Situation Report

Leonard Patterson took a picture of a parcel of land on Detroit’s northwest side earlier this month as part of an emerging database. Credit Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

nytimes.com - by Monica Davey - February 17, 2014

DETROIT — A midnight blue Chevy rolls slowly down a snow-covered street, an emergency strobe light on its roof and a sign on its side that promises this is “official business.” At each house, business, even vacant lot, workers in the car pause to decide whether someone lives there and what shape the place is in before snapping a photo and beaming it to “mission control” miles away.

All over Detroit, scores of these workers — on some days as many as 75 three-person teams — have been wending their way through the streets since December, cataloging on computer tablets one of this bankrupt city’s most devastating ailments: its tens of thousands of abandoned and dilapidated buildings.

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Natural gas is flared at a Pioneer Natural Resources well, in Karnes County, Texas in 2010. 
Photographer: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg

bloomberg.com - by Lisa Song, Jim Morris and David Hasemyer - February 20, 2014

. . . For the past eight months, the Center for Public Integrity, InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel have examined what Texas, the nation's biggest oil producer, has done to protect people in the Eagle Ford from the industry's pollutants. What's happening in the Eagle Ford is important not only for Texas, but also for Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Dakota and other states where horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have made it profitable to extract oil and gas from deeply buried shale.

Our investigation and records obtained from Texas regulatory agencies reveal a system that does more to protect the industry than the public. . .

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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
The polar jet stream may be driving a "hemispheric pattern of severe weather."

submitted by Paul Pritchard

e360.yale.edu - by Fred Pearce - February 24, 2014

Scientists are trying to understand if the unusual weather in the Northern Hemisphere this winter — from record heat in Alaska to unprecedented flooding in Britain — is linked to climate change. One thing seems clear: Shifts in the jet stream play a key role and could become even more disruptive as the world warms.

This winter’s weather has been weird across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Record storms in Europe; record drought in California; record heat in parts of the Arctic, including Alaska and parts of Scandinavia; but record freezes too, as polar air blew south over Canada and the U.S., causing near-record ice cover on the Great Lakes, sending the mercury as low as minus 50 degrees Celsius in Minnesota, and bringing sharp chills to Texas.

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