Progressive News Feeds

The Midwest has experienced near record flooding this spring, resulting in four deaths, extensive property damage, and disruptions of agriculture and transportation. Evidence suggests that manmade climate change has increased the frequency of heavy downpours, and will continue to increase flooding risks. But in their ample coverage of Midwestern flooding, major media outlets rarely mentioned climate change.

Tags: author, climate-change, economy, elections, floods, foreign-policy, government, media matters, the nation, war

by Richard Sommerville and Jeff Masters, via Climate Communication With oppressive heat waves, devastating droughts, ravaging wildfires, and hard-hitting rainstorms, the summer of 2012 has been one for the record books. Thousands of precipitation and temperature records were broken, plaguing almost all of the contiguous United States this season and underscoring the connection between climate change and increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather.

Tags: agriculture, articles, author, environment, feeds, floods, global-warming, health, security, tweets

On Thursday, oil baron Harold Hamm will testify to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the unrealistic promise that the U.S. can drill its way to energy independence. As chief architect of Romney’s energy plan, Hamm will echo its pro-oil tenets

Tags: action, black, flight, floods, global-warming, house, obama, politics, romney, thinkprogress

Last week, I reported that leading scientific experts were warning we could see a “near ice-free Arctic in summer” in a decade — if volume trends continue. Here’s a short video showing those ominous trends from 1979 through early September 2012: Since 1979, the volume of summer Arctic sea ice has declined by 75% and accelerating. …  This video by Andy Lee Robinson illustrates the dramatic decline from 1979 until September 2, 2012 (day 246)

Tags: archives, climate-change, earth, economy, feeds, financial, floods, health, mitt-romney, security, tweets

In the annals of idiotic remarks by Presidential candidates, Mitt Romney now has a strong claim for the top spot. On Meet the Press , the GOP nominee actually told NBC’s David Gregory: I’m not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or to heal the planet .

Tags: action, climate-change, climate-progress, economy, floods, health, lgbt, politics

With the ice-free drilling season nearing an end, Shell Oil started its first exploration well in the Chukchi Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska on Sunday. [ Washington Post ] A new paper, released Sunday in Nature Climate Change, has attempted to lay out just how climate stress affects forests, and how serious the consequences of could be. [ Climate Central ] New Zealand’s High Court has dismissed a challenge launched by climate-change sceptics against a government research agency’s finding that the temperature had risen in the past century.

Tags: alaska, economy, feeds, floods, homes, mitt-romney, politics, power, tweets, war

by Kelly Levin, via WRI’s Insights Over the past several months, extreme weather and climate events in the form of heat waves, droughts, fires, and flooding have seemed to become the norm rather than the exception. In the past half-year alone, millions of people have been affected across the globe – from Europe suffering from the worst cold snap in a quarter century; to extreme flooding in Australia, Brazil, China, and the Philippines; to drought in the Sahel. Records have been broken monthly in the continental United States, with the warmest spring and 12-month period experienced this year and severe fires and drought affecting large swaths of the country.

Tags: amazon, archives, australia, author, feeds, floods, lgbt, science, security, thinkprogress

by Mary Anne Hitt and Justin Guay, via the Sierra Club While no new coal plants have broken ground here in the US since 2008, the US government is backing a huge, polluting new coal plant oversees. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and World Bank are pushing a heavily polluting, costly, and controversial new coal plant in Kosovo.

Tags: climate progress, contractor, director, economy, election, facebook, floods, freedom, global-warming, health

While most of the political world was glued to the Democratic convention Thursday night, Congressman Steve King (R-IA) debated Democratic challenger Christie Vilsack on local radio station WHO 1040. King, who has called climate scientists “frauds” doing “the modern version of the rain dance, touted his support for wind power and other renewable fuels as a means of helping the local economies.

Tags: action, democratic, economy, energy, feeds, floods, government, health, progressive news, security, steve king, thinkprogress

How much extra energy are we putting in the atmosphere through emission of greenhouse gases? One Australian researcher put it into context : “The radiative forcing of the CO2 we have already put in the atmosphere in the last century is … the equivalent in energy terms to almost half a billion Hiroshima bombs each year.” With more energy radiating down on the planet rather than back up into space, the planet continues to heat up. As the atmosphere warms, it is able to hold more water vapor — thus strengthening the global hydrological cycle.

Tags: atmosphere, climate, climate-change, climate-progress, economy, facebook, floods, obama, politics, tweets