Indian Country Today: Ocean-surface temperatures from Maine to North Carolina have shot to their highest in 150 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on April 25. "Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest ever recorded in both long-term observational and short-term remote sensing time series," said NOAA in a statement containing data from the agency's Northeast Fisheries Science Center. "These exceptionally high...

ClimateWire: In the late 1990s, the Hydraulics Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography nearly closed. The lab, founded in 1964, had lost its permanent funding. Grant Deane, a physical oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego, stepped up to head the lab and rescue it from a possible shutdown. "I was a user of the facility at that time, but I had a broader vision for what could be done beyond my own work," Deane said. Atmospheric chemist Kimberly Prather, who has just shed new...

Toronto Star: Alberta has turned its eye to Canada’s Arctic as its latest possible avenue to pipe oil out and into the global market. The province has backed a $50,000 feasibility study to see if it’s physically and financially viable to pump the oilsands bitumen to Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., on the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean. “We’re looking at market access in all directions,” said Mike Feenstra, press secretary for Alberta Energy Minister Ken Hughes. The province says $30 billion in oilsands revenue...

New York Times: A proposal to buy the damaged homes of New Yorkers who want to relocate after Hurricane Sandy is finding few takers, as most residents opt to rebuild, state officials said on Friday. “It’s up to the homeowner, and the vast bulk of homeowners are deciding to stay right where they are and rebuild,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said at a news conference in Albany. The state has allocated an initial sum of $171 million to buy homes in low-lying areas, part of an ambitious effort by Mr. Cuomo to reshape coastal...

ScienceDaily: Researchers at Florida State University have developed a new metric to measure seasonal Atlantic tropical cyclone activity that focuses on the size of storms in addition to the duration and intensity, a measure that may prove important when considering a hurricane's potential for death and destruction. The 2012 hurricane was only a Category 2 storm on the often referenced Saffir-Simpson scale when it became the largest hurricane on record, killing 285 people in its path in seven different countries...

OnEarth: Today marks the deadline for public comments on a genetically modified salmon currently under review by the Food and Drug Administration. If approved, the fish will be the first transgenic animal ever to enter the human food supply. Some say it’s about time. In an op-ed that appeared last month in the New York Times under the title “Don’t Be Afraid of Genetic Modification,” science writer Emily Anthes explained that the company behind the fish, Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies, has been...

ScienceDaily: The chemical element bromine, whose compounds contribute significantly to the depletion of ozone in the lower atmosphere, is also released in polar regions to a great extent from snow on land. This is the result reached by an international research team of scientists from the Institute of Environmental Physics of Heidelberg University and colleagues from the USA, who performed measurements and sampling together in Alaska. Until now, science has assumed that sea ice was the sole source of bromine...

Scientific American: Climate scientists may have to rethink some of their old assumptions about carbon. US and European researchers have just established that black carbon, soot and biochar -- the burnt remains from countless forest fires -- doesn't stay in the soil indefinitely. Around 27 million tons of the stuff gets dissolved in water and washed down the rivers into the oceans each year. Black carbon or biochar has been hailed as one possible way of limiting greenhouse gas emissions, by taking carbon out of...

ScienceDaily: Sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest recorded in 150 years, according to the latest Ecosystem Advisory issued by NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC). These high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are the latest in a trend of above average temperature seen during the spring and summer seasons, and part of a pattern of elevated temperatures occurring in the Northwest Atlantic, but not seen elsewhere in the ocean basin over the...

Guardian: Australia's environment minister said he never saw advice that a proposed coal port posed "extreme" risks – including threats to endangered turtles and a species of dolphin – at the Great Barrier Reef. Campaigners said Tony Burke should have ruled out the Fitzroy Terminal as soon as the government received the strongly worded warnings, rather than allow the company to undertake a lengthy environmental impact statement. But a spokeswoman said the minister had not seen the 2011 advice and the...

New Scientist: IT CONTAINS most of the world's land and 90 per cent of its people, but that is not why the northern hemisphere is consistently hotter than its southern counterpart. It turns out that ocean circulation is to blame. The temperature disparity was first recorded by early 16th century explorers, who noticed icebergs floating in the southern hemisphere at latitudes where they wouldn't have been in the north. The northern hemisphere is currently 1.5 °C warmer on average than the southern hemisphere....

Guardian: A new initiative to make the labelling of sustainable fish clearer and more consistent for consumers will be launched by industry and retailers on Friday, with the backing of the Fish Fight campaign setup by celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingttall. The voluntary code of conduct by the Sustainable Seafood Coalition (SSC), whose supermarket and supplier members represent over 80% of fish sales in the UK, should mean "consumers will be able to shop safe in the knowledge that [sustainability] claims...

Green Car Congress: The US Department of the Interior will offer more than 21 million acres offshore Texas for oil and gas exploration and development in a lease sale that will include all available unleased areas in the Western Gulf of Mexico Planning Area. Proposed Lease Sale 233, scheduled to take place in New Orleans in August, will be the third offshore auction under the Administration’s Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2012-2017 (Five Year Program). The sale builds on the first two auctions...

Grist: Officials in Texas continue to investigate the cause of the explosion last week at West Fertilizer that killed 15 people and injured 200. The explosion, which could be felt up to 50 miles away, obliterated the facility and destroyed houses. It was fueled by a massive stockpile of nitrogen fertilizer - up to 270 tons of ammonium nitrate, a solid fertilizer that comes in the form of a powder or pellets, and over 50,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia gas. But while the explosion last week was spectacular...

Environmental News Network: The Hawaiian Islands ecoregion includes one of the world's wettest places, the slopes of Mount Wai?ale?ale, which average 460 in (12,000 mm) of rainfall per year. However, almost imperceptibly, rainfall over the Hawaiian Islands has been declining since 1978, and this trend is likely to continue with global warming through the end of this century, according to a team of scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) and the University of Colorado at Boulder. This latest Hawaii rainfall study,...

New York Times: The cleanup of New York after Hurricane Sandy has cost taxpayers at least twice as much as the national post-disaster average, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, which city officials selected to help handle the huge job. Federal officials defended the exceptionally high cost — so far about $177 million for the nearly one million cubic yards of debris handled by the Army Corps — saying it was justified by the complicated assignment of quickly disposing of debris in the midst of a major urban...

Guardian: Mining shale oil under the Great Barrier Reef is likely to be banned by Australia's federal Labor government as tensions rise over the environmental impact of the booming oil and gas industry on the coastline beside the reef. In February, the conservative Queensland state government lifted a moratorium on the shale oil industry in most places along the coast to allow companies to assess whether the US shale oil boom could be replicated in Australia. Power firm Queensland Energy Resources is...

LiveScience: The remains of a real-life journey to the center of the Earth are preserved in a South Pacific volcano, a new study suggests. The lava that erupted from the Cook Islands volcano, called Mangaia, contains a few tiny grains of sulfide, a mineral, with a peculiar ratio of sulfur isotopes, according to research published in today's (April 24) issue of the journal Nature. The unusual ratio could only have formed before oxygen-breathing life appeared on Earth 2.45 billion years ago. Isotopes are versions...

Mongabay: The sight of a clownfish wriggling through the stinging tentacles of its anemone is a familiar and seemingly well-understood one to most people--the stinging anemone provides a protective home for the clownfish who is immune to such stings, and in turn the clownfish chases away any polyp-eating sunfish eyeing the anemone's tentacles for a meal. But recent research has shown that all that clownfish wriggling significantly helps to oxygenate the anemone at night, when oxygen levels in the water are...

LiveScience: Dana Nuccitelli is an environmental scientist at a private environmental consulting firm in the Sacramento, Calif., area and a contributor to Skeptical Science. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Most discussions of global warming focus on the temperature of the air at the Earth's surface, where over the past decade warming has slowed. This has resulted in misleading declarations that global warming has "paused." However, failing to consider the heating...