Let Them Eat Cake

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Green Jobs Are Obama’s Pipe Dream

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream.

Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.

http://www.nytimes.com/

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Would You Hire This Climate Detective?

Scientists Link Somalia Famine To Global Warming

Somalia, East Africa – As millions of people struggle to survive a famine in East Africa, it’s hard not to ask whether anyone saw this disaster coming. Chris Funk, one of the leading researchers of rainfall in the region, would answer yes.

As a climate scientist based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Funk is part of a team of researchers who studies weather in East Africa, where the lack of rain this year has caused tens of thousands of people to die, most of them children.

He said he thinks of himself as a “drought detective,” an analogy that captures the clue-gathering aspect of his work, if not the scale of the destruction he deals with. In more straightforward terms, he collects information about the climate from a variety of sources and uses it to try to identify the causes of droughts and make predictions about where and how droughts will strike in the future.

http://ournewsnow.com/

Some detective. The article below is from 1935, and took me almost half a minute to find.

The. country is financially poor. Practically the whole of its capital at present consists of stock, and periodically nearly one-third of this capital- is lost through drought

http://trove.nla.gov.au/


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Exceptional Drought In Southern New Mexico?

The US Drought Monitor shows southeastern New Mexico in an exceptional drought.

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DM_west.htm

Cloudcroft is located in the middle of the brown area, and has received rain on half of the days this month. This is what it looks like today.

http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/back40/1/show.html

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Obama Looks To Shut Down America Before He Leaves Office

Over the next 18 months, the Environmental Protection Agency will finalize a flurry of new rules to curb pollution from coal-fired power plants. Mercury, smog, ozone, greenhouse gases, water intake, coal ash—it’s all getting regulated. And, not surprisingly, some lawmakers are grumbling.

Industry groups such the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities, and the American Legislative Exchange Council have dubbed the coming rules “EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck.” The regulations, they say, will cost utilities up to $129 billion and force them to retire one-fifth of coal capacity. Given that coal provides 45 percent of the country’s power, that means higher electric bills, more blackouts and fewer jobs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

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Green Jobs In Oz

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports, “The only Australian company which manufactures solar cells is closing the operation. Ilex Solar has announced it will stop making the cells at its western Sydney facility, with 30 jobs to be lost.

http://thewinstonreview.com/

h/t to Dave G

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Hansen : “all hell is going to break loose”

“If we follow ‘business-as-usual’ growth of greenhouse gas emissions, I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several metres, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

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Polar Bears Desperately Seeking That Last Chunk Of Ice

http://www.arctic.io/observations/8/2011-08-18/5-N85.850886-E177.293776

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Shock News : Polar Bears Surviving An Ice-Free Hudson Bay

as we know the polar bear depends on sea ice for survival

http://globalwarmingisreal.com/

Right. Hudson Bay is ice-free for several months every summer

Aug 10th, 2011

Good numbers of  polar bears are showing up in and around the Churchill area

http://churchillpolarbears.org

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Brolly And Sunblock Summer Winding Down

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/18/floods-hit-bournemouth

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