It&#8217;s worse than the 1993 Kader Toy Factory fire in Bangkok, which killed 188 people, nearly all of them women and teenage girls. It&#8217;s worse than the Ali Enterprises Factory fire in Karachi, which killed at least 262 people — and which I&#8217;m guessing nearly all of us had forgotten about, or never knew it occurred, even though the disaster happened only eight months ago. Bangladeshi officials are still investigating the causes behind the factory&#8217;s collapse on April 24, although Sohel Rana, the building&#8217;s owner, was arrested over the weekend as he attempted to flee the country. There&#8217;s no shortage of possible reasons — building codes in Bangladesh are too rarely enforced and corruption in the country is rampant. Nor, sadly, are such disasters rare. A major fire in a textile factory in Dhaka killed over 100 people just last November. While thousands of Bangladeshi protesters have taken to the streets in the wake of the building collapse, and the political opposition has called for a national strike on May 2, there&#8217;s little hope that the catastrophe will be the last that the country&#8217;s garment workers suffer. (MORE: Mr. Green Jeans: Levi’s Detoxifies Its Supply Chain) The clothes that the doomed workers in Dhaka were laboring over when their factory collapsed include some Western brands, like Primark and Joe Fresh. Is there anything we as clothing consumers can or should do about these deaths? In a post written last week as the dead were still being tallied in the building collapse, Slate&#8217;s economics blogger Matthew Yglesias suggests, not really: Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=14899&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Globalization</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/globalization/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/b178c993d3974c0dafef71e384416055-0.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">A worker at the site of the garment factory building that collapsed near Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 29, 2013.</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Why the Lazy Way to Shop for Groceries — Online — Is the Green Way</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/04/29/why-the-lazy-way-to-shop-for-groceries-online-is-the-green-way/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/04/29/why-the-lazy-way-to-shop-for-groceries-online-is-the-green-way/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:45:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[density]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[efficiency]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[farmer's market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[farming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[freshdirect]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[urban farming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[whole foods]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=14885</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I am not a cook. Since graduating college, I&#8217;ve only lived in very large, very dense cities — Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York — and in very small apartments. I once went more than two years without actually connecting my stove to a gas supply. The inside of my refrigerator rarely contained more than beer, half-and-half and the remains of whatever I&#8217;d ordered from the Thai takeout place the night before — or, if I&#8217;m being honest, the week before. My cell phone was my main cooking utensil. My urban foraging method of food consumption wasn&#8217;t just about laziness, though. Without a car — I haven&#8217;t driven one regularly since high school — it&#8217;s always been difficult for me to get to a large market and bring home a decent assortment of groceries. I&#8217;m usually left with whatever I can carry from the local bodega — or, because I live in Brooklyn, extremely expensive (but high-quality!) organic produce. But that&#8217;s changed lately, thanks to the grocery-delivery service FreshDirect. I can order groceries online, and FreshDirect will deliver to my door for free. (Sound familiar? The great Web 1.0 flop Webvan had a similar business model. Times have changed.) For someone who hates shopping for food almost as much as I hate cooking it, FreshDirect is brilliant — and a little decadent. I always felt a bit guilty when I punched in an order. Surely a service that drives my groceries right to my doorstop must be worse for the environment than buying my own. Guess again. A new study in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum shows that ordering groceries for delivery online is actually much greener than driving to the store and buying them yourself. A lot greener — the study found that delivery-service trucks produced 20% to 75% less carbon dioxide than the corresponding personal vehicles driven to and from a grocery store. If the delivery service employed routes that clustered customers together, to minimize trips, the savings were even higher. (MORE: Desert Dreams: Can the Middle Eastern Country of<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=14885&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Food</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/food/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/1674442.jpeg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>As Harvard Closes a Primate Research Center, Are Lab Chimps Becoming a Thing of the Past?</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/04/24/as-harvard-closes-a-primate-research-center-are-lab-chimps-becoming-a-thing-of-the-past/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/04/24/as-harvard-closes-a-primate-research-center-are-lab-chimps-becoming-a-thing-of-the-past/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:00:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Animals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[animal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Animal Welfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chimps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[harvard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[primates]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[research]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=14616</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In a surprise move, Harvard Medical School announced yesterday that it would be closing a controversial primate research center where four monkeys died between 2010 and 2012 because of problems with animal care. The New England Primate Research Center (NEPRC) in Southborough is set to be largely shut down by 2015, a decision that Harvard officials told the Boston Globe was mostly due to a difficult economic climate for biomedical research as the government cuts back sharply on spending. But it&#8217;s difficult to imagine that the animal welfare problems at the center—which was cited for violations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture—didn&#8217;t factor into the decision to shutter the labs. The decision is obviously going to be tough on the dozens of Harvard researchers whose work depends on lab primates. Nancy Haigwood, the director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, told the Globe&#8216;s Carolyn Johnson: It’s very, very disturbing, disappointing, disheartening, shocking. I think it’s going to be very, very difficult to imagine that the investigators impacted by this decision will be able to keep up their momentum. We’re talking about very talented senior investigators who are at the peak of their careers. Work with live animals is expensive, and budget cuts are impacting public funding for science across the board. Still, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—which spends about $87 million supporting primate research centers around the country—noted that the decision was made by Harvard alone. (MORE: Why Wild Animals and Hollywood Don&#8217;t Mix) The problems at the NEPRC go back to 2010, when a cotton-top tamarin was found dead in a cage that had been recently cleaned. Although investigators later determined that the animal had died of natural causes, the fact that staff members had failed to notice the monkey was dead was a violation of federal animal-welfare regulations. Another elderly cotton-top tamarin was later found in such poor condition—in part because its cage lacked a water bottle—that the monkey had to be euthanized. As officials at Harvard began probing the center, more troubling failures emerged, as Harvard Magazine reported<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=14616&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Ecocentric</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/ecocentric/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/90064565.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">90064565</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Earth Daze: What Happened to the Environmental Movement?</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/04/22/earth-daze-what-happened-to-the-environmental-movement/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/04/22/earth-daze-what-happened-to-the-environmental-movement/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:39:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Environmentalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Going Green]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[activism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cap and trade]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Earth Day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environmentalism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=14592</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It&#8217;s Earth Day, though you could be forgiven if you missed it. The annual event doesn&#8217;t quite have the same energy as it once did — especially not compared with the first Earth Day 43 years ago. That nationwide event, initially inspired by the work of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, was celebrated by more than 20 million people in more than 12,000 events around the country. As Nicholas Lemann pointed out in a recent piece in the New Yorker, Congress took the day off, and two-thirds of its members — Democrat and Republican alike — spoke at Earth Day events. The Today show devoted 10 hours of airtime to Earth Day. And that mobilization — which was decentralized, mostly achieved through a tiny national office — paved the way for real government action: the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This year&#8217;s Earth Day was a little less memorable, and a whole lot less bipartisan. (I can&#8217;t imagine a Republican member of Congress giving a speech during Earth Day now unless they were calling for the dismantling of the EPA.) And it comes during a moment of crisis for the environmental movement as it attempts to grapple, so far unsuccessfully, with the existential threat of climate change. Back to Lemann: Then, 40 years after Earth Day, in the summer of 2010, the environmental movement suffered a humiliating defeat as unexpected as the success of Earth Day had been. The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, announced that he would not bring to a vote a bill meant to address the greatest environmental problem of our time — global warming. The movement had poured years of effort into the bill, which involved a complicated system for limiting carbon emissions. Now it was dead, and there has been no significant environmental legislation since. Indeed, one could argue that there has been no major environmental legislation since 1990, when President George H.W. Bush signed a bill<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=14592&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Going Green</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/going-green/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/98347175.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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