All missing residents accounted for after Texas tornadoes
GRANBURY, Texas |
GRANBURY, Texas (Reuters) – All seven people listed as missing after a monster Texas tornado that tore homes from their foundations and uprooted trees on Wednesday have now been accounted for, leaving the death toll at six, authorities said on Friday.
Workers were clearing debris to allow residents of the most damaged areas in the town of Granbury to return to see the destruction, possibly on Saturday. Volunteers have arrived in droves to help with the massive cleanup effort, said Lonny Haschel, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
“Crews are trying to shore things up to make sure it’s safe for people to return,” Haschel said. “There is still debris everywhere, and some still falling off the houses, so we want to make sure it is safe.”
The search for survivors is complete and everyone is accounted for, Haschel said. Fifty people were taken to area hospitals for injuries and another 90 were treated for minor injuries at the scene, he said.
About 100 homes were damaged and 66 are unlivable, according to Anita Foster, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross in North Texas.
“It is really catastrophic to see how much damage there is,” Foster said. “You can really tell the powerful force of this storm.”
The tornado, which brought winds of up to 200 miles per hour (320 km per hour), was rated an EF4 by the National Weather Service (NWS), the second-most powerful level for such a storm.
The tornado blew homes from their foundations, tossed cars through the air and uprooted trees as it raged through at least four North Texas counties. The worst-hit area included dozens of Habitat for Humanity homes, which are built by volunteers for poor families.
The weather service said on Friday that 16 tornadoes struck North Texas during the outbreak. The strongest one hit Granbury, a town of 8,000 people about 35 miles southwest of Dallas-Fort Worth.
On Friday, in the Rancho Brazos neighborhood of Granbury, cars sat upside down, windows of homes were shattered and plastic bags and sheet metal were stuck in trees.
In that entire neighborhood of 110 homes, there is no water or electricity, so even residents of homes that were not damaged won’t be able to live there for awhile, officials said.
Texas Governor Rick Perry surveyed the devastation on Friday and met with survivors.
“A tornado can turn your life upside down, literally,” Perry told reporters.
Rancho Brazos
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China says EU solar duties to ”seriously harm” trade ties
BEIJING (Reuters) – China warned the European Union on Thursday that imposing duties on Chinese solar panels would ”seriously harm” bilateral trade ties, upping the tone of its criticism a week after the EU said it would move ahead with hefty penalties in June.
The European Commission has agreed to impose average import duties of 47 percent on solar panels from China, according to officials, a move they say is to guard against the dumping of cheap goods in Europe.
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Your Car Also Needs To Undergo Spring Cleaning
How often do you clean your car? And when we say “clean” we don’t mean the regular washing and hosing down you do for the car’s body, so that it looks shiny on the outside. By “clean” we mean the process by which every nook or cranny of your car has been thoroughly maintained.
Cars accumulate dust everyday. But overtime, it also accummulates oil and other harsh elements from the environment, such those coming from storms, mud and dust from the roads and pavements, or even the kind of soap and water you use with your regular cleaning. These will eventually eat away into your car’s system that once in a while, the car needs to undergo a thorough underwashing and complete detailing so that these are removed.
This detailing must be done at least once a year and it’s necessary because cars also have filters and other parts that you normally wouldn’t touch during your regular washings, but these deteriorate when they are not properly maintained. When this happens, it affects the car’s overall performance. This impacts the environment as well, because cars that perform badly on the road bring a lot of hazards and pollution.
Having your car detailed may be an added expense, but given that you only have to do this once every year, it’s well worth splurging on. Choose a good detailing service center so that you also get your money’s worth, and if possible, use products that are not just car-friendly, but also eco-friendly.
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New fracking rules attempt to placate opposing camps
WASHINGTON |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration on Thursday unveiled a new proposal for regulating hydraulic fracturing on federal lands, rolling back some measures from its original, abandoned draft as it sought to ease concerns the rules would be too burdensome for producers.
The U.S. Interior Department scrapped a proposal from 2012 after drawing heat from green groups and the drilling industry over rules aimed at updating decades-old fracking regulations.
“Our thorough review of all the comments convinced us that we could maintain a strong level of protection of health, safety, and the environment while allowing for increased flexibility and reduced regulatory duplication,” Interior’s Bureau of Land Management Principal Deputy Director Neil Kornze said in a statement.
While the rules would only cover federal lands, which have so far made up only a small portion of the shale oil and gas boom, the administration has said it hopes the regulations can act as a model for state oversight of private lands.
But in attempting to navigate between environmental concerns and economic needs, the latest plan did not please advocates on either side of the debate.
The plan offers “flexibility” to drillers by allowing them to use various tools to evaluate cement integrity and by allowing the use of an industry-backed web site known as FracFocus for the disclosure of chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing after drilling takes place, the Department said.
These added flexibilities raised the ire of environmental groups, who had argued that the department’s first attempt at drafting rules did little to address pollution risks often associated with fracking.
And the changes failed to win over some industry backers, who have questioned why federal regulations are needed at all when states already have rules in place.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said she expects the rules to be attacked from backers and skeptics of fracking alike, but that the guidance is sound.
“You’re going to hear from folks that we’ve caved in to industry or we’re bowing to pressure from environmentalists,” Jewell told reporters on a conference call.
“The fact is this is an improved common sense proposal that benefited from the feedback we got from all stakeholders on all sides of this issue.”
MORE DRILLING VS MORE SAFETY?
The Obama administration has attempted to walk a fine line on the fracking issue, stressing support for expanded oil and gas drilling, while also promising to ensure safety.
The new draft rules, which will be subject to 30-day public
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Monsanto tests planting platform, eyes new microbial business
ST. LOUIS |
ST. LOUIS (Reuters) – Monsanto Co, the world’s largest seed company, is developing two new platforms that diverge from its core business and are seen as potential key long-term growth drivers, according to top Monsanto executives.
“What we are building right now is based on the strength of our germplasm and our breeding. That is the key engine,” said Monsanto Chief Financial Officer Pierre Courduroux in an interview. “When you get to the next layers of growth, that is where you’ll start getting into those new platforms we’re building. We are putting the base in place so that it is the next layer of growth.”
The first platform, a precision planting product called “FieldScripts,” is being rolled out for beta testing this year to more than 150 farmers in the U.S. Midwest.
FieldScripts will be sold alongside Monsanto seed products at dealers and is based on soil data, slope, organic matter and other information gathered from individual farmer fields.
The data is translated to an individualized prescription for the farmer that recommends what type of seed, what density and spacing a farmer should use. Lower seeding rates might be used in parts of one field and higher rates suggested in another based on the data gathered.
Certain equipment will be required to implement the product, but farmers should see a gain of 5-10 bushels per acre, said Pam Strifler, Monsanto’s vice president of integrated farming systems.
The company is still not sure how it will price the product or license it to rivals as it does its seed technology, but has high hopes for commercialization in the next two to three years and strong long-term growth.
The second new platform seen as having high potential involves new biological research. Monsanto’s “biodirect” research is aimed at developing products that use molecules found in nature as topical applications for crop protection.
The company is accelerating work to screen and test micro-organisms to find ways to use the bacteria and fungi to optimize the performance of crops and protect them from weeds and pests.
“It is an interesting time in the company as we look at some of these new opportunities,” said Monsanto Chairman Hugh Grant.
Biologicals are used to complement or replace agricultural chemical products and represent a growing market segment of roughly $1.7 billion in annual sales, according to Monsanto.
The core business of providing seeds and chemicals to farmers remains the top priority as Monsanto see increasingly
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Grocery Deliveries Help Reduce Carbon Emission
Have you taken advantage of having groceries delivered? According to a study done at the University of Washington, grocery delivery services help reduce carbon emission to as much as 75%. That’s a huge difference compared to when people have to make their own trips to the store and shop for items there.
According to the head of the study, one of the professors from UW’s environmental engineering department, “A lot of times people think they have to inconvenience themselves to be greener, and that actually isn’t the case here. From an environmental perspective, grocery delivery services overwhelmingly can provide emissions reductions.”
Many leading supermarket chains are offering grocery delivery service. But only very few families avail of it, when not only does this help with carbon emission, companies can also see some savings in operations especially when the routes are clustered and well-mapped out. In other words, people and corporations can save fuel by taking advantage of this, which also saves a lot of money while saving the environment.
The research was compiled using data from Seattle and King County and it was printed in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum.
If this is the case, why are people still hesitant about having groceries delivered, despited the convenience and ease? Perhaps the actual choosing of items is preventing them from doing this. But if more people were to pick delivery, the service is expected to become better, so that customers are constantly pleased and satisfied with the goods.
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Ice melt, sea level rise, to be less severe than feared: study
OSLO |
OSLO (Reuters) – A melt of ice on Greenland and Antarctica is likely to be less severe than expected this century, limiting sea level rise to a maximum of 69 cm (27 inches), an international study said on Tuesday.
Even so, such a rise could dramatically change coastal environments in the lifetimes of people born today with ever more severe storm surges and erosion, according to the ice2sea project by 24, mostly European, scientific institutions.
Some scientific studies have projected sea level rise of up to 2 meters by 2100, a figure that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called a worst case that would swamp large tracts of land from Bangladesh to Florida.
Ice2sea, a four-year project to narrow down uncertainties of how melting ice will pour water into the oceans, found that sea levels would rise by between 16.5 and 69 cm under a scenario of moderate global warming this century.
“This is good news” for those who have feared sharper rises, David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey who led the ice2sea project, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“But 69 cm is a very real impact … it changes the frequency of floods significantly,” he said. And seas would keep rising for centuries beyond 2100, in a threat to coastal cities and low-lying islands such as the Maldives or Tuvalu.
Ice2sea said a thaw of Antarctica, Greenland and glaciers from the Alps to the Andes would contribute between 3.5 and 36.8 cm to sea level rise this century. The fact that water expands as it warms would add another 13 to 32 cm, Vaughan said.
Some other scientists disputed ice2sea’s projections.
“I think the numbers are too low,” Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, an ice expert and professor at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, told Reuters. She said ice2sea wrongly assumed a slowdown in the rate of ice discharge from Greenland.
ANTARCTIC SNOW
Sea levels rose by 17 cm last century and the rate has accelerated to more than 3 mm a year. A third of the current rise is from Antarctica and Greenland – equivalent to emptying 138 million Olympic-sized pools into the sea every year.
One factor likely to offset sea level rise, ice2sea said, is that warmer temperatures will result in more snow, especially over Antarctica, locking in the moisture on land. It also played down worries of a runaway melt of Greenland, and of the breakup of major Antarctic ice shelves.
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UN faces uphill battle to reduce global airline emissions
MONTREAL/WASHINGTON |
MONTREAL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Little progress has been made in a United Nations’ effort to craft an agreement to lower greenhouse gas emissions from international air travel, raising doubts that its civil aviation body can deliver a final resolution by a September target date, several government officials said on Monday.
Representatives to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) said a high-level group of representatives from 17 countries tapped to expedite a global agreement continues to be bogged down by a few key issues.
The group had been tasked with developing a global plan to address aviation emissions using market-based measures in time for the body’s triennial assembly in September.
But it has yet to resolve key questions such as whether states or airlines would be responsible to pay for their emissions; how to account for a country’s aviation emissions and whether less-developed countries should have different goals than rich states.
“We hoped that they would bring to the table some ability to find some compromise. What has transpired, however, in the three meetings of that group unfortunately we’ve had very little progress,” said Kerryn Macaulay, Australia’s representative to ICAO.
If ICAO makes enough progress toward a global agreement on emissions, it could ensure that the European Union would no longer need to apply its own emissions trading system to global airlines.
The advent in 2012 of an EU law requiring all aircraft using EU airports to pay for carbon emissions via the bloc’s Emissions Trading Scheme stirred threats of a trade war. The United States, China, India and Russia all lobbied fiercely against it.
At the end of 2012, the EU agreed to “stop the clock” on its law requiring all airlines to pay for each ton of emissions associated with flights into and out of its airports, provided that ICAO comes up with a solution by late this year.
INDUSTRY FAVORS OFFSETTING
ICAO has narrowed its options to three approaches: a mandatory offsetting scheme, mandatory offsetting that would raise revenue to fund joint measures to address climate change and a global emissions trading scheme similar to the European Union’s carbon market.
Tony Tyler, chief executive of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), said a global carbon offsetting system was preferred by the industry out of three market-based solutions floated by the United Nations to tackle the sector’s growing greenhouse gas emissions.
Under an offsetting system, either air carriers or countries would have to purchase credits
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Using Cloth Pads During That Time of The Month
This is a subject that may make some women feel a little iffy, because menstrual habits doesn’t come up to often in conversations. Yes, even with women. But there’s a need to talk about some of the options women have when it comes to keeping themselves clean and protected when they have their montly period. Specifically, with the kind of menstrual products women use.
Some are probably so use to using tampons, while others rely on disposable pads because it’s very easy to throw this away with every changing. But the problem is, landfills are already filled with tons of garbage, and like diapers, disposable pads take awhile to degrade.
In addition to the eco-friendly benefits of using cloth pads, here are other benefits to using cloth pads instead:
1. Our grandmothers used cloth pads for many years, and some of them have to be at work, too. The kinds of cloth pads that are available now are better versions of what our grandmas used, so they make a woman feel protected, clean and comfortable. In tons of different colors and prints, cloth pads do not come with plastic material, which tend to irritate the skin. They also don’t feel bulky, if you’re worried about not being able to walk right or sit right.
2. Cloth pads are very easy to wash and they also dry quickly. You can purchase in bulk for a much cheaper price than disposable, and just wash this as often as you would like.
3. Cloth pads are without any chemicals. They absorb just like disposable pads, but the great thing is your body doesn’t come in contact with harmful elements. Other people have developed allergies for disposables. It doesn’t happen with cloth pads.
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Climate change forecast to shrink habitat of common plants, animals
OSLO |
OSLO (Reuters) – The habitats of many common plants and animals will shrink dramatically this century unless governments act quickly to cut rising greenhouse gas emissions, scientists said on Sunday after studying 50,000 species around the world.
The scientists from Britain, Australia and Colombia said plants, amphibians and reptiles were most vulnerable as global temperatures rise and rainfall patterns change.
About 57 percent of plants and 34 percent of animal species were likely to lose more than half the area with a climate suited to them by the 2080s if nothing was done to limit emissions from power plants, factories and vehicles, they wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Hardest hit would be species in sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, the Amazon and Central America.
“Climate change will greatly reduce biodiversity, even for many common animals and plants,” lead author Rachel Warren of the University of East Anglia in England said. The decline would damage natural services for humans such as water purification and pollination, she said.
But the scientists said governments could reduce the projected habitat loss by 60 percent if global greenhouse gas emissions peaked by 2016 and then fell. A peak by 2030 would cut losses by 40 percent.
Only 4 percent of animals, and no plants, were likely to benefit from rising temperatures and gain at least 50 percent extra territory, the study said.
However, some experts said while it was clear that global temperatures were rising, forecasting the effect on plants and animals was often unreliable as species range was difficult to check.
DIFFICULT BALANCE
Some past studies have indicated that creatures such as bats, hares or opossums may be more able to adapt to new climates than believed. Yet many species of frogs and toads are suffering worse declines in numbers than projected by computer models, apparently because a fungal skin disease is aggravating the effects of global warming.
“It’s very difficult to get the right balance between crying wolf and examining the facts,” said Carsten Dormann, professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, who was not involved in the study. “We simply don’t know if these assessments are correct.”
The scientists said: “Over half of common plants and one third of the animals could see a dramatic decline this century due to climate change.” They said their findings were “probably conservative” as they did not take account of factors that could exacerbate declines, such as pests or
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