Save the earth

Climate change is in the news. It seems like everyone’s “going green.” We’re glad you want to take action, too. Luckily, many of the steps we can take to stop climate change can make our lives better. Our grandchildren-and their children-will thank us for living more sustainably. Let’s start now.

We’ve partnered with the Million Car Carbon Campaign to help you find ways to save energy and reduce your carbon footprint. This campaign is uniting conscious consumers around the world to prevent the emissions-equivalent of 1 million cars from entering the atmosphere each year.
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Small filter-feeding animals that look like branched twigs collected more than a century ago from Antarctica’s Ross Sea reveal a mysterious increase in how fast the modern-day animals have been growing over the past two decades.
While the researchers can only speculate the cause right now, the amped-up growth makes the tiny organisms carbon collectors, potentially a positive thing for climate change.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott is best known as head of the second expedition to reach the South Pole, and who, with his team, died on the return trip in 1912. But unlike other polar explorers, he also made a variety of high-quality scientific collections, said David Barnes, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey.
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Butterflies inhabit every continent except Antarctica. Flitting from flower to flower, they assist in pollination. People are awed by their fragile beauty but more importantly, butterflies indicate the health of the environment. Cold-blooded, butterflies are dependent upon temperature, just as are rodents, birds, frogs and other insects. Measuring butterfly response to warming temperature helps researchers all over the world gauge the effect of climate change, and researchers are finding that butterflies are seeking new habitat to find the temperatures they need.
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Every summer, ice melts in the Arctic. And every winter it re-freezes. That hasn’t changed, but the rate of melting has accelerated and the rate of refreezing has decelerated, leading to a steady loss of ice in the Earth’s air conditioner.

Case-in-point: February 2011. Satellites monitored by the National Snow and Ice Data Center measured as little ice as has ever been seen in the Arctic for that calendar month. It’s a tie with the winter of 2005:
Sea ice extent averaged over the month of February 2011 was 5.54 million square miles. This was a tie with the previous record low for the month, set in 2005. February ice extent remained below normal in both the Atlantic and Pacific sectors, particularly in the Labrador Sea and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
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By failing to take the larger ecological impacts of biofuels production into account, scientists have allowed governments to present the fuels as better for the world’s climate and environment than they really are, according to a paper published in the journal Science. This has put the debate over biofuels dangerously off course, the authors warned.

“We made an honest mistake within the scientific framing of the debate, and we’ve got to correct it to make it right,” said co-author Steven P. Hamburg of the Environmental Defense Fund
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