August 4th, 2011

Climate change is expected to lead to worsening drought conditions and greater heat extremes, along with myriad health problems. And a new web tool created by the Natural Resources Defense Council lets you see read just how badly your state could be impacted by climate change.

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June 10th, 2011

As a monster tornado bore down on Tuscaloosa last week, residents of Greensburg, Kansas were preparing for a weekend of festivities commemorating their recovery from a 2007 tornado.
The May 4 twister that nearly blasted Greensburg off the map was rated an EF5. It turned 95 percent of the town’s buildings to tinder and claimed 11 lives as it skidded across the western Kansas town.

Rebuilding the community of 800 has become a testament to how people can plunge in to a new way of living. While some residents left after the storm, many more have worked diligently to turn that dark event into an opportunity, constructing a new village made of sturdy, energy-efficient, sustainable homes that employ the latest technology.

Greensburg GreenTown's demonstration silo home

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March 15th, 2010

From Green Right Now Reports

New research by U.S. environmental and geo-science academicians shows a distinct warming trend in the nation’s breadbasket over the last two centuries.

The scientists drew that conclusion after examining 65,987 weather records, recording the daily mean temperatures since 1828. Those weather observations, made by doctors in pioneer forts and later Weather Bureau officials, helped Dorian J. Burnette and David Stahle of the University of Arkansas, with the help of geographer Cary Mock of the University of South Carolina, reconstruct the climate of Manhattan, Kansas, in the center of nation. The scientists’ findings are published in the March 15 issue of Journal of Climate.

What they found was that 19th century temperatures were notably cooler than those in the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st Century.

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October 29th, 2009

By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

The town of Greensburg, Kansas was destroyed after a tornado ripped through their community in May of 2007, but it is not only coming back stronger than before, but much greener.

One project currently taking place in Greensburg is the Chain of Eco-Homes. When completed, 12 homes will serve as a “living laboratory” for unique environmental building. Two Eco-Homes already exist, Silo Eco-Home, equipped with a vegetable garden green roof, and Solar Eco-Home, the winner of the 2005 Solar Decathlon Competition and donation from the University of Colorado.

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August 14th, 2009

From Green Right Now Reports

Exxon-Mobil Corporation, the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Denver to violating the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) in five states during the past five years, the Justice Department announced.

The company has agreed to pay fines and community service payments totaling $600,000 and will implement an environmental compliance plan over the next three years aimed at preventing bird deaths on the company’s facilities in the affected states. According to papers filed in court, the company has already spent over $2.5 million to begin implementation of the plan.

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November 18th, 2008

By Barbara Kessler

If global warming wasn’t so devastatingly tangible, it would sound like part of a doomsday cult. Consider these projections of the future for a swath of the U.S.

First up: Kansas, the American heartland, breadbasket to the world, a place of amber waves of grain…a place we might not recognize by century’s end.

Under projected global warming scenarios, Kansas will become hotter and drier, with more insects and more storms during the next several decades. By century’s end, western Kansas will be so arid, it will need 8 more inches of water to sustain crops there. Eastern Kansas will be wetter, but so warm that evaporation will claim the extra rainfall and southwestern Kansas will be a virtual desert. All this according to a report released last week by University of Kansas scientists Nathaniel Brunsell and Johannes Feddema for the Climate Change and Energy Project based in Salina, Kansas.

But wait, Dorothy, there’s more.

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February 6th, 2008

By Barbara Kessler

As communities in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas sift through damage from deadly tornadoes that tore through last night, another town is quietly commemorating its reconstruction after a belly-punch from Mother Nature last year.

On May 4, 2007, 95 percent of the homes and businesses in Greenburg, Kan., were virtually wiped away by a massive, slow-moving EF5 tornado that scraped a 2-mile-wide path. The result left the already economically depressed town wondering if it would have a future.

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