Climate 411

This post is by Ramon Cruz, Senior Policy Analyst for Living Cities at Environmental Defense Fund.

It’s ironic. In many parts of the world, there is no clean drinking water. Here in the U.S., pure, drinkable water flows out of every tap, and yet Americans buy a staggering amount of bottled water. We pay big bucks for it, too – over $15 billion a year.

Worse of all, the bottles are overflowing our landfills, and contribute to global warming. Take a look at this video from Doug James, and then check out these surprising facts.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/OZbTXDkrD1o" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, this past winter was the coolest since 2001. A single season can’t determine a long-term trend any more than a single month can (see my previous post, "Did Global Warming Stop in January?"). But the recent cooler temperatures do offer an opportunity to talk about La Niña – a climate pattern that causes short-term cooling.

This winter’s La Niña is the strongest (coldest) since 1989, so we’d expect the weather to be cooler than usual. But even so, the cooling didn’t come close to offsetting the warming of the past 50-100 years. As you can see in the graph below, the cooling barely takes us back to 2001.

Data source: NASA. Each dot is a three-month period (season).

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This post is by Tony Kreindler, Media Director for the National Climate Campaign at Environmental Defense Fund.

Operation Climate Vote

This post is part of a series on the work of the Environmental Defense Action Fund to enact an effective climate law. You can help by writing to Congress.

We’re closer than ever to passing national climate legislation:

• Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) predicts a Senate floor vote in June.
• House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-MI) signals he’ll circulate a bill in April.
• House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (D-VA) says there’s a 50-50 chance of passing climate legislation this year.

But we need to maintain grassroots pressure to keep legislators focused on the need to pass a bill this year.

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