August

News In August 2015

The EPA announced new rules to cut methane emissions. The new proposal is needed to ensure the President’s Climate Action Plan is on track to achieve its goal to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 40 to 45 percent from 2012 levels by 2025. Read more about the new rules in this New York Times article.

The National Academies Press has released Regional Disaster Response Coordination to Support Health Outcome: Summary of a Workshop Series. This summary of workshops explores opportunities to strengthen regional coordination required in response to a large scale multijurisdictional disaster. To download or purchase, click here.

RCI affiliate Malin Pinsky was interviewed in this Rutgers Today article about population plunges of fast-growing fish species. The combination of overfishing and climate variability appears to be responsible for these population collapses. Read Dr, Pinsky’s paper here. Interviews about this research can also be found at: sciencedaily.com and economictimes.com.  

Rutgers Professor Norbert Psuty is quoted in this climatecentral.org article about  rising sea levels and the possible short term solutions.

RCI Affiliates Steve Brechin, Tom Rudel and Rachael Shwom are authors of the recently released, Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives released this month by Oxford University Press. Read more pdf here (1.31 MB) .

The U.S. Global Change Research Program has released a report called Towards Scenarios of U.S. Demographic Change: Workshop Report. The main focus of this report is on the needs, resources, capabilities, and barriers/opportunities for producing national-scale, regionally differentiated, and spatially explicit long-range population and demographics scenarios for the United States. Click here for full report.

In this Rutgers Today article, RCI affiliate Ben Horton discusses the sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet loss during past warm trends. The full paper can be found in Science.

RCI affiliate Patricia Findley discusses her recent report findings on Superstorm Sandy’s lingering effects of mental health distress and depression on child and family health in this Rutgers Today article, nj1015.com article, and philly.com article.

RCI affiliate Jennifer Francis is quoted in Alaska Dispatch News about the causes for the projected warmer winter weather in Alaska.

President Obama, along with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has unveiled a set of environmental regulations devised to sharply cut planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s power plants and ultimately transform America’s electricity industry. This Clean Power Plan will require states to meet specific carbon emission reduction standards based on their individual energy consumption. An overview of the plan can be read in this CNN article as well as the EPA rule summary.

NOAA has recently announced the formation of the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment. This committee will provide advice on sustained assessment activities and products, including engagement of stakeholders. The Committee will be established under The Department of Commerce in 2015. The Committee will consist of 15 non-Federal Members. Interested persons may submit nominations for themselves or third parties here (you must create an account) until Monday, September 14th 2015.

The National Academies Press has released Review of the Draft Interagency Report on the Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States which addresses the need for deeper analysis on how climate change impacts on the environment can create environmental stressors that, in turn, are having and/or have the potential to have significant impact on human health in a number of dimensions. To pre-order the paperback or download the pdf version of this book, click here.

The National Academies Press has released A Community-Based Flood Insurance Option, which  identifies a range of key issues and questions that would merit consideration and further analysis as part of such a program. To pre-order the paperback or download the pdf version of this book, click here.