This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

In Sunday's New York Times, there was an editorial by Thomas Friedman that (among other things) talked about how the role of the Weather Channel has evolved over time. Weather used to be about "acts of God" – nobody's fault. But more and more lately we are wondering if extreme weather events are acts of man, not God – our fault. And so, Friedman says, the Weather Channel, formerly a politics-free zone, is "slowly morphing into the news channel."

Towards this end, the Weather Channel has recently launched a new Web site called Forecast Earth. It's a great resource.

This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

Here are some interesting articles I came across recently:

Inconvenient Youths – Wall Street Journal
Amusing article about how 4- and 8-year-olds are educating their parents about climate change and pestering them to take action.

America's Greenest States – Forbes Magazine
A ranking of the states based on six equally-weighted categories: carbon footprint, air quality, water quality, hazardous waste management, policy initiatives and energy consumption. See how your state fared.

Read more »

The author of today's post, Lisa Moore, Ph.D., is a scientist in the Climate and Air program.

Here's something to complement the climate change reading list and list of links that Bill posted a while back.

The folks who publish the journal Nature have just launched Nature Reports: Climate Change, an information hub that brings together research, news, analysis, and commentary. It also links to the blog Nature launched last April, Climate Feedback.

I've taken a quick tour, and it looks promising. What do you think?

What is needed now is a strong, sustained, and well-coordinated effort between governments at all levels, businesses, civic institutions, and individuals to adopt policies, programs, and practices that accelerate the adoption of clean, efficient energy choices. The costs of delay are high. For every year of delay in beginning significant emissions reductions, global concentrations of heat-trapping gases rise higher and the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change becomes more difficult and more costly to achieve.

From Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast [PDF 8MB], prepared by the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment Synthesis Team. July 2007.

For more on the toll of global warming in the Northeast, visit our New York City page.

Today's post is from Sam Parry, Environmental Defense's manager of online membership.

As we prepare for July 4th festivities, I wanted to share an inspiring conversation we've had with our online supporters over the past several weeks. We asked the question, how do people who love this country approach the crisis of global warming? We must have struck a nerve because we got thousands of passionate responses.

We used these responses to craft a Declaration of New Patriotism. To date, almost 56,000 people have added their "John Hancock." Last week, we delivered the message to Congress with an ad in Roll Call, one of the most widely read newspapers on Capitol Hill.

So before you head out to celebrate tomorrow, take a look at our Declaration of New Patriotism and add your signature. Happy Fourth of July!

The RealClimate blog has great information on the science behind global warming. Recently they posted a resource page with links about climate change. They plan to update the page as they discover new resources, so you might want to bookmark it.

In browsing around the internet this week I found some sites with good information about global warming:

Reporting on Climate Change: Understanding the Science – A 100-page book, free to download or $30 in print form, that does an excellent job summarizing the science behind climate change.

Celsias (Blog) – Great background essays on climate science, also some very funny posts.

Woods Hole Research Center – Excellent resource with background articles, links for further reading, and more.

MarketWatch Special Report: An Investor Guide to Global Warming – A five-part series that ran each day this week covering everything from green investments to the role of insurers.

Do you have favorite sites for information on climate change? Post the links!

"Governments have a crucial supportive role in providing appropriate enabling environment, such as, institutional, policy, legal and regulatory frameworks, to sustain investment flows and for effective technology transfer – without which it may be difficult to achieve emission reductions at a significant scale."

From IPCC Working Group 3, Summary for Policymakers [PDF]

"Who are the fanatics now? The ones that live in denial – political denial, economic denial, and environmental denial."

- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking on "Twenty-First Century Environmentalism: How Protecting Our Environment Will Create Economic Growth" for the Council on Foreign Relations, April 12, 2007.

"EPA has refused to comply with this clear statutory command. Instead, it has offered a laundry list of reasons not to regulate."

From Supreme Court ruling [PDF] on Massachusetts vs. EPA, Opinion of the Court, page 31.