Sat.Feb 22, 2014 - Fri.Feb 28, 2014

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Watch the Great Lakes Freeze Over

TIME Ecocentric

Correction appended February 26 You can measure a winter in many ways: temperature records, snow cover, even travel delays. But to truly see how frigid this winter has been—at least for the eastern half of the U.S.—you need to go way up. Satellite imagery shows that an incredible 88% of the Great Lakes—Superior, Michigan, Huron, Ontario and Erie—are now frozen over.

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How Uncle Sam Is Helping to Feed the Honeybees

TIME Ecocentric

When I wrote a cover story last August about the plight of the honeybees, I didn’t think I’d still be talking about it half a year later. Yet this afternoon I went down to Washington to address a meeting of the National Garden Club—and the topic, of course, was honeybees. I wish I’d had better news to offer. Scientists still don’t know exactly why rates of honeybee loss have been so high in recent years, though there has been some promising research identifying new viruse

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Volcanoes May Be Slowing Down Climate Change

TIME Ecocentric

Small volcanic eruptions might be part of the reason why the pace of global warming hasn’t kept up with previous predictions, a new study published in Nature Nature Geoscience suggests. Eruptions of at least 17 volcanoes since 2000, including Kasatochi in Alaska and Merapi in Indonesia, seem to have had a cooling influence on the temperature of the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere.

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Thanks to Climate Change, West Nile Virus Could Be Your New Neighbor

TIME Ecocentric

Invasive species aren’t just species — they can also be pathogens. Such is the case with the West Nile virus. A mosquito-borne virus identified in the West Nile subregion in Uganda in 1937 — hence the name — West Nile wasn’t much of a concern to people elsewhere until it broke out of Africa in 1999. The first U.S. cases were confirmed in New York City in 1999, and it has now spread throughout much of the world.

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Electrofuels Are the Future: The Driving Force to Decarbonizing Heavy Transport

Speaker: Ayesha Choudhury - Senior Vice President, Head of Capital Markets at Infinium

With the first wave of the energy transition, renewable energy sources (such as solar and wind) have begun replacing coal power generation. However, some sectors are lagging behind and struggling to decarbonize more than others, including large-scale transportation like commercial aviation, shipping, and rail transit. Electrofuels (aka eFuels) are the next generation of solutions to help the hardest-to-abate sectors pivot from their reliance on fossil fuels.

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California Is Finally Set to Get Rain, But It Won’t Quench the Drought

TIME Ecocentric

How extreme is the drought in California? Right now the federal government says that every square mile of California is in some state of drought—and 14.62% of the state, concentrated in central California’s agricultural heartland, is in the most extreme state of exceptional drought. Rainfall in some of the most populated parts of the state have been all but nonexistent—since July 1, San Francisco has experienced just 5.85 inches of rain, about 35% of what’s normal, and Los Angeles ha

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Japan Mulls Nuclear Revival Not Even 3 Years After Fukushima

TIME Ecocentric

If there was one thing that seemed certain in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in 2011—the worst atomic accident since Chernobyl—it was that nuclear power in Japan and the rest of the world was in major trouble. Japan, which before Fukushima had generated 30% of its electricity from nuclear, eventually took all of its 50 commercial reactors offline to pass new safety tests.