The February 2010 issue of Environment & Climate News opens with a report on “Climategate,” the temperature data-tampering scandal that would not die. A series of e-mails between scientists who serve as gatekeepers for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change leaked from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has caused a firestorm of controversy that has yet to die down several months after the news first broke.
Also in this issue:
Researchers at the heart of the Climategate scandal tampered with Russian temperature data to assert far more warming in recent years than has actually occurred, according to the Russian Institute for Economic Analysis. The tampered data were used in United Nations assertions that the planet has been warming rapidly.
The North Carolina General Assembly has outlawed throwing away items such as plastic milk jugs and ketchup bottles. North Carolinians are confused by the new restrictions and responding with frustration.
The wind power industry suffered a legal defeat as a federal court has ruled mountaintop wind turbines under construction in West Virginia would kill and injure thousands of endangered bats.
Only one in four broadcast meteorologists agrees with United Nations’ claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent global warming, a survey published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports. The news drives a sharp dagger into the oft-repeated assertion that a consensus of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis.
Plans to transform California’s state transportation network by adding high-speed trains throughout the state have run into opposition from environmental activists who assert the project will despoil the Los Angeles River.
