Climate Change

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will lead a delegation of officials to the United Nation's sustainability conference in Rio de Janeiro from June 20-22, the State Department said Tuesday, signaling a stronger U.S. commitment to the summit. The announcement comes after U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in April called on U.S. President Barack Obama to attend the conference and to take a more active role in global efforts to curb climate change."

"A new US-led study, featuring research by Tasmanian scientists, has concluded that warming ocean temperatures over the past 50 years are largely a man-made phenomenon."

"State lawmakers ran into a problem this year when recommending a study on rising sea levels and their potential impacts on coastal Virginia. It was not a scientific problem or a financial one. It was linguistic."

"Scientists have discovered a vast pea-soup-green bloom of tiny plant-like marine organisms under Arctic Ocean ice. The bloom represents an enormous, and until now, unknown reservoir of food for marine life in frigid waters at the top of the world."

"The scientist who exposed the inner workings of the ultra-conservative Heartland Institute, triggering the defection of key donors, has been reinstated after an investigation."

"So far, 2012 has been the warmest year the United States has ever seen, with the warmest spring and the second-warmest May since record-keeping began in 1895, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on Thursday."

"The cap and trade system known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative announced on Monday that carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in the nine participating states on the East Coast fell by an average of 23 percent during the first three years of the program."

"Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade."