Orlando Becomes 40th City to Commit to 100% Renewable Energy. “Today, Orlando takes its place on the regional, state and national stage as a forward-thinking city committed to a healthier, sustainable future,” said League of Women Voters of Orange County co-president Carol Davis. “This is a first, important step, and we plan to continue to support and encourage the City to follow with concrete measures that solidify this commitment.”
Orlando represents the 40th city in the U.S. to commit to move to 100 percent clean and renewable energy.
In June, Mayor Dyer signed onto the Sierra Club’s Mayors for 100% Clean Energy campaign and endorsed a vision of powering all of Orlando with 100 percent clean energy. “We stand in support with the Orlando City Commission, in realizing the importance of renewable energy to it residents, by taking the necessary actions to begin the transformation,” said Beverlye Colson Neal, president of the NAACP’s local branch.
In a letter sent to commissioners urging their support, First 50 acknowledged that Orlando has already taken significant steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, praising in particular Green Works Orlando and Smart ORL, which boosted Orlando down a path of clean-energy and sustainability.
Orlando’s vote was applauded by Phil Compton, senior organizing representative with the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 Campaign in Florida, and a member of the First 50 Coalition. “All across our state and our nation, cities are committing to a future powered by 100 percent clean and renewable energy for all,” Compton said. “Today, Orlando joins this growing movement of cities that are ready for 100 percent clean, renewable energy.

Fracking New Mexico: BP Just Found ‘Significant New Source of U.S. Natural Gas Supply’.
Earlier this week, BP announced it had discovered what it is labelling a “significant new source of U.S. natural gas supply” in New Mexico in the Mancos Shale, just across from the Colorado border. “We are delighted with the initial production rate of this well,” said Dave Lawler, CEO of BP’s U.S. Lower 48 onshore business. “This result supports our strategic view that significant resource potential exists in the San Juan Basin, and gives us confidence to pursue additional development of the Mancos Shale.”
For anyone fighting fracking, climate change and the shale industry in the U.S., it is significant because it could open up a whole new area of shale.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), “The Mancos Shale is a significant potential source of natural gas.”
Massive Fracking Explosion in New Mexico, 36 Oil Tanks Catch Fire – EcoWatch https://t.co/VOWZ2eLY7K @Earthworks @aafracking — EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) 1468531212.0 A report the USGS published last year concluded that the wider Mancos Shale basin “contains an estimated mean of 66 trillion cubic feet of shale natural gas, 74 million barrels of shale oil and 45 million barrels of natural gas liquids …
The previous estimate was just 1.6 trillion.
But BP still has significant hurdles to overcome in an area of complex geology with potential high costs. “Will they be able to repeat these results in another five wells?

Editor’s note:Conservation International is publishing stories from a new feature series, “South Africa side by side with nature.” In the series, we explore two South African landscapes where doing right by nature and doing right by people are the same.
Sinegugu Zukulu, CI’s program manager for the Umzimvubu River catchment, was born in the southernmost extent of the landscape he now works to improve — an expanse of rolling grasslands overlooking the Indian Ocean known as Pondoland.
“You have got to have a particular set of skills to be able to work successfully.” So what is his secret?
“Number one, being able to listen to the people.
Respect for the indigenous knowledge systems.
Being able to remind yourself that you don’t know it all.
Because if you are not humble, rural people are very quick to pick that up, and they will make your life very difficult and you will not achieve anything.
But if you come there with three mouths and one ear, then your work will not go very far.” In South Africa’s Eastern Cape conservationists are connecting with local communities through culture, science and shared values.
Read part four: “Two ears, one mouth” Jamey Anderson is a senior writer at Conservation International.
Sign up for email updates here.

Can Greenwashing Ever Be Good?.
A great example of this is boxed water — whether it comes in a plastic bottle or a carton, it still isn’t sustainable, and it shouldn’t be marketed as green.
Let’s take the boxed water example from above: It’s a plastic-lined paper box that has a plastic lid.
However, I consider this a win for the planet in the war against plastic pollution.
The amount of plastic in a Boxed Water Is Better carton is considerably less than your standard single-use plastic water bottle.
Why is boxed water better?
Normalizing Green Habits The best way greenwashing is helping our society change over time is by making sustainability a normality.
When consumers are walking around a supermarket, constantly seeing advertisements for eco-friendly products, it normalizes purchasing those products.
You get a sense of pride when a company tells you their product is helping something or someone, and you’re more likely to purchase through that company again when you need that product.
We shouldn’t be persecuting every single person who does every little thing wrong for the planet; instead, we should be praising every single positive thing.

It’s currently estimated that nearly half of deaths from heart disease, diabetes, and from stroke in the U.S. were tied to diet.
The average American eats about double the amount of protein they need, two-thirds of which comes from animal sources – and the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.)
emphasizes a high intake of meat, dairy, fat, sugar as well as refined, processed, and junk foods … so, we’re not exactly setting ourselves up for success here.
With growing information about how different foods are made and a growing knowledge of how these foods affect our bodies, as well as animals and the environment – more people are looking to make “better” choices.
But when it comes to deciphering which foods are better, things start to get a little tricky.
We know that we should eat our fruits and vegetables, but there is a lot of conflicting information about things like whether organic milk and cheese is better than conventional or if grass-fed meat and processed meat products are all bad for our health … and you can pretty much find studies (sometimes questionably funded studies) on either side saying that these foods can be helpful or harmful to our health.
Well – the latest episode of #EatForThePlanet with Nil Zacharias is sure to help!
In this podcast, Nil sits down with Dr. Michelle McMacken, a board certified internal medicine physician at Bellevue Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine.
She is an advocate for plant-based nutrition and has helped transform the lives of many of her patients by focusing on their food choices and guiding them to improve their overall well-being through healthy eating and lifestyle modifications.
Her methods have completely transformed the lives of many people – and the tips she gives are sure to win favors with vegans and meat-eaters alike!

But with the right camera—a hyperspectral one—you can pick up a whole lot more.
And these colors reflect even more detail about the scene: the gases coming out of the city, the health of the plants surrounding it, the species of algae coloring the water offshore.
Scientists love pointing hyperspectral cameras at the Earth to analyze things like crop health, or the mineral content of exposed soil.
So a private company called Satellogic wants to give scientists its data for free—the company plans to have 300 spectroscopic satellites in orbit by the early 2020s.
Kargieman won’t name any specific customers, but he says Satellogic serves ag and oil pretty heavily. “Well, for one, we see some trends in defunding Earth science research in the public sector, so we have a certain sense of responsibility to open up our data,” says Kargieman.
First, its satellites are already in orbit.
Next year it plans to launch 12 to 18 satellites, and another 60 in 2019.
Green points to the late, great Hyperion as a model for space-based, science-oriented imaging spectrometer: a souped-up hyperspectral imager.
Hyperion collected more than 200 spectral bands, in wavelengths ranging from 400 to 2,500 nanometers—that’s all of the visible light spectrum, and a nice chunk of infrared.

The gardener has a long, touchy-feely relationship with the soil.
It is a subterranean community that includes worms, insects, mites, other arthropods you’ve never heard of, amoebas, and fellow protozoa.
The bacteria convert nitrogen and other nutrients into forms the plants can use, often by getting devoured by other microbes.
Although some species are pests or nurture pests such as aphids, ants with their highly organized colonies are essential members of the soil biosphere.
Half the known species of mites live in the soil, where they feed on decaying plant litter.
Some nematodes eat soil bacteria and fungi, while others prefer to consume other soil arthropods and protozoa.
Their value to the garden is in converting nitrogen into a form that plants can use.
There can be as much as 100 times more bacteria around plant roots than elsewhere in the soil, and with good reason.
The plants feed them carbon sugars.
● Fungi: Fungi break down organic matter, which is why you will see mycelium strands in compost piles and under leaf litter.

“Then the phone went dead.” Smith and her son, her sisters and their kids, and her mother and grandmother had moved to Baton Rouge from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina flooding upended their lives.
“Every street we went down, as close as we could get to the home, there was water,” Smith said.
The victims include some of America’s most vulnerable residents, many of them poor, many of them living in households headed by single working women like Smith.
The amount of money that follows a disaster depends largely on the whims of Congress.
“This was not a well-covered disaster,” he said.
North Baton Rouge’s residents work as nurses, teachers, and in hospitality, often in low-paying to middle-class jobs.
The other people are still, well, many of these neighborhoods are still a disaster.” This storm and other disasters could make a poor state poorer still.
The recovery has been slow and difficult, with a poor and vulnerable state prioritizing the use of limited recovery funds to help its poorest and most vulnerable.
But he said aspects of the August storm were “consistent with climate change” and that both of the climate studies so far have shown it likely “had its fingerprints” on the disaster.
With mental health at stake, state officials are considering doing so — though their time is stretched as they scramble to contain flood fallout amid a famine of national compassion.

Editor’s note:Conservation International is publishing stories from a new feature series, “South Africa side by side with nature.” In the series, we explore two South African landscapes where doing right by nature and doing right by people are the same.
Sinegugu Zukulu, CI’s program manager for the Umzimvubu River catchment, was born in the southernmost extent of the landscape he now works to improve — an expanse of rolling grasslands overlooking the Indian Ocean known as Pondoland.
“You have got to have a particular set of skills to be able to work successfully.” So what is his secret?
“Number one, being able to listen to the people.
Respect for the indigenous knowledge systems.
Being able to remind yourself that you don’t know it all.
Because if you are not humble, rural people are very quick to pick that up, and they will make your life very difficult and you will not achieve anything.
But if you come there with three mouths and one ear, then your work will not go very far.” In South Africa’s Eastern Cape conservationists are connecting with local communities through culture, science and shared values.
Read part four: “Two ears, one mouth” Jamey Anderson is a senior writer at Conservation International.
Sign up for email updates here.

It’s currently estimated that nearly half of deaths from heart disease, diabetes, and from stroke in the U.S. were tied to diet.
The average American eats about double the amount of protein they need, two-thirds of which comes from animal sources – and the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.)
emphasizes a high intake of meat, dairy, fat, sugar as well as refined, processed, and junk foods … so, we’re not exactly setting ourselves up for success here.
With growing information about how different foods are made and a growing knowledge of how these foods affect our bodies, as well as animals and the environment – more people are looking to make “better” choices.
But when it comes to deciphering which foods are better, things start to get a little tricky.
We know that we should eat our fruits and vegetables, but there is a lot of conflicting information about things like whether organic milk and cheese is better than conventional or if grass-fed meat and processed meat products are all bad for our health … and you can pretty much find studies (sometimes questionably funded studies) on either side saying that these foods can be helpful or harmful to our health.
Well – the latest episode of #EatForThePlanet with Nil Zacharias is sure to help!
In this podcast, Nil sits down with Dr. Michelle McMacken, a board certified internal medicine physician at Bellevue Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine.
She is an advocate for plant-based nutrition and has helped transform the lives of many of her patients by focusing on their food choices and guiding them to improve their overall well-being through healthy eating and lifestyle modifications.
Her methods have completely transformed the lives of many people – and the tips she gives are sure to win favors with vegans and meat-eaters alike!

“Then the phone went dead.” Smith and her son, her sisters and their kids, and her mother and grandmother had moved to Baton Rouge from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina flooding upended their lives.
“Every street we went down, as close as we could get to the home, there was water,” Smith said.
The victims include some of America’s most vulnerable residents, many of them poor, many of them living in households headed by single working women like Smith.
The amount of money that follows a disaster depends largely on the whims of Congress.
“This was not a well-covered disaster,” he said.
North Baton Rouge’s residents work as nurses, teachers, and in hospitality, often in low-paying to middle-class jobs.
The other people are still, well, many of these neighborhoods are still a disaster.” This storm and other disasters could make a poor state poorer still.
The recovery has been slow and difficult, with a poor and vulnerable state prioritizing the use of limited recovery funds to help its poorest and most vulnerable.
But he said aspects of the August storm were “consistent with climate change” and that both of the climate studies so far have shown it likely “had its fingerprints” on the disaster.
With mental health at stake, state officials are considering doing so — though their time is stretched as they scramble to contain flood fallout amid a famine of national compassion.

Today, with help from The Nature Conservancy’s Christian Marks, success is closer than ever—which is good news for our floodplain forests, as well as our urban communities.
The devastation continued along the region’s riverbanks, where the elm had been an anchor species in the floodplain forests, providing critical habitat for wildlife and protecting human communities from rising waters during severe storms.
Labor of Love In the sweltering greenhouses, interns Colby and Bazluke methodically complete row after row of cuttings—about 270 by the end of the day.
“But seven varieties is not enough,” says Marks.
“We realized that we have to figure out how to get this species back, if we are truly going to restore these floodplains,” says Kim Lutz, director of the Connecticut River Program.
And, of course, his commitment to the elm.” Thanks to the help of dedicated interns and volunteers, Marks has planted elms at more than 30 sites in the Connecticut River watershed—3,300 seedlings from crosses at the Conservancy’s field trial plots in Vermont and more than 1,000 cuttings from clonal copies of the seven disease-resistant varieties.
“There’s something about planting a tree,” says Marks.
Several new restoration projects are about to get underway, including two in New Hampshire—one along the Ashuelot River in Swanzey and another along the Connecticut River in Colebrook.
With each sapling planted, hope will take root once again.
Hope for a future where the American elm once again rises high above the forest canopy along our riverbanks.

Editor’s note: Indigenous peoples make up approximately 5 percent of the world’s population (370 million people).
Though they act as stewards of nearly a quarter of Earth’s land and the vast majority of its wildlife, they still face critical challenges — including legal rights to their lands and natural resources.
On International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples — and the tenth anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — Human Nature is revisiting an interview with members of Conservation International’s (CI) Indigenous Advisory Group.
These leaders sat down with Minnie Degawan, the director of CI’s Indigenous and Traditional Peoples Program, to discuss the challenges and successes of indigenous peoples around the world.
David James, Guyana: I faced a lot of discrimination as a youth attending school in the capital, where not many indigenous people were.
Kittisak Rattanakrajangsri, Thailand: For those who doubt, the rights laid out for indigenous peoples aren’t special, they’re basic — we need them for survival, we need them to be recognized.
Kevin Iro, Cook Islands: If you’re a Cook Islander, you know the ocean is the lifeblood of your existence, so people should understand the fundamental connection that indigenous peoples have with the environment.
Our kids are in danger of losing that connection, and we want them to grow up understanding there’s also a living to be made in the Cook Islands as marine biologists, engineers and more — it’s not just about conservation, but having Cook Islanders engaged in wisely using the ocean’s resources.
Joenia Wapichana, Brazil: Indigenous peoples were once invisible to some societies.
Donate to Conservation International.

West Virginia’s governor wants a new subsidy for coal..
Among its major findings: America is warmer now than it has been in at least 1,500 years.
And the quickly melting Arctic will have significant consequences for the U.S. mainland.
There’s a bit of debate over whether the draft obtained by the Times was a true “leak,” as it was portrayed in the initial front-page story.
Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, one of the report’s lead authors, said on Twitter that versions of the document identical to the one the Times first published had been publicly available for months.
(In fact, outlets had already reported on previous drafts.)
The Times’ Brad Plumer said the newspaper updated its story after its initial publication with a version of the report that Hayhoe confirmed was not publicly available prior to Tuesday.
Several cabinet secretaries in charge of signing off on the report deny its findings.
If the goal of the scientists who contacted the Times was to gain publicity for their report — Hayhoe says it wasn’t her — that’s definitely worked.
“Leaking” climate science might be the only way to get it through government censors.

Toxicologist Albert Donnay says he’s found evidence a 1989 study commissioned by EPA on the health effects of carbon monoxide, which, if true, could call into question 25 years of regulations and billions of dollars on catalytic converters for automobiles.
“They claimed to find an effect when there wasn’t one,” Donnay told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Ad By PG&E EPA gave “primary consideration” to 1989 study put together by the Health Effects Institute (HEI) to replace a previous 1981 study that relied on fabricated data.
EPA’s been wildly successful in reducing carbon monoxide over the years.
EPA also used Aronow’s research.
The New England Journal of Medicine also published the study in 1989, and medical journal Environmental Health Perspectives published the study two years later.
HEI researchers, unsurprisingly, found that “low levels of carboxyhemoglobin [carbon monoxide] exacerbate [angina] during graded exercise in subjects with coronary artery disease.” EPA heralded the HEI study, and relied on it to promulgate its 1994 carbon monoxide standard.
The agency gave the HEI study “primary consideration” in its 2011 review of carbon monoxide regulations.
‘Extensive Evidence Of Data Fabrication’ First Donnay would need the raw data HEI researchers used in their study, but that proved more difficult than expected.
al. printed two different sets of summary results in their HEI report and a third in their New England Journal of Medicine article that came out the same week,” Donnay told TheDCNF.

The Effects of the Bray Climate and Solar Cycle.
We call the warm period from 8000 BC to 3500BC the Holocene Climatic Optimum and the cooling period from 3500 BC to the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) in the late 19th century the Neoglacial.
The Bray lows in figure 2 are the same as those in figure 1, but the bars are smaller to allow all the Eddy cycle lows to be displayed.
The de Vries 210-year solar cycle is modulated by the Bray cycle such that it is more severe in Bray lows (Hood and Jirikowic, 1990) like the Little Ice Age.
If the Bray cycle were of terrestrial origin, then we should not be able to see it modulate the solar de Vries cycle in solar records, but we do see it in figure 3 in the sunspot record and in the auroral frequency record.
Figure 3 (source: Javier, here) Many researchers have identified a climate cycle or oscillation of about 1500 years (Kern et al., 2012 and Darby, et al. 2012), but it does not show up in cosmogenic records.
There is evidence that the sun is the cause of the Bray cycle, if the mechanism is not a change in TSI, it could be a change in UV radiation, which can vary as much as 100% in one 11-year solar cycle, or some other solar cause such as variability in the Sun’s magnetic field strength.
Figure 6 (source: Scotese, here) The pole-to-pole temperature curves represent the average global temperatures shown on the right of the figure, currently we are in the severe icehouse state because of the very cold temperatures in Antarctica.
The “normal” climate of the Earth is cooling greenhouse to warming hothouse with an average temperature of about 20°C, at this temperature there are no permanent ice caps and life thrives at the poles.
The stratospheric pressure changes affect Tropospheric weather patterns.

Did you know that coffee is the second largest international commodity?
Crazy, right?!
Well this fact brings up other issues – like who is meeting these demands?
And what kind of labor regularities have been put in place to meet such ?
These are 5 Fair Trade coffee brands have made it an integral part of their mission to develop fair, mutually beneficial partnerships by employing Fair Trade and Direct Trade practices with the farmers who cultivate their crops.
Conscious Coffees : Is a certified B Corporation that buys only certified organic Fair Trade coffee grown on small family farms that are collectively self-organized into cooperatives.
Their mission is to create long-term relationships with their growers, customers, and the environment.
Allegro promotes organic growing methods and abide to fair trade regulations by paying their farmers a fair wage and great working conditions.
Even more amazing is the education and health initiatives for their communities.
The Devocion team developed long-term relationships with farmers, paying above fair trade while establishing social and environmental programs to help secure their future.

Here is a map of the stations in NSW in this table: For context, I have marked with green the stations of Goulburn and Thredbo top which had temperatures of below -10C flagged on that very cold morning in July.
The other data hasn’t changed.
You can also get a file for max and min.
GHCN unadjusted does not change, except if the source notifies an error.
With the unadjusted vs adjusted files, it is possible to do that.
I have been calculating a global anomaly every month, using the unadjusted GHCN data with ERSST.
The heading line looks like this: The BoM AWS link takes you to this page, listing all station names with links to their current month data page.
BoM also posts the metadata for all their stations, and that link takes you to this page, which lists all stations (not just AWS, and including closed stations) with links to metadata.
Summary I have shown, for Australia (BoM) at least, that you can follow the unadjusted temperature data right through from within a few minutes of measurement to its incorporation into the global unadjusted GHCN, which is then homogenized for global averages.
But what good is a Red Team if it would be smeared and intimidated even…

Exposure to chemicals used in jeans dyeing units can affect human health, says government.
NEW DELHI: The government on Tuesday told the Lok Sabha that the exposure to chemicals used in textile dyeing units can affect human health and the civic authorities would take action against any such industries operating in residential areas in the Capital.
Responding to a Parliament question on illegal jeans dyeing units in the north-east Delhi’s Shiv Vihar areas, reported by the TOI in May, the Union environment minister Harsh Vardhan said, “Whenever any unit operating illegally is brought to the notice of State Pollution Control Board/Pollution Control Committees, action as per rules is required to be taken for closing of such industries”.
He said no inventorization of jeans dyeing factories operating illegally in residential areas had been undertaken by the environment ministry or the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB).
Also read: Is blue the colour of death in Delhi’s ‘cancer colony’?
Responding to a question on the steps being taken by the government to check the pollution caused by dyeing factories, Harsh Vardhan said the Delhi government had directed that action would be taken by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) against industries operating in residential/non-conforming areas in violation of the Master Plan of Delhi.
Taking suo motu cognisance of the TOI’s report, the Delhi High Court had earlier asked the CBI to probe the entire issue of the illegal jeans dyeing units and find out the complicity of officials, if any, in allowing such units in those residential areas.
The CBI subsequently started its probe after registering a case on last Friday.
Acting on the TOI report, even the Union water resources ministry had in May directed the city health department to conduct a detailed study on the health impact of the dyeing units operating in the Mustafabad locality of north-east Delhi and extent of ground water contamination in the area, if any, due to these industrial units.
(This article was originally published in The Times of India)

California has positioned itself as a leader in the fight to curb climate change.
Rather, it’s a way to promote goals such as political responsiveness, experimentation and policy diversity.
This careful balance of federal and state power has been implemented by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
In recent years, scholars have expanded on Justice Brandeis’ famous “laboratories of democracy” model of federalism with the notion of “democratic experimentation.” Brandeis’ core insight, updated for contemporary society, is that decentralization lets state and local governments experiment with different policies to generate information about what works and what doesn’t.
For example, state experimentation with pollution controls may allow regulators to identify cheap ways to reduce emissions.
Experimentation resulted in information on how to push pollution around instead of cleaning it up, and utilities in midwest states used this knowledge to shift pollutants to states downwind in the Northeast.
For example, Pruitt has formally proposed to rescind the Clean Water Rule, an Obama administration regulation that clarifies the jurisdiction of EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to regulate smaller water bodies and wetlands under the Clean Water Act.
One might think that without EPA on the beat, states will take a more central role in water pollution control.
Less creativity, not more There is even more need for a federal role in addressing problems that have global impacts, such as climate change.
By forcing Republican leaders to craft state climate policies and sell them to their constituents, the Clean Power Plan promoted what I consider truly useful experimentation that could have helped break the national gridlock on climate policy.