Climate Science

Climate change may have killed 4 out of 5 seal pups in 2011

North Atlantic sea ice in areas where harp seals breed has declined as much as 6 percent every 10 years since 1979, according to scientists from Duke University and the […]

Baby sloths in a bath, just sayin’

A friend of mine just spent some time helping out at the Sloth Sanctuary in Costa Rica, and I am OVERWHELMINGLY jealous. And you will be too, after watching this video that is going around today for some reason even though it is only one of many cute baby sloth videos on YouTube. Seriously, this is NSFW, in the sense that you may fall down a rabbit hole of baby sloth videos that will wreck your productivity.

Critical List: Huge wind farm to rise in Wyoming; doomsday clock ticks forward

The Obama administration is speeding towards approval for a huge wind project, 1,000 turbines strong, in Wyoming.

GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon cribbed text for her op-ed on Keystone XL from the website of pipeline builder Transcanada.

There's a second tar-sands pipeline, Northern Gateway, and that one faces strong opposition, as well.

Top-secret snake!

This newly discovered snake species, named Matilda's Horned Viper after the discoverer's 7-year-old daughter, lives in Tanzania somewhere. Beyond that, who can say? The answer is nobody (except Matilda's dad Tim Davenport, who took the photo above, and maybe a handful of other people from the Wildlife Conservation Society), because the snake lives in an undisclosed location. The viper is so endangered that conservationists are keeping its exact habitat a secret, out of fear that it will attract trophy hunters and exotic animal poachers.

FAA gets confused, tries to ground cranes

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has decided to allow a whooping crane migration to continue, after initially trying to halt it. PLANES, guys. You are in charge of PLANES.

Actually, the FAA was only grounding the cranes as a byproduct of grounding planes -- specifically, the ultralight craft that guide the endangered birds on their migration route. Whooping crane chicks raised in captivity, which many of them are since the birds are so threatened, don't have parents to demonstrate migration to them. So conservationists from Operation Migration have the babies imprint on pilots dressed as birds. Then the chicks follow the ultralights on the 1,200-mile flight.

Evidently the FAA doesn't find this as adorable as I do, because they're now quibbling over whether the pilots are allowed to keep training their flocks of babies.

Critical List: Canadian minister hates tar-sands opposition; airlines charge for free carbon permits

Canada's natural resources minister is not happy that all of you with your "radical ideological agenda" think Canada's turning into a creepy petrostate.

Japan is releasing those three whaling activists who boarded a Japanese whaling vessel.

Carbon emissions are delaying the next ice age.

Caving on Keystone: Still a dumb idea

Will Obama stick to his guns and reject the Keystone XL pipeline? If he's smart he will.

Critical List: No Grand Canyon uranium mining; Supreme Court case on wetlands

The Obama administration will announce today that it's limiting uranium mining near the Grand Canyon.

And the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a major environmental case in which the Sacketts, a couple backed by the conservative property rights group Pacific Legal Foundation, claim the EPA unfairly restricted their use of the property by determining that it was a wetland.

A Japanese whaling ship is holding three activists who boarded it to protest its activities.

Is there a bubble in shale gas stakes?

An act of dog: Why climate change is like walking Fido [VIDEO]

Climate deniers in your family? They can't resist a video illustrating the relationship between climate change and weather with a man walking his dog.

St. Louis Zoo builds love hotel for salamanders

Ozark hellbenders, aka "snot otters" and "lasagna sides," are among the world's largest and least cute salamanders. Looking at them, it’s probably not a big surprise that they’re having a hard time breeding -- although inexplicably, scientists think it’s NOT because of their pancake heads or beady little eyes, but some problem in the natural environment. Now that there are fewer than 600 hellbenders left in Ozark rivers, scientists at the Saint Louis Zoo decided to step in and create a place for the salamanders to get it on.

The salamanders' love nest is a simulated river built to bring out amorous feelings in hideous beasties:

The zoo has built a kind of honeymoon resort for salamanders, assembling a mini water treatment plant and carefully tweaking water chemistry to recreate their cold, fast-flowing Ozark streams — minus any distracting predators or pollution. ...