Star-Ledger: Monday will probably be the most important Earth Day for people in New Jersey since the first one. As we celebrate the 43rd Earth Day, people will be cleaning up parks and areas of the state that have been devastated by Hurricane Sandy. They will be replanting dunes, fixing beaches and parks and helping neighbors. We will see the impact of climate disruption all around us. It is not just what we do on Earth Day that counts; it is what we do every day dealing with climate change. We will move...

Associated Press: Mississippi has become the third state to sue BP over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. State Attorney General Jim Hood said on Friday that the state had filed suits in federal and state court. Mr. Hood said he wanted to settle, but he said BP refused to negotiate. A spokeswoman for BP did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Louisiana and Alabama sued BP earlier and are participating in a federal trial in New Orleans to determine the liability of BP and its contractors. Mississippi...

ScienceDaily: Wild fire residue is washed out of the soil and transported to the sea by rivers. Wild fires turn millions of hectares of vegetation into charcoal each year. An international team of researchers led by Thorsten Dittgar from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and Rudolf Jaffé from Florida International University's Southeast Environmental Research Center in Miami has now shown that this charcoal does not remain in the soil, as previously thought. Instead, it is transported...

Environment News Service: Desalination plants are typically built in dry places. But along New York`s Hudson River a different story is unfolding. A desalination plant has been proposed by United Water New York, a private company, to address the rapid growth of water demand in the expanding New York City suburb of Rockland County. If built, the Haverstraw Water Supply Project on the Hudson River`s Haverstraw Bay would mark New York State's first foray into desalination, the process of removing salt and particulates...

Climate Desk: Earlier this month, when a burst pipe spilled thousands of gallons of heavy oil into an Arkansas suburb, the message from the White House went something like: "Everybody chill, the EPA has it under control." But reporters on the scene found the cleanup orchestrated by the same company, ExxonMobil, that allowed the spill, and heard only crickets when they asked the EPA about its involvement. Turns out, on some of the nation`s most pressing environmental health issues, the EPA`s transparency record...

International Business Times: A study by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has warned that the world's coastline beaches could experience swelling and intense levels and heights of pounding ocean waves due to climate change. Mark Hemer, CSIRO researcher and lead author of the study, said average annual wave heights could increase by as much as half a metre in coming decades as storm frequency and intensity in the Southern Ocean likewise increase. The heightened wave heights...

Summit Voice: Warming ocean temperatures and increased glacial outflow around Antarctica may have a big impact on clams living on the ocean floor. Younger clams try to move away when they sense warmer temperature or reduced oxygen levels, but older clams stay put. The findings by a team of British and German scientists indicate how climate change may affect biodiversity in the region, suggesting that the overall population of Antarctic clams may dwindle, since it`s the older animals that reproduce. “Our...

Science: When Superstorm Sandy struck the United States on 30 October, it didn't just devastate the Eastern Seaboard, it shook the ground as far away as the West Coast, producing tiny vibrations in Earth's crust that were picked up by seismometers there. Scientists can use this activity to track the path of the storm. Now, they say that analyzing past records of these vibrations may help them discern whether climate change has influenced the amount of storminess over the world's oceans in recent decades....

Environmental News Network: The Antarctic Peninsula is the northernmost part of the mainland of Antarctica. It is the section closest to another continent (South America). A new 1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction shows that summer ice melting has intensified almost ten-fold, and mostly since the mid 20th Century. Summer ice melt affects the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers. The research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, adds new knowledge to the international effort that is required...

PlanetEarth: Food is not just something we eat. Its fluctuating price and availability mean it will be one of the main ways many of us will interact with the environmental issues of our time: climate change and competition for water, land and energy. Tim Benton explains why. By the middle of the century, global demand for food is projected to grow by about 60 per cent, as population rises, and the burgeoning global middle class develops more sophisticated tastes and devotes more money to satisfying them. But...

BBC: Whales, dolphins and porpoises are to be photographed and their calls recorded during a new survey of marine life off Scotland's west coast. Scientists and volunteers will gather the data between May and September. The Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust (HWDT) project will also seek to record behaviour and numbers of basking sharks. The survey work will be carried out over seven to 10 days from the charity's yacht, Silurian. HWDT said 24 species of cetaceans - whales, dolphins and porpoises...

The Hill: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) warned the Obama administration Thursday that its proposal to steer federal oil-and-gas revenues into a green energy fund won’t fly unless it's paired with opening new areas to drilling. President Obama is pushing Congress to create an “Energy Security Trust,” which would steer $2 billion in revenues from offshore development into technologies that wean cars and trucks off of oil. Murkowski – the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee – said...

ScienceDaily: When superstorm Sandy turned and took aim at New York City and Long Island last October, ocean waves hitting each other and the shore rattled the seafloor and much of the United States -- shaking detected by seismometers across the country, University of Utah researchers found. "We detected seismic waves created by the oceans waves both hitting the East Coast and smashing into each other," with the most intense seismic activity recorded when Sandy turned toward Long Island, New York and New Jersey,...

ScienceDaily: A study just published in the Journal of Marine Biology sheds new light on the relatively rare but occasionally recorded presence of white sharks in waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands, and suggests a new method to help distinguish between white sharks and close relatives, such as mako sharks. The paper, titled "Occurrence of White Sharks in Hawaiian Waters," was written by Kevin Weng of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) and Randy...

LiveScience: Hurricane Sandy's fateful left turn toward the mid-Atlantic Coast in October last year lit up earthquake monitors all the way to Seattle, according to results presented at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting today (April 18). When Hurricane Sandy veered on Oct. 29, the sudden increase in crashing ocean waves sent rumbles through the Earth detectable on seismometers. The wave-on-wave collisions created what are called standing waves, doubling the energy directed at the seafloor,...

Yale Environment 360: Reducing the emissions of four critical pollutants in the coming decades could at least temporarily slow the rate of global warming and reduce projected sea level rise by as much as 50 percent, according to a new study. Building on previous research that found that reducing the emissions of four short-lived pollutants -- tropospheric ozone, hydrofluorocarbons, black carbon, and methane -- could slow the rate of global warming by 50 percent, the new study projects that sea-level rise could, in turn,...

Environment News Service: In a case brought by environment groups, Belize`s Supreme Court has declared offshore oil drilling contracts issued by the Government of Belize in 2004 and 2007 null and void. The ruling halts the Belizean government`s immediate effort to allow offshore oil drilling in the Meso American Reef, the world`s second largest barrier reef. The ruling by Justice Oswell Legall was in response to a case brought by Oceana, Citizens Organized for Liberty through Action, COLA, and the Belize Coalition to...

ScienceDaily: A new study of Antarctic clams reveals that age matters when it comes to adapting to the effects of climate change. The research provides new insight and understanding of the likely impact of predicted environmental change on future ocean biodiversity. Reporting this week in the journal Global Change Biology scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and from Germany's University of Kiel and the Alfred Wegener Institute reveal that when it comes to environmental change the reaction of Antarctic...

Online Athens: Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy were separated by more than 1,300 miles and eight years, but they share one big thing in common, according to University of Georgia ecologist James Porter: They were exactly the sort of destructive superstorms we will see more frequently, as global warming advances and sea levels rise. No single weather event can be chalked up to global warming — but climate scientists believe that warmer temperatures will fuel bigger and more frequent hurricanes, Porter told a University...

Greenpeace: The Mauritian government should refuse port clearance for a South Korean ship accused of illegal fishing in West African waters, Greenpeace International said on Thursday. Owned by Dongwon Industries, the purse seine fishing boat Premier is sailing to Port Louis, where it has been given permission to enter by Mauritian authorities, despite the fact it has been accused of illegal fishing off the coast of Africa. The Premier was later found to be using falsified letters claiming it had permission...