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August 10, 2016

Environmental Headlines for the Houston Region: August 10, 2016

  1. Web tool lets anyone see effects of climate change at home ( Harvey Rice – Houston Chronicle, 8/8/2016) A new web tool allows anyone to find out how climate change will affect the city where they live. Climate Explorer, the new tool released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week, offers downloadable maps, graphs, and tables of projected temperature, precipitation, and related climate information projected to the end of the century. The web tool shows climate information by zip code, city or county with projections based on high and low levels of climate-changing emissions. One of the maps is split by a line and shows temperatures with lower emissions on one side and temperatures with higher emissions on the other. The line can be dragged left or right to reveal the differences for any location in the United States. www.houstonchronicle.com
  2. Amid worrisome Zika news, longer mosquito season season found across the US (Bill Davidson – Texas Climate Network News, 8/3/2016) There’s been a burst of worrisome news about the mosquito-borne Zika virus in recent days. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Monday that pregnant women should avoid visiting part of the Miami area where 14 people contracted Zika, which can cause severe birth defects. State health officials said the infected individuals probably caught the disease locally. The CDC said last week that Zika could affect as many as 10,000 pregnant women in Puerto Rico this year. The New York Times reported that the Zika epidemic that began in South American is  “raging in Puerto Rico — and the island’s response is in chaos.” Amid these and other recent Zika developments, Climate Central, a nonprofit research and reporting organization, released a report concluding that the warming climate, bringing higher humidity with higher temperatures in many places, has lengthened the mosquito-breeding season across most of the contiguous 48 states. www.texasclimatenews.org
  3. Toxic Landfill Plan Near Colonia Raises Racism Charges (Anneri Pattani – The Texas Tribune, 8/2/2016) LAREDO — Since Alejandro Obregón moved to a colonia along the Texas-Mexico border 20 years ago, he has fought for basic necessities like clean water and paved roads. Now a private developer wants to build a landfill just a few miles from his backyard, and Obregón is fighting again for the interests of his family and hundreds of colonia residents. Local ranch owner Carlos “C.Y.” Benavides III and his family’s company have asked the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for permission to build a 660-acre landfill about four miles south of the colonias and 20 miles east of Laredo. It would become one of the seven largest-capacity landfills in the state, accepting trash and some toxic refuse from across Texas, other states and Mexico. Obregón fears winds will blow toxic waste from the landfill into his neighborhood’s homes, and he worries about residents, many impoverished and lacking regular access to medical care, getting respiratory illnesses. He will fight “because it’s my life. It’s my kids’ lives. It’s my wife’s life,” said Obregón, who is considering a hunger strike to protest. www.texastribune.org
  4. Looking, Quickly, for the Fingerprints of Climate Change (Henry Fountain – The New York Times 08/01/2016) When days of heavy rain in late May caused deadly river flooding in France and Germany, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh got to work.Dr. van Oldenborgh is not an emergency responder or a disaster manager, but a climate researcher with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. With several colleagues around the world, he took on the task of answering a question about the floods, one that arises these days whenever extreme weather occurs: Is climate change to blame?For years, most meteorologists and climate scientists would answer that question with a disclaimer, one that was repeated so often it became like a mantra: It is not possible to attribute individual weather events like storms, heat waves or droughts to climate change. But increasingly over the past decade, researchers have been trying to do just that, aided by better computer models, more weather data and, above all, improved understanding of the science of a changing climate. Attribution studies, as they are called, can take many months, in large part because of the time needed to run computer models. Now scientists like Dr. van Oldenborgh, who is part of a group called World Weather Attribution, are trying to do such studies much more quickly, as close to the event as possible. www.newyorktimes.com

EcoNotes

  • 24 July
    • Hot-weather records keep being set – and more look to be in the making (Bill Dawson – Texas Climate News)
      http://texasclimatenews.org
  • 22 July
    • Houston’s development boom and reduction of wetlands leave region flood prone (Kim McGuire – Houston Chronicle)
      www.houstonchronicle.com
    • Weekly Roundup: In the Country’s Most Expensive Cities, It Takes Too Long to Build (Ryan Holleywell – The Urban Edge)
      http://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu
    • Texas ranch recognized for outstanding environmental stewardship (High Plains Journal)
      www.hpj.com
    • Earth Day Texas Unveils the First Ever ‘Earth Day Texas Expeditions’ (Environmental Protection)
      https://eponline.com
    • NOAA Fisheries Announces the Extension of the Gulf of Mexico Commercial Shrimp Permit Moratorium (Southeast Fishery Bulletin)
      http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov
  • 21 July
  • 20 July
  • 19 July
  • 18 July
  • 17 July
    • Pipeline leak near Exxon Mobil’s Baytown plant prompts evacuations (Lauren Carube – Houston Chronicle)
      www.chron.com
  • 15 July
    • Texas’ official sea turtle far below historical numbers (Harvey Rice – Houston Chronicle)
      www.houstonchronicle.com
    • Texas Gets Boost in New Mexico Water Fight (Jim Malewitz – The Texas Tribune)
      www.texastribune.org
  • 14 July
    • Community Design: How a New Pocket Park Came to the Near Northside (Kate Cairoli – OffCite)
      http://offcite.org
  • 13 July
    • Drainage Disasters: Fixing Houston’s Flooding Hotspots (Dave Fehling – Houston Public Media)
      www.houstonpublicmedia.org
  • 12 July
    • Supreme Court to Consider Report on Rio Grande Case (Susan Montoya Bryan – ABC News)
      http://abcnews.go.com
    • Cleanup continues from 2015 deadly flooding in Texas (Elizabeth Findell – Hastings Tribune)
      www.hastingstribune.com
  • 11 July
    • A perfect pair? Well, on climate policy, Texas and ExxonMobil rarely agree (Randy Lee Loftis – Texas Climate News)
      http://texasclimatenews.org