Top news and views about Environment and Cleantech for 23 Mar 2017
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Climate change from a plant’s eye view
According to the calendar and the corresponding position of the earth in relation to the sun, it is now officially spring. But spring arrived weeks ago, according to many flowers, when warm temperatures typically associated with mid to late April arrived in early March. In fact, “spring” as defined by bloom time, is actually arriving as much as month earlier now than it was100 years ago. Indeed, in a paper published by the American Journal of Botany, scientists, looking at preserved plant specimens, have determined that many rare species of flowers are responding to warming temperatures and changing seasonal rainfall patterns by blooming two to four weeks earlier then they did historically. This was the first study to focus specifically on imperiled flowers. Previous research in Boston and the Mid-West had also found patterns of earlier bloom time in many species, but, typically found shifts of only one to two weeks.
Full story at http://huff.to/2nfixLz
Columbus, Ohio: What's next for the DoT Smart City Challenge winner
Winning $40 million in the U.S. Department of Transportation's (DoT) Smart City Challenge has proven to be only the first of many steps for Columbus, Ohio to become the nation's first city to fully integrate self-driving cars, connected vehicles, and smart sensors into its transportation network.
"It's a four-year grant cycle, and in year one there's a lot of planning going into effect," said Jeffrey Ortega, assistant director of the Columbus Department of Public Service and spokesman for Smart Columbus, the city's smart city initiative.
Columbus won the DoT challenge in June, and deployment of smart transportation will begin at some point in late 2017 or early 2018, or even beyond, Ortega said.
Full story at http://tek.io/2nC33Q6
Funding the battle to shutdown dirty coal generation in the USA
Bloomberg Philanthropies announced it will invest an additional $30 million in the Sierra Club to secure the replacement of half the nation’s coal fleet by 2017 with clean energy. The new round of funding builds on a previous commitment of $50 million, raising the foundation’s overall investment in the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign to $80 million.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2nfpXOU
Large Sections of Australia’s Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find
SYDNEY, Australia — The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world’s most magnificent natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears.
But the reef, and the profusion of sea creatures living near it, are in profound trouble.
Huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching across hundreds of miles of its most pristine northern sector, were recently found to be dead, killed last year by overheated seawater. More southerly sections around the middle of the reef that barely escaped then are bleaching now, a potential precursor to another die-off that could rob some of the reef’s most visited areas of color and life.
“We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” said Terry P. Hughes, director of a government-funded center for coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and the lead author of a paper on the reef that is being published Thursday as the cover article of the journal Nature. “In the north, I saw hundreds of reefs — literally two-thirds of the reefs were dying and are now dead.”
Full story at http://nyti.ms/2nfmcsE
Prepared by @SydesJokes
Original post from: http://CrowdifyClub.com/SydesJokes