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Submission + - Climate Deal Would Commit Every Nation to Limiting Emissions (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Negotiators from around the globe reached a climate change agreement early Sunday that would, for the first time in history, commit every nation to reducing its rate of greenhouse gas emissions — yet would still fall far short of what is needed to stave off the dangerous and costly early impact of global warming.

The agreement reached by delegates from 196 countries establishes a framework for a climate change accord to be signed by world leaders in Paris next year. While United Nations officials had been scheduled to release the plan on Friday at noon, longstanding divisions between rich and poor countries kept them wrangling through Friday and Saturday nights to early Sunday.

The agreement requires every nation to put forward, over the next six months, a detailed domestic policy plan to limit its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases from burning coal, gas and oil. Those plans, which would be published on a United Nations website, would form the basis of the accord to be signed next December and enacted by 2020.

Submission + - Global Warming to Make European Heat Waves 'Commonplace' by 2040s (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: In June 2003, a high-pressure weather system took hold over Western Europe and hovered there for weeks, bringing warm tropical air to the region and making that summer the hottest since at least 1540, the year King Henry VIII discarded his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

Temperatures were about 2.3 degrees Celsius, or 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit, above average that summer, contributing to perhaps 70,000 additional deaths and hitting the elderly particularly hard. The heat was a factor in the outbreak of forest fires and in lower than usual crop yields. It caused Alpine glaciers to shrink at a rate double that seen in the previous record summer five years earlier.

Now, three scientists from the Met Office, the British weather agency, have concluded that human-caused global warming is going to make European summer heat waves “commonplace” by the 2040s.

Their findings, published on Monday in the online journal Nature Climate Change, suggest that once every five years, Europe is likely to experience “a very hot summer,” in which temperatures are about 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, above the 1961-90 average. This is up from a probability, just a decade ago, that such events would occur only once every 52 years, a 10-fold increase.

Submission + - New Mexico levies $54M against US for violations at nuclear repository (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: New Mexico on Saturday levied more than $54 million in penalties against the US Department of Energy for numerous violations that resulted in the indefinite closure of the nation’s only underground nuclear waste repository.

The state Environment Department delivered a pair of compliance orders to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, marking the state’s largest penalty ever imposed on the agency. Together, the orders outline more than 30 state permit violations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico and at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The orders and the civil penalties that come with them are just the beginning of possible financial sanctions the Energy Department could face in New Mexico. The state says it’s continuing to investigate and more fines are possible.

The focus has been on a canister of waste from Los Alamos that ruptured in one of WIPP’s storage rooms in February. More than 20 workers were contaminated and the facility was forced to close, putting in jeopardy efforts around the country to clean up tons of Cold War-era waste.

Submission + - NASA Orion Capsule Succesfully Lifts off from Florida Space Coast (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by PaisteUser
PaisteUser writes: NBC News writes: America's most powerful rocket launched a robotic test version of NASA's Orion deep-space capsule on its first flight on Friday, a day after a series of snags forced a scrub of the first attempt. The United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket's liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station had to be postponed on Thursday — at first due to gusty winds, and later due to a balky fuel valve. But on Friday, no technical issues or weather snags got in the way of an on-time 7:05 a.m. ET launch, even though the clouds were thick over Florida's Space Coast.

"Liftoff at dawn! The dawn of Orion, for a new era of American space exploration!" launch commentator Mike Curie said as the rocket blasted through the clouds just after sunrise.

Article include a live feed from the NASA TV channel, NTV-1.

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