Climate Change

The University of California, Berkeley, got a $4 million grant for three years' work on electric power grid monitoring. UC Berkeley's California Institute for Energy and Environment, or CIEE, will oversee the research, working with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the UC Center for Information Research. Alexandra von Meier is co-director of electric grid research at CIEE and will lead the project. Read more

Brian Beal, a University of Maine at Machias biologist, has been studying the decline of clam populations in the state and said warm weather, coupled with an extremely successful predator, historically spells disaster for clams. Green crabs, originally from Japan, were first recorded on Long Island, N.Y., in the mid-1860s and weren’t seen in Casco Bay until the early 1900s, Beal said. The green crab populations have been kept in check by severe cold snaps, Beal said, experienced frequently throughout the last century, allowing clams and other shellfish to recover.

On the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 7, more than 250 members of the public from Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts packed the elementary school gym in Vernon, Vt., for the first of two public hearings held by Vermont’s three-member Public Service Board. The topic at hand was whether the board should grant the Entergy Corp. a certificate of public good that would legally authorize the company to run the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor for 20 years past the original 40-year license period, which ended last March. Read more

The climate change debate typically divides Americans into two camps: Hot and cold. I’m starting my own camp: Hungry. Climate change guru Andrew Jones presented his group’s new online tool, climateinteractive.org, on Tuesday at the Savannah International Clean Energy Conference. The website is built around a computer simulation tool that helps users visual the impacts of energy decisions on long-term climate.

Many climate advocates hope that the recent bout of extreme weather will awaken Americans to the dangers of climate change. Advocates and scientists have pointed to superstorm Sandy and the Texas drought as clear and present signs of the climate crisis. Although the public does seem to be taking notice, I fear these efforts could backfire if we do not proceed cautiously with our framing around extreme weather and climate change. Our challenge to solve the climate crisis could become more difficult in the end.

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Two West Virginia politicians -- Sen. Jay Rockefeller and the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd -- bluntly warned that Appalachia's coal industry is heading for decline. They urged intelligent long-range planning to cope with what seems to be an inevitable economic transition. "Face reality," Rockefeller declared in a West Virginia Day speech. Three years earlier, the aging Byrd said it's time to "speak the truth" and "have an open and honest dialogue about coal's future in West Virginia.

Environmental scientist Amy Luers found the nonprofit setting more fitting than academia for her career goals. "I wanted to be at the intersection of science, policy and action," she said. That would have been hard to do as an academic scientist, she said. "It's rare that a scientist at an academic research institution gets to really see the fruits of their labor put into practice in a significant way in their lifetime," said Luers, climate change director for the Skoll Global Threats Fund, a San Francisco-based non-profit. ...

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