A roundup of news items related to climate change and other environmental issues in Florida:
Panthers: Group sues over failure to protect cats from pesticides | Fort Myers News-Press
An environmental group last week filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service accusing it of failure to protect endangered species from dangerous chemicals.
The Center for Biological Diversity says up to 97% of endangered species are threatened by pesticides, and the group wants the FWS to help ban the use of those pesticides.
“From rusty patched bumblebees to Florida panthers, hundreds of plants and animals are really suffering while they wait for basic protections from toxic pesticides,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Endangered Species Act is incredibly effective, but it can’t stop extinctions if the agency tasked with protecting wildlife refuses to do its job.”
Bill could boost Florida’s ‘renewable’ fuel industry. Critics say it will cost consumers | Miami Herald
There is booming interest across Florida in turning cow manure, urban sewage and other nasty stuff once considered waste into “renewable” gas.
If used instead of oil and other fossil fuels, such alternative sources of energy could, at least potentially, help slow emissions driving climate change and the rising seas that threaten communities up and down the coast.
But such experimental projects come at considerable costs — costs that under a bill being considered by Florida lawmakers would be passed on to consumers, not the companies that stand to profit from the operations.
What the warming global average temperature means for La Niña and hurricane season | WUSF
During COP21, the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, 196 parties adopted a legally binding international treaty on climate change to pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
But the European Union’s climate service reported recently that global warming exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels for the first time in a 12-month period from February of last year to January.
A global temperature of 1.5 degrees above normal means the Earth’s atmospheric system has double the energy compared to 1950, said Bob Bunting, with the Climate Adaptation Center in Sarasota.
If you have any news items of note that you think we should include in our next roundup, please email The Invading Sea Editor Nathan Crabbe at ncrabbe@fau.edu. Sign up for The Invading Sea newsletter by visiting here.
