Thanks to a combination of global warming and an El Nino, the planet shattered monthly heat records for an unprecedented 12th straight month, as April smashed the old record by half a degree, according to federal scientists… And more heat meant recor…
Global Warming Cited as Wildfires Increase in Fragile Boreal Forest
Scientists have been warning for decades that climate change is a threat to the immense tracts of forest that ring the Northern Hemisphere, with rising temperatures, drying trees and earlier melting of snow contributing to a growing number of wildfires…
New Jersey Tomato, Victim of Modern Farming, Vies for a Comeback
The Jersey tomato, red, ripe and juicy, was once revered as the best to be had, with a tangy, sweet-tart flavor that was the very taste of summer… “This was the tomato that made the Jersey tomato reputation,” Thomas J. Orton, a professor in the department of plant biology and pathology, said of the 1934 variety.
February Freeze Decimates the Peach Crop in Northeastern US
The peach crop in much of the Northeast was decimated by sub-zero temperatures in mid-February in what one fruit tree expert describes as the Valentine’s Day massacre of the peach blooms… New Jersey, the fourth-largest peach producing state after Cal…
Oyster Farms, Shorebird Vie for Space on NJ Bay Beaches
Oyster farming is the kind of business an environmentalist should love: it doesn’t use harmful chemicals or deplete natural resources, and the locally grown shellfish actually help clean the water… The 17 farms in the area produced 1.6 million oyster…
DEET Seen as Safe for Pregnant Women Despite Limited Studies
This summer, some yellow-fever mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus are expected to arrive along the Gulf Coast and elsewhere in the continental United States. Health officials are urging people to use insect repellents with DEET to avoid being bitten. The mounting evidence that the virus is strongly linked with birth defects makes this a priority for pregnant women. But is it safe to use repellents containing DEET with a baby on the way?… In 2010, researchers, including some from the C.D.C., analyzed the blood of 150 pregnant women in New Jersey and their umbilical cords for a range of pesticides. “DEET was not at remarkable levels,” said Mark Robson, the study’s senior author and a professor of plant biology and pathology at Rutgers University. “Birth weight, length and circumference were all normal” for all infants.
Lingering Lessons from a Cold-War Climate Peril – Nuclear Winter
The Retro Report team, in partnership with The Times and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, has taken a fascinating fresh look at nuclear winter, the Cold War hypothesis that vast smoke clouds from cities burned in a nuclear war could chill the p…
Global Warming Gives Science Behind Nuclear Winter a New Purpose
With global temperatures rising inexorably, some scientists and national security theorists have pondered cooling things down by tinkering mechanically with the planet’s climate. The goal of this geoengineering would be to create an effect not unlike when clouds suddenly block the sun and chill a warm afternoon. Average surface temperatures might be held down by a few degrees worldwide, these experts suggest – enough, they theorize (maybe with fingers crossed), to stave off environmental cataclysm… It would not take an American-Russian conflagration to inflict enormous environmental damage, said Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University. “A ‘small’ nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each using 50 Hiroshima-size bombs (far less than 1 percent of the current arsenal), if dropped on megacity targets in each country would produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history,” Dr. Robock wrote in 2011 in the journal Nature. Temperatures, he continued, “would be lower than during the ‘Little Ice Age'(1400-1850), during which famine killed millions.”
Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter
In the early 1980s, American and Russian scientists working together outlined a stark vision of the Cold War future. In a battle between the two superpowers, smoke from fires ignited by nuclear explosions would be so dense that it would block out the s…
Zika Virus ‘Spreading Explosively’ in Americas, W.H.O. Says
The World Health Organization rang a global alarm over the Zika virus on Thursday, saying that the disease was “spreading explosively” in the Americas and that as many as four million people could be infected by the end of the year…”As long as we are on the ball, if somebody is sick they get removed from proximity to mosquitoes,” said Dina M. Fonseca, an entomology professor at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She added that her state, New Jersey, has a plan in place for chikungunya, another related virus, that includes testing mosquito pools, and if any are positive, taking action, which could include spraying.
