EnvironmentLA - The City's official site for information about projects and programs that are making Los Angeles more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - LADWP offers environmental Green LA programs, including Trees for a Green LA, Energy Efficiency for a Green LA, Solar Energy for a Green LA, Electric Vehicles for a Green LA, Green Power for a Green LA, Recycling for a Green LA and Educational Services for a Green LA.
Green LA Action Plan - The City's official plan to improve energy conservation, transition to renewable power sources, and change the ways citizens commute to work and school.
US Green Building Council-LA - A resource for agencies, municipalities, professionals and companies interested in sustainable, green buildings.
I have been working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA), National Ocean Service since 1999. Currently as the National Education Liaison for the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, I work with various partners, such as National Geographic Society and the Institute for Exploration on national and regional educational programs that enhance public awareness, understanding and appreciation of the marine environment, particularly America’s underwater treasures, known as national marine sanctuaries.
Wondering how much it matters that your sneakers were made in China and your coffee grown in Kenya? Consider this: The ships that brought those goods to America belch enough particulate pollutants into the world’s air to match half of all cars combined.
So says a paper just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, in which scientists led by Boulder, Colorado researcher Daniel A. Lack analyzed readings taken in and around the Gulf of Mexico during the summer of 2006. The team trailed over 200 commercial vessels that summer, measuring the emissions of everything from cargo freighters to cruise ships, and what they found isn’t happy news for those living in coastal areas.
Google has a way of attracting attention, whether it’s by upending cell phone paradigms with an open-source platform or frightening publishers with its quest to digitize every book ever written. Now environmental groups have reason to hope one of the search giant’s projects will raise eco-consciousness among people who spend more time playing with the latest techie fad than they do reading conservationist pamphlets.
President Obama may be moving swiftly to turn his environmental campaign pledges into official policy, but even a miraculous transformation of our behavior at this point would be too late to stop some effects that are “basically irreversible,” according to statements made by climate scientists this week.
In a press teleconference held in advance of the publication of their research, the scientists said that, contrary to what many laymen and policymakers assume, the earth’s temperature would not return to normal even if carbon emissions were cut to zero tomorrow — not in 100 years, not in 200 years, and probably not within this millennium.
Hurricane Ike, which knocked Galveston and Houston with a right hook reminiscent of Katrina, again raises the question of whether global warming is fostering monster storms.
It has become almost ipso facto among many climate change scientists and activists that global warming is a key culprit behind worsening hurricanes. They point out that tropical storms feed on warmer water, and warmer sea waters are a given these days, whether you believe that the sea change is caused by Mother Nature, greenhouse gases or little green men in space.
But weather forecasters and meteorologists take a more measured view of hurricanes. Trained to distinguish between causes and consider time lines and probabilities, they do not use “weather” and “climate change” interchangeably. Weather is a sudden occurrence – albeit with a hurricane it can malinger and loom with maddening deliberateness – whereas climate change is a gradual thing, building over many years.
So to the weather experts, the shorthand formula is not as simple as Storms + Warmer Waters = Worse Storms.
Society and the Institute for Exploration on national and regional educational programs that enhance public awareness, understanding and appreciation of the marine environment, particularly America’s underwater treasures, known as national marine sanctuaries.
