Mother Nature Network: Antarctic warming has been a boon for one large colony of Adélie penguins, a finding that's surprising scientists. A recent study found that over the last 60 years, a colony of the birds on Beaufort Island in the Ross Sea, south of New Zealand, increased by 84 percent, from 35,000 breeding pairs to 64,000 breeding pairs. This increase has come as glaciers have retreated from the island, leaving more bare, snow-free ground, where the penguins make their nests, according to the study, published this...

ScienceDaily: Isolated coral reefs can recover from catastrophic damage as effectively as those with nearby undisturbed neighbours, a long-term study by marine biologists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) has shown. Scott Reef, a remote coral system in the Indian Ocean, has largely recovered from a catastrophic mass bleaching event in 1998, according to the study published in Science today. The study challenges conventional...

Reuters: With the warming U.S. Arctic region poised for greater oil and mining development, the White House needs to develop a national strategy that can take environmental decisions on a larger scale, a report issued Thursday concluded. The study recommends greater coordination between federal, state and local agencies to better manage resources in Alaska, said the U.S. Department of Interior's Alaska Interagency Working Group in its report that was presented to President Barack Obama. "It is imperative...

Reuters: A "rank" odor that has spread across parts of greater New Orleans may be linked to a leak from the 192,500-barrel-per-day Chalmette refinery, the U.S. Coast Guard investigating the smell said on Thursday. Chalmette, a joint venture between Exxon Mobil Corp and Venezuela's national oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), reported a leak early Wednesday morning but it had been quickly contained at the plant, the Coast Guard said. "Chalmette Refinery has worked with (the Louisiana Department...

LiveScience: A new and rare ice core record of tropical temperatures highlights changes in the enfants terribles of world climate, the El Niño/La Niña–Southern Oscillation. The climate record comes from Peru's stunning Cordillera Oriental mountain range, home to Quelccaya, the world's largest tropical ice cap. Researchers trekked to an altitude of more than 18,000 feet (5,600 meters) to probe the ice. The two ice cores (or cylinders of ice) drilled from the Quelccaya hold 1,800 years of climate history,...

Deep Green Resistance: As radicals, we believe that another world--a world without patriarchy, white supremacism, capitalism, colonialism, or ecocide--is possible. But in the face of the reality in which we live our day to day lives, it can become difficult to remember not only the possibility of successful resistance to power, but also its rich and proud history, of which we are a part. This is all the more true when we recognize that a potent resistance movement will have to include militant, underground resistance....

Minnesota Public Radio: Last year was an expensive year for insurers. Global economic losses from natural and man-made disasters totaled $186 billion. Extreme weather events in the United States were the most expensive -- Hurricane Sandy alone caused $70 billion worth of damage. On Climate Cast, Kerri Miller and MPR News' Chief Meteorologist Paul Huttner talked about the economic impact of climate change. Here is an edited transcript of their conversation: Kerri Miller: We've been reading a report from the international...

ScienceDaily: Adélie penguins may actually benefit from warmer global temperatures, the opposite of other polar species, according to a breakthrough study by an international team led by University of Minnesota Polar Geospatial Center researchers. The study provides key information affirming hypothetical projections about the continuing impact of environmental change. Researchers from the United States and New Zealand used a mix of old and new technology studying a combination of aerial photography beginning...

Yale Environment 360: In most major rivers in the U.S., maintaining some semblance of the integrity of migratory fish runs past hydropower dams is dependent upon the fish using ladders and elevators as freely as do two-legged humans. But is this asking too much? Six colleagues and I undertook a study of the success -- or, rather, failure -- of Atlantic salmon, American shad, river herring, and other species in migrating from the sea to their spawning grounds past a gauntlet of dams on three rivers in the northeastern...

LiveScience: Coral reefs may be more independent and resilient than previously thought. New research shows that an isolated reef off the northwest coast of Australia that was severely damaged by a period of warming in 1998 has regenerated in a very short time to become nearly as healthy as it was before. What surprises scientists, though, is that the reef regenerated by itself, found a study published today (April 4) in the journal Science. Until now, scientists have thought that damaged reefs depend on...

Planet Earth: The summer melting season in the Antarctic Peninsula has lengthened over the last 60 years, new research shows. This is contributing to sea-level rise, and may be linked to the rapid break-up of ice shelves in the area. The Antarctic Peninsula, a mountainous finger of land pointing northwards towards South America, is warming much faster than the rest of Antarctica. Temperatures have risen by almost 3°C since the 1950s -- three times faster than the global average. Scientists think this...

Guardian: Just nine per cent of the millions of tonnes of fish caught by China's giant fishing fleet in African and other international waters is officially reported to the UN, say researchers using a new way to estimate the size and value of catches. Fisheries experts have long considered that the catches reported by China to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO) are low but the scale of the possible deception shocked the authors. "The study shows the extent of the looting of Africa, where...

ScienceDaily: Last September, at the end of the northern hemisphere summer, the Arctic Ocean's icy cover shrank to its lowest extent on record, continuing a long-term trend and diminishing to about half the size of the average summertime extent from 1979 to 2000. During the cold and dark of Arctic winter, sea ice refreezes and achieves its maximum extent, usually in late February or early March. According to a NASA analysis, this year the annual maximum extent was reached on Feb. 28 and it was the fifth lowest...

ScienceDaily: More useful projections of sea level are possible despite substantial uncertainty about the future behavior of massive ice sheets, according to Princeton University researchers. In two recent papers in the journals Nature Climate Change and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers present a probabilistic assessment of the Antarctic contribution to 21st-century sea-level change. Their methodology folds observed changes and models of different complexity into unified...

ScienceDaily: If the sheet of ice covering Greenland were to melt in its entirety tomorrow, global sea levels would rise by 24 feet. Three million cubic kilometers of ice won't wash into the ocean overnight, but researchers have been tracking increasing melt rates since at least 1979. Last summer, however, the melt was so large that similar events show up in ice core records only once every 150 years or so over the last four millennia. "In July 2012, a historically rare period of extended surface melting...

ScienceDaily: A huge pool of warm water that stretched out from Indonesia over to Africa and South America four million years ago suggests climate models might be too conservative in forecasting tropical changes. Present in the Pliocene era, this giant mass of water would have dramatically altered rainfall in the tropics, possibly even removing the monsoon. Its decay and the consequential drying of East Africa may have been a factor in Hominid evolution. Published in Nature today, the missing data for this...

Scientific American: The last time the Earth enjoyed greenhouse gas levels like those of today was roughly 4 million years ago, during an era known as the Pliocene. The extra heat of average temperatures as much as 4 degrees Celsius warmer turned the tropical oceans into a nice warm pool of bathwater, as noted by new research published in Nature on April 4. By analyzing the ratio of magnesium and calcium in the shells of microscopic animals found in long cores of mud from the deep ocean, the researchers confirmed...

Bloomberg: Judy Aiello and her husband, Michael, settled 20 years ago at the New Jersey shore in a 1950s-era development with their backyard on a lagoon leading to Manahawkin Bay. Five months after Hurricane Sandy sent a surge of water through the Beach Haven West neighborhood, about 35 miles north of Atlantic City, the Aiello house is more of a construction zone than a home. Damaged exterior siding lets in rain, and most of the floors are newly placed plywood, minus carpet or tile. Governor Chris Christie,...

Radio Australia: Religious leaders in the Pacific have been told they aren't doing enough to fight climate change. In Fiji religious leaders have gathered for a summit and the region's leading scientists were also there to make presentations. Taholo Kami is the Regional Director for the Oceania Program of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. He says he told the summit that religious leaders in the region focus too much on the after-life, and not enough on the state of the planet here and...

New Scientist: Call it a tale of two poles. While sea ice in the Arctic is vanishing fast, the extent of Antarctic ice has increased. Good explanations for the growth of ice in the Southern Ocean have been hard to find, but now the problem may have been cracked. Counter-intuitively, it seems global warming may be cooling southern surface waters. Nobody predicted that the fate of ice at each pole would take such different paths in just 30 years, with Arctic sea ice dropping more than 15 per cent, even as Antarctic...