QUARTZ  by Grace Dobush                                         March 13, 2015

AUSTIN, Texas—Perhaps the most surprising and important product debuting at SXSW Interactive this year is a personal protective equipment (PPE) prototype for health care workers dealing with Ebola, a tangible result of the U.S. government adapting the culture of innovation and design thinking so key in the startup world.

A team from the U.S. Agency for International Development demonstrated the traditional Ebola suit and the new suit in a preview for Quartz....

Ocean and sky (stock image) / Iakov Kalinin / Fotolia

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Atlantic and Pacific multidecadal oscillations and Northern Hemisphere temperatures

sciencedaily.com - February 26, 2015

The recent slowdown in climate warming is due, at least in part, to natural oscillations in the climate, according to a team of climate scientists, who add that these oscillations represent variability internal to the climate system. They do not signal any slowdown in human-caused global warming.

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NBC NEWS  by Maggie Fox                                                                               Feb. 26, 2015

The United States fumbled its response to the Ebola epidemic before it even began, neglecting experiments to make vaccines and drugs against the virus, and cutting funding to key public health agencies, a presidential commission said Thursday.

Americans focused on their own almost nonexistent risk of catching Ebola from travelers instead of pressing to help the truly affected nations, the scathing report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues says.

They've been acting against their own best interest, the commission said in its report.

"Both justice and prudence demand that we do our part in combating such devastating outbreaks. Once we recognize our humanitarian obligations and the ability of infectious diseases to travel in our interconnected world, we cannot choose between the ethical and the prudential," it reads.

"Ethics and enlightened interest converge in calling for our country to address epidemics at their source."

A depot used to store pipes for Transcanada Corp's planned Keystone XL oil pipeline is seen in Gascoyne, North Dakota November 14, 2014.  Credit: Reuters/Andrew Cullen

reuters.com - By Jeff Mason and Timothy Gardner - February 24, 2015

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday, as promised, swiftly vetoed a Republican bill approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline, leaving the long-debated project in limbo for another indefinite period.

The U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, after receiving Obama's veto message, immediately countered by announcing the Republican-led chamber would attempt to override it by March 3.

That is unlikely. Despite their majority, Republicans are four votes short of being able to overturn Obama's veto.

They have vowed to attach language approving the pipeline to a spending bill or other legislation later in the year that the president would find difficult to veto.

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Workers from the United Steelworkers (USW) union walk a picket line outside the Lyondell-Basell refinery in Houston, Texas February 1, 2015. REUTERS/Richard Carson

reuters.com - by Erwin Seba - February 22, 2015

(Reuters) - The largest U.S. refinery strike in 35 years entered its fourth week on Sunday as workers at 12 refineries accounting for one-fifth of national production capacity were walking picket lines.

Sources familiar with the negotiations said talks may resume by mid-week to end the walkout by 6,550 members of the United Steelworkers union (USW) at 15 plants, including the 12 refineries.

Representatives of both sides said no date has been set to restart negotiations, however.

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REUTERS      by Lisa Rapaport                                                                                Feb. 19, 2015

Effectively monitoring people exposed to Ebola requires more than just checking symptoms. A quarantine plan also needs to help people keep up with work and school and pay for essentials like housing and food, a U.S. report concludes.

To understand the challenges encountered by ordinary citizens exposed to Ebola, a team led by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed concerns raised by people monitored as part of an Ebola cluster in Dallas last year.

If yet-to-be-identified contacts notice that those who come forward as Ebola contacts are shunned from society and quarantined in their homes, with no way to provide for themselves and their families, they will be less likely to come forward," said lead study author Dr. Charnetta Smith, a CDC epidemic intelligence service officer.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/19/us-cdc-quarantine-ebola-policy-idUSKBN0LN1HI20150219

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Image: Cattle roam dirt-brown fields on the outskirts of Delano, in California’s Central Valley. Scientists predict future droughts will be far worse than the one in California. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

theguardian.com - February 12 2015 - Suzanne Goldenberg

The US south-west and the Great Plains will face decade-long droughts far worse than any experienced over the last 1,000 years because of climate change, researchers said on Thursday.

The coming drought age – caused by higher temperatures under climate change – will make it nearly impossible to carry on with current life-as-normal conditions across a vast swathe of the country.

New EPA standards will aim to significantly cut methane emissions from oil and gas sites in the U.S.

The Obama administration makes its latest move to take on climate change.

usnews.com - by Alan Neuhauser - January 14, 2015

In the Obama administration’s latest use of executive authority to address climate change, the White House announced plans Wednesday to impose new regulations on the oil and gas industry that would nearly halve methane emissions from wells, drill sites and pipelines in 10 years.

The new standards, to be developed by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act, would aim by 2025 to cut methane emissions by up to 45 percent from levels recorded in 2012. They would also slash the spread of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, key components of ground-level smog that have been linked to cancer, neurological conditions and other illnesses.

nrdc.org

Across the nation, climate change is making hot summer days hotter and stretching their numbers into heat waves that never seem to end. And the heat is causing more than just discomfort - as temperatures rise, so are the number of illnesses, emergency room visits, and deaths.

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Oil pump jacks at work at a drilling site in North Dakota. Producers have been cutting back.
Credit Eric Gay/Associated Press

nytimes.com - by Clifford Krauss - January 7, 2015

HOUSTON — With oil prices plunging at an ever-quickening rate, producers are beginning to slash the number of drilling rigs around the country.

The national rig count had remained surprisingly resilient over recent months even as oil prices dropped by more than 50 percent since June, and it still tops the count of a year ago as domestic production continues to surge.

The UCL study used an economic model to determine what percentage of each region's fossil fuel reserves should be left untouched in order to meet climate goals. Reserves are defined as fuels that could be developed given current technology and economic conditions.
EMILY M. ENG, NG STAFF. SOURCE: C. MCGLADE AND P. EKINS. NATURE

New study says vast amounts of coal, oil, and gas must be left untouched to limit global warming.

CLICK HERE - STUDY - NATURE
The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to
2 °C

Nature 517, 187–190 (08 January 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14016

nationalgeographic.com - January 7, 2015
by Christina Nunez

Canada's tar sands need to stay in the ground, the oil beneath the Arctic has to remain under the sea, and most of the world's coal must be left untouched in order to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2°C, a study released Wednesday says.

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS  by Sue Ambrose                                     Dec. 27, 2014

DALLAS, Texas --When Ebola surfaced in the U.S., federal guidelines to protect medical workers here were weaker than the ones that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had in place 15 years earlier, The Dallas Morning News has found.

It’s not known exactly how nurse Nina Pham contracted Ebola while caring for patient Thomas Eric Duncan. Shown here at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, she was later successfully treated at a National Institutes of Health hospital in Maryland. Agence France-Presse

A review of CDC documents and archived Web pages shows that a 1998 protocol originally written for health care workers in Africa had more protective measures than the one for U.S. caregivers when Thomas Eric Duncan became the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in this country.

Two Dallas nurses were infected with the deadly virus while treating Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, where he died in early October....

CENTER FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE AND POLICY                                                                   Dec. 9, 2014          
By  Peter M. Sandman, PhD, and Jody Lanard, MD  

In contrast to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, which started in late 2013 and will last well into 2015 or longer, the US "Ebola crisis" was encapsulated in a single month, October 2014. But there may well be US Ebola cases to come, brought here by travelers or returning volunteers. And other emerging infectious diseases will surely reach the United States in the months and years ahead.

So now is a propitious time to harvest some crisis communication lessons from the brief US Ebola "crisis."

We're putting "crisis" in quotation marks because there was never an Ebola public health crisis in the United States, nor was there a significant threat of one. But there was a crisis of confidence, a period of several weeks during which many Americans came to see the official response to domestic Ebola as insufficiently cautious, competent, and candid—and therefore felt compelled to implement or demand additional responses of their own devising....

(CLICK HERE - INTERACTIVE MAP - Surging Seas - Risk Finder: Texas)

(CLICK HERE - Surging Seas - Risk Finder: Texas)

Searchable interactive map of sea level rise & flood risk areas

Climate Central - An independent organization of leading scientists and journalists researching and reporting the facts about our changing climate and its impact on the American public.

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DALLAS MORNING NEWS  By REESE DUNKLIN and STEVE THOMPSON                                        Dec 8, 2014

The Dallas emergency-room doctor who missed signs of Ebola in a Liberian man who later became the first to die of the disease in the U.S. describes the fateful night for the first time.

Dr. Joseph Howard Meier told The Dallas Morning News that when he treated Thomas Eric Duncan in the early morning hours of Sept. 26, he was unaware that Duncan had recently arrived from a country ravaged by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He also said he did not realize Duncan had such a high fever.

"I was unaware of a 103-degree fever," Meier said in written answers to questions from the paper, released by his attorney. "It appears in the chart, but I did not see it...."

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