In a sign that New York City is getting serious about improving its poor recycling record, the city's Department of Sanitation is appointing a recycling industry innovator as its new "deputy commissioner for recycling and sustainability."

The department plans to formally announce next week that Ron Gonen, 37, is assuming the newly created position to help the Bloomberg administration meet its goal of at least doubling the city's recycling rate from the current 15 percent by the year 2017.

Mr. Gonen is a founder of Recyclebank, a company that awards points to consumers for recycling that they can redeem at local and national restaurants, stores and other retailers. He is also a co-founder of an environmental services firm that helps bring renewable energy to sport stadiums .

This is great news to get NYC crankin' towards the #1 slot in the country with regard to Green Initiatives. So far, San Francisco is kickin' our butts!

In the clammy depths of a southern Illinois coal mine lies the largest fossil forest ever discovered, at least 50 times as extensive as the previous contender.

Scientists are exploring dripping passages by the light of headlamps, mapping out an ecosystem from 307 million years ago, just before the world's first great forests were wiped out by global warming. This vast prehistoric landscape may shed new light on climate change today.

"Effectively you've got a lost world," said Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has explored the site. "It's the closest thing you'll find to time travel," he added.

Simply amazing....

Celebrate!

Respect the environment!

Save the planet for the next generations!

The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a "national teach-in on the environment" to the national media; persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair; and recruited Denis Hayes as national coordinator. Hayes built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land.

As a result, on the 22nd of April, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Check out the video from the very first Earth Day in 1970:

Standing on the deck of his rusted steel trawler, Naz Sanfilippo fumed about the latest bad news for New England fishermen: a decision by Whole Foods to stop selling any seafood it does not consider sustainable.

Starting Sunday, gray sole and skate, common catches in the region, will no longer appear in the grocery chain's artfully arranged fish cases. Atlantic cod, a New England staple, will be sold only if it is not caught by trawlers, which drag nets across the ocean floor, a much-used method here.

"It's totally maddening," Mr. Sanfilippo said. They're just doing it to make all the green people happy."

No, Mr. Sanfilippo, they're doing it so that our kids have fish to eat when they grow up...that's why they're doing it.

Good for Whole Foods!

62% of Americans now believe that man-made climate change is occurring, according to the biannual National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, commissioned by the Brookings Institute.

That's up from the low of 50% in spring 2010, but it's still far down from the 75% who believed it in 2008.

A majority of Americans (65%) also want mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions, but there's still a partisan divide. 82% of Democrats favor it, but only 50% of Republicans do, according to the latest Gallup poll.

The conclusion: The GOP is not representing the public in its outright denial of climate change and related action. GOP lawmakers oppose carbon emissions controls much more than their constituents.

Indeed, the GOP (aka Republican) representatives are not properly representing the 50% of their constituents who want to take action to combat Climate Change. When will this change?

A monster "tornado" big enough to swallow a hundred Earths has been spied on the sun, according to astronomers who analyzed recent images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

"The structure is huge ... and the velocity of the material is several tens to hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour," said Xing Li, an astronomer at Aberystwyth University in Wales, who co-authored a new study describing the vortex.

"It is a real gem of an event to fire the imagination -- and it is a good way to study magnetic structures in the sun's atmosphere."

A real gem, indeed! Make sure to check out the video here.

At noon, local time, James Cameron's "vertical torpedo" sub broke the surface of the western Pacific, carrying the National Geographic explorer and filmmaker back from the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep -- Earth's deepest, and perhaps most alien, realm.

The first human to reach the 6.8-mile-deep (11-kilometer-deep) undersea valley solo, Cameron arrived at the bottom with the tech to collect scientific data, specimens, and visions unthinkable in 1960, when the only other manned Challenger Deep dive took place, according to members of the National Geographic expedition.

Before surfacing about 300 miles (500 kilometers) southwest of Guam, Cameron spent hours hovering over Challenger Deep's desert -- like seafloor and gliding along its cliff walls, the whole time collecting samples and video.

Among the 2.5-story-tall sub's tools are a sediment sampler, a robotic claw, a "slurp gun" for sucking up small seacreatures for study at the surface, and temperature, salinity, and pressure gauges. (See pictures of Cameron's sub.)

It's been FIFTY years since a man was that deep in the ocean:

Retired U.S. Navy Capt. Don Walsh, who descended to Challenger Deep in 1960, said he was pleased to hear that Cameron had reached the underwater valley safely.

"That was a grand moment, to welcome him to the club," Walsh, said in a telephone interview from the sub-support ship.

"There're only three of us in it, and one of them -- late Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard -- "is dead. Now it's just Jim and myself. "

Incredible!

About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.

If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.

And which state is the most prone for massive disruption along the coast because of Global Warming?

By far the most vulnerable state is Florida, the new analysis found, with roughly half of the nation's at-risk population living near the coast on the porous, low-lying limestone shelf that constitutes much of that state. But Louisiana, California, New York and New Jersey are also particularly vulnerable, researchers found, and virtually the entire American coastline is at some degree of risk.

Climate Central has the skinny, along with a handy-dandy "search by zip code" feature which allows you to see if your house will be affected.

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Make sure to visit The Good Guide before your next consumer purchase!

The Bloomberg administration has set a goal of doubling the amount of garbage it diverts from landfills over the next five years.

"If we're going to be the most innovative city in the world, we also have to be the greenest – because that's how you attract the most talented individuals and most forward-looking companies," Mayor Bloomberg is expected to say in his prepared remarks.

Well...duh!

The efforts still fall far short of what many other American cities are doing, but environmentalists who have followed the New York's waste management over the years said they were cautiously optimistic.

"It's encouraging to hear the mayor's personal commitment to issues that have not received the attention that they've deserved," said Eric A. Goldstein, a senior lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "As always, it's the details of the plan and the ability to implement them that's the challenge."

The fact that you can't recycle #5 plastics (like yogurt cups) in New York City is just ridiculous, of course. C'mon, Bloomie...speed it up!

Here's a sampling:

6) Fishing line: Mail to Berkley Recycling, which turns it into fish habitat structures: 1900 18th Street; Spirit Lake, IA 51360.

10) Plastic packaging: Many pack-and-ship stores will take packing peanuts and bubble wrap. For drop-off locations for foam blocks, contact the Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyclers.

12) "Technotrash": Organizations and schools can earn money for recycling ink cartridges and small electronics like cell phones and iPods through ProjectKOPEG.com. Recycle a large box of CDs, DVDs, jewel cases, audio and video tapes, small electronics, and ink cartridges for $30 (includes postage) through Green Disk, 800/305-GREENDISK, GreenDisk.com.

Now stop dumpin' and get recyclin'!

By 2100, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth's land surface and will drive the conversion of nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type - such as forest, grassland or tundra - toward another, according to a new NASA and university computer modeling study.

This section of the report was particularly troubling:

To study the sensitivity of Earth's ecological systems to climate change, the scientists used a computer model that predicts the type of plant community that is uniquely adapted to any climate on Earth. This model was used to simulate the future state of Earth's natural vegetation in harmony with climate projections from 10 different global climate simulations. These simulations are based on the intermediate greenhouse gas scenario in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. That scenario assumes greenhouse gas levels will double by 2100 and then level off. The U.N. report's climate simulations predict a warmer and wetter Earth, with global temperature increases of 3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 4 degrees Celsius) by 2100, about the same warming that occurred following the Last Glacial Maximum almost 20,000 years ago, except about 100 times faster. Under the scenario, some regions become wetter because of enhanced evaporation, while others become drier due to changes in atmospheric circulation.

Yes, the earth has warmed up before naturally, but never at the pace that's happening now. And this is what human-induced Climate Change deniers don't get: we're warming up the planet 100 times faster than has ever occurred before!

Let's hope we can wake up before it's too late...

The so-called Durban platform is a promise to negotiate a new climate deal by 2015 to replace the Kyoto protocol and take effect in 2020. It's a commitment to "a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties." (If this doesn't strike you as faintly ridiculous, you've been spending too much time at the UN.)

In essence, all the parties agreed to sit down during the next session and actually hammer out a legally-binding document that all polluters would be beholden to. But is that going to happen, and should they just be focused on reducing emissions --- or setting new policies?

Negotiations that focus on setting targets for emissions are unlikely to succeed, if only because the levels of emissions reflect forces -- economic growth, fuel costs, technology breakthroughs (or their absence) -- over which governments have limited control.

Instead of agreeing to numerical emissions targets, governments could pledge to adopt "greener" policies. They could, for example, set efficiency standards for buildings or cars, or impose a carbon tax."Especially when it comes to countries that are growing rapidly, it's much easier for them to make promises about policies and measures than about emissions outputs," says David Victor, director of UCSD's Laboratory on International Law & Regulation.

Well, there are some optimists:

To be sure, as the optimists argue, this is the first time that the governments of countries that are the biggest carbon emitters -- China, the United States, the EU and India -- have agreed to negotiate legally binding restrictions. That's a big change from the terms of the Kyoto protocol, which essentially excluded developing countries, among them China, the world's biggest carbon emitter.

Fingers are crossed but breath is not held. There is a long way to go on this thing, that's for sure.

The anonymous hacker who shook the world of climate science two years ago by posting a trove of stolen e-mails delivered a new batch on Tuesday, stirring up climate-change contrarians a little more than a week before global negotiations on greenhouse gases are to begin in Durban, South Africa.

But from the source (University of East Anglia), we have this:

If genuine, (the sheer volume of material makes it impossible to confirm at present that they are all genuine) these emails have the appearance of having been held back after the theft of data and emails in 2009 to be released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption to the imminent international climate talks.

This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change when that science has been vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and number of studies -- including, most recently, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group.

As in 2009, extracts from emails have been taken completely out of context. Following the previous release of emails scientists highlighted by the controversy have been vindicated by independent review, and claims that their science cannot or should not be trusted are entirely unsupported. They, the University and the wider research community have stood by the science throughout, and continue to do so.

And from RealClimate:

The blogosphere is abuzz with the appearance of a second tranche of the emails stolen from CRU just before thanksgiving in 2009. Our original commentary is still available of course (CRU Hack, CRU Hack: Context, etc.), and very little appears to be new in this batch. Indeed, even the out-of-context quotes aren't that exciting, and are even less so in-context.

A couple of differences in this go around are worth noting: the hacker was much more careful to cover their tracks in the zip file they produced -- all the file dates are artificially set to Jan 1 2011 for instance, and they didn't bother to hack into the RealClimate server this time either. Hopefully they have left some trails that the police can trace a little more successfully than they've been able to thus far from the previous release.

More of Much Ado About Nothing...again.

At least some of the weather extremes being seen around the world are consequences of human-induced climate change and can be expected to worsen in coming decades, a United Nations panel reported on Friday.

It is particularly likely that greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity have already led to more record-high temperatures and fewer record lows, as well as to more extremes of precipitation and to greater coastal flooding, the report said.

Whether inland flooding is getting worse because of human influence is murkier, the report said. Nor can any firm conclusion be drawn at this point about the human influence on hurricanes, typhoons, hail storms or tornadoes.

And where's the largest economy (U.S.) in the world (more than twice as large as the next economy - China) stand on this issue? It's nowhere to be found:

In 2008, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, warned about man-made global warming and supported legislation to curb emissions. After he was elected, President Obama promised "a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change," and arrived cavalry-like at the 2009 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen to broker a global pact.

But two years later, now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.

Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified, President Obama now talks about "green jobs" mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the administration is fighting to exempt United States airlines from Europe's new plan to charge them for CO2 emissions when they land on the continent. It also seems poised to eventually approve a nearly 2,000-mile-long pipeline, from Canada down through the United States, that will carry a kind of oil. Extracting it will put relatively high levels of emissions into the atmosphere.

"In Washington, 'climate change' has become a lightning rod, it's a four-letter word," said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan's Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.

Yup. Completely absent in the global dialogue on global Climate Change is the U.S. All while the planet cooks.