The esteemed Dr. Ingraffea, the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, summarizes the best available science on the intersection between hydraulic fracturing and climate change.

Dr. Ingraffea has taught structural mechanics, finite element methods, and fracture mechanics at Cornell for 37 years. Dr. Ingraffea's research concentrates on computer simulation and physical testing of complex fracturing processes. He and his students have performed pioneering research in using interactive computer graphics in computational mechanics, and together they have authored more than 250 papers in these areas. He has been a principal investigator on more than $35 million in R&D projects from the NSF, NASA, Nichols Research, AFOSR, FAA, Kodak, U. S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station, U.S. Dept. of Transportation, IBM, Schlumberger, EXXON, the Gas Research Institute, Sandia National Laboratories, the Association of Iron and Steel Engineers, General Dynamics, Boeing, Caterpillar Tractor, and Northrop Grumman Aerospace. For his research achievements he has won the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics "1994 Significant Paper Award" for one of the five most significant papers in the category of Computational/Analytical Applications, twice won the National Research Council/U.S. National Committee for Rock Mechanics Award for Research in Rock Mechanics (1978, 1991), and the George Irwin Medal form the American Society for Testing and Materials (2006). He was named a Fellow of the International Congress on Fracture in 2009. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the premier journal in his field, Engineering Fracture Mechanics.

By Justin Elliott, ProPublica

Recently, we wrote about former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell's connections to the natural gas industry after he published a pro-fracking op-ed in The New York Daily News.

Following our story, Rendell's column — which called on New York officials to lift a ban on the drilling technique — was updated to disclose that he is a paid consultant to a private equity firm with natural gas investments.

Rendell assured us in an interview before the first story that despite his role with the private equity firm, he had no "pecuniary interest in the natural gas industry doing well."

But the story doesn't end there. One entity that indisputably has an interest in the industry is Rendell's longtime home outside of politics: the law firm Ballard Spahr of Philadelphia.

Rendell is currently special counsel at the firm, and is a member of its energy and project finance and environment and natural resources practice areas, his spokeswoman said.

The firm touts its work "on the forefront" of the development of the Marcellus Shale, the formation under Pennsylvania and other states from which a vast quantity of natural gas is now being extracted.

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From our friends at NASA comes this amazing 13-second animation that depicts how temperatures around the globe have warmed since 1950. You’ll note an acceleration of the temperature trend in the late 1970s as greenhouse gas emissions from energy production increased worldwide and clean air laws reduced emissions of pollutants that had a cooling effect on the climate, and thus were masking some of the global warming signal.

The data come from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York (GISS), which monitors global surface temperatures. As NASA notes, “All 10 of the warmest years in the GISS analysis have occurred since 1998, continuing a trend of temperatures well above the mid-20th century average."

A new study shows that the speed of warming in the past 100 years is unprecedented, and by the end of this century the planet will have gotten hotter than ever.

Bloomberg News reports:

The Earth is warmer now than during 70 to 80 percent of the time stretching back to the last Ice Age, according to researchers from Oregon State and Harvard universities who studied data from more than 73 global sites.

The findings also show that temperature-change rates are accelerating, Shaun Marcott, a scientist at Oregon State in Corvallis and one of the paper’s authors, said yesterday in an interview. The study was published today by the journal Science.

The research is the longest global reconstruction of temperature records over the last 11,300 years and mirrors results covering the past 2,000 years. The study may provide additional context in refuting “arguments that what we’re experiencing today is part of some natural climate variability,” Marcott said.

"The decade from 1900 to 1909 was colder than 95% of the last 11,300 years," according to CNN, which obtained a copy of the study. "Between 2000 and 2009, it was hotter than about 75% of the last 11,300 years." “From 1900 to 2000, we go from the cold end of that spectrum to the warm end of that spectrum -- the rates of change we’re seeing are unprecedented,” Marcott said. “We should still be cooling, but we’re not.”

Exxon Mobil gave a cease-and-desist order to Comcast, forcing the cable provider to pull an ad about climate change from Fox News' coverage of the State of the Union address in some areas, according to a press release from one of the groups responsible for the ad.

The ad, titled "Exxon Hates Your Children," urges Congress to eliminate fossil fuel industry subsidies, and was produced by progressive advocacy groups Oil Change International, The Other 98% and Environmental Action.

Huffington Post reports:

The ad was scheduled to air in Houston, Texas, and Denver, Colorado, during Fox's State of the Union coverage. However, a few hours before the event began, a senior vice president of Universal McCann, which handles global media duties for Exxon, fired off an email to Comcast, which provides Fox programming in those areas.

"Please let this serve as an official cease & desist notification that claims made by Oil Change International that their claims in any spot that 'ExxonMobil Hates Your Children' is false and unsubstantiated," the email stated.

"ExxonMobil fully expects the spot in question to be pulled down immediately," the email continued. "Any delay in executing this cease & desist will be viewed as willful defamation and slander of the Exxon Mobil Corporation and will result in aggressive action."

The ad is part of an ongoing campaign -- ExxonHatesYourChildren.com -- targeting the more than $10 billion per year the U.S. government spends in fossil fuel subsidies. In response to Exxon's move to halt the ad run, they’ve launched a new group statement, Exxon Can’t Silence Us, which is already garnering thousands of public signatures online.

“When the richest company on Earth uses their power to silence the voices of average Americans it’s a very dark day for democracy,” said John Sellers, of The Other 98%. “Exxon thinks that they can take away our right to freedom of speech. They have made a huge mistake. They will only make us louder.”

“Every year U.S. taxpayers give Exxon and the rest of Big Fossil at least $10 Billion corporate welfare – it’s time to stop our tax dollars from funding climate chaos” said Steve Kretzmann, of Oil Change International. “People are tired of seeing our political system bullied by the biggest oil companies in the world. It’s time to fight back.”

“We wanted to do something very simple: on a night where the President laid out a plan to address our climate and economic challenges, we wanted Fox News viewers to finally hear about Exxon and the billions in taxpayer dollars that go toward helping them ruin our future,” said Drew Hudson, Executive Director of Environmental Action. “What people can’t understand is why it’s okay for some viewers to hear the full story in primetime, but others have to be shielded by the richest company in the world.”

In the last 30 years, we’ve lost as much as three-quarters of the floating sea ice cover at the top of the world. The volume of that sea ice measured by satellites in the summer, when it reaches its smallest, has shrunk so fast that scientists say it’s now in a ‘death spiral’.

For over 800,000 years, ice has been a permanent feature of the Arctic ocean. It’s melting because of our use of dirty fossil fuel energy, and in the near future it could be ice free for the first time since humans walked the Earth. This would be not only devastating for the people, polar bears, narwhals, walruses and other species that live there - but for the rest of us too.

The ice at the top of the world reflects much of the sun’s heat back into space and keeps our whole planet cool, stabilizing the weather systems that we depend on to grow our food. Protecting the ice means protecting us all.

To save the Arctic, we have to act today. Time is running out, the ice that keeps our planet cool is melting fast. The polar bears who need that ice to live could disappear within the next 50 years. If you sign up now to protect the Arctic, your name will be microscopically etched onto tiny crystal discs and placed inside an indestructible glass sphere. When Greenpeace travels to the North Pole in April they will lower the pod through the ice to plant on the seabed, and mark the spot with a flag for the future designed by the youth of the world. Your name will remain at the pole for your lifetime, as a statement of your commitment to protect the Arctic.

Preparations for the expedition soon, so you must add your name by February 11.

Sign now to declare a global sanctuary in the Arctic so when future generations read your name, they’ll know you were among the first to join the defining environmental battle of our time.

[Via Greenpeace/SavetheArctic]

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, Jan. 25, 2013

Mexico City plans to draw drinking water from a mile-deep aquifer, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The Mexican effort challenges a key tenet of U.S. clean water policy: that water far underground can be intentionally polluted because it will never be used.

U.S. environmental regulators have long assumed that reservoirs located thousands of feet underground will be too expensive to tap. So even as population increases, temperatures rise, and traditional water supplies dry up, American scientists and policy-makers often exempt these deep aquifers from clean water protections and allow energy and mining companies to inject pollutants directly into them.

As ProPublica has reported in an ongoing investigation about America's management of its underground water, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has issued more than 1,500 permits for companies to pollute such aquifers in some of the driest regions. Frequently, the reason was that the water lies too deep to be worth protecting.

But Mexico City's plans to tap its newly discovered aquifer suggest that America is poisoning wells it might need in the future.

Indeed, by the standard often applied in the U.S., American regulators could have allowed companies to pump pollutants into the aquifer beneath Mexico City.

For example, in eastern Wyoming, an analysis showed that it would cost half a million dollars to construct a water well into deep, but high-quality aquifer reserves. That, plus an untested assumption that all the deep layers below it could only contain poor-quality water, led regulators to allow a uranium mine to inject more than 200,000 gallons of toxic and radioactive waste every day into the underground reservoirs.

But south of the border, worsening water shortages have forced authorities to look ever deeper for drinking water.

Today in Mexico City, the world's third-largest metropolis, the depletion of shallow reservoirs is causing the ground to sink in, iconic buildings to teeter, and underground infrastructure to crumble. The discovery of the previously unmapped deep reservoir could mean that water won't have to be rationed or piped into Mexico City from hundreds of miles away.

According to the Times report, Mexican authorities have already drilled an exploratory well into the aquifer and are working to determine the exact size of the reservoir. They are prepared to spend as much as $40 million to pump and treat the deeper water, which they say could supply some of Mexico City's 20 million people for as long as a century.

Scientists point to what's happening in Mexico City as a harbinger of a world in which people will pay more and dig deeper to tap reserves of the one natural resource human beings simply cannot survive without.

"Around the world people are increasingly doing things that 50 years ago nobody would have said they'd do," said Mike Wireman, a hydrogeologist with the EPA who also works with the World Bank on global water supply issues.

Wireman points to new research in Europe finding water reservoirs several miles beneath the surface — far deeper than even the aquifer beneath Mexico City — and says U.S. policy has been slow to adapt to this new understanding.

"Depth in and of itself does not guarantee anything — it does not guarantee you won't use it in the future, and it does not guarantee that that it is not" a source of drinking water, he said.

If Mexico City's search for water seems extreme, it is not unusual. In aquifers Denver relies on, drinking water levels have dropped more than 300 feet. Texas rationed some water use last summer in the midst of a record-breaking drought. And Nevada — realizing that the water levels in one of the nation's largest reservoirs may soon drop below the intake pipes — is building a drain hole to sap every last drop from the bottom.

"Water is limited, so they are really hustling to find other types of water," said Mark Williams, a hydrologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It's kind of a grim future, there's no two ways about it."

In a parched world, Mexico City is sending a message: Deep, unknown potential sources of drinking water matter, and the U.S. pollutes them at its peril.

This is a non-commercial attempt from http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/sanctuaryasiapage, to highlight the fact that world leaders, irresponsible corporates and mindless 'consumers' are combining to destroy life on earth. It is dedicated to all who died fighting for the planet and those whose lives are on the line today. The cut was put together by Vivek Chauhan, a young film maker, together with naturalists working with the Sanctuary Asia network.

Content credit: The principal source for the footage was Yann Arthus-Bertrand's incredible film HOME . The music was by Armand Amar. Thank you, too, Greenpeace and http://timescapes.org/

Since the 1970s, the coal industry has been deploying deceptive advertising campaigns to scrub its image and delay important clean air standards. They use the same arguments year after year - environmental protections will cripple the economy, the science behind pollution problems is inadequate, and that coal is already clean.

Check out the coal industry's deceptive advertisements at www.quitcoal.org/coalads

Democracy Now! is broadcasting live from the annual U.N. Climate Change Summit, as it convenes in Doha, Qatar. Tune in Dec. 3-7, to see coverage of the official proceedings, as well as events outside the conference.

As Amy Goodman noted in her recent column, "No world leader at the UN climate change summit hasn’t heard the warnings, but it will take popular pressure to make them act."