Public

"A Senate committee on Tuesday launches three long days of hearings on a Democratic climate bill in a bid to further convince an international summit in December that Washington is serious about tackling global warming."

Hikers using GPS beacons are calling rescuers to get them out of situations they should never have gotten into -- and overtaxing rescuers with nuisance requests.

"The federal Energy Department will make good on a pledge for a bolder technology strategy on Monday, awarding research grants for ideas like bacteria that will make gasoline, enzymes that will capture carbon dioxide to counter global warming and batteries so cheap that they will allow the use of solar power all night long."

"Decades of industrial pollution in the Portland Harbor Superfund site have left high levels of contaminants in river sediment, an exhaustive survey concludes, posing risks to wildlife, fish and humans who eat fish from the nine-mile stretch of the Willamette River."

A trawl survey that has been conducted weekly for some 50 years in Narragansett Bay is finding profound changes in the composition of sea life there. Biologically, the news is bad. Despite huge investments in cleaning up the Bay, climate change seems to be the villain.

Refugees from global warming are arriving at camps in Kenya.

"Federal investigators entered a smoldering fuel depot for the first time Sunday to investigate what may have caused an explosion that forced hundreds to evacuate and spewed thick, toxic smoke across the region."

"Many experts think pig farming presents a serious and overlooked risk to public health. Proof of that assertion -- indirect but indisputable, in the opinion of virologists -- is the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza."

Gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale formation of Pennsylvania is bringing an economic boom there -- even as oil and gas drilling has fallen dramatically nationwide. But the gas is tax-exempt in Pennsylvania.