WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Killer heat fueled by climate change could cause an additional 150,000 deaths this century in the biggest U.S. cities if no steps are taken to curb carbon emissions and improve emergency services, according to a new report.

The three cities with the highest projected heat death tolls are Louisville, with an estimated 19,000 heat-related fatalities by 2099; Detroit, with 17,900, and Cleveland, with 16,600, the Natural Resources Defense Council found in its analysis of peer-reviewed data, released on Wednesday.

Concentrated populations of poor people without access to air conditioning are expected to contribute to the rising death tolls.

Thousands of additional heat deaths were also projected by century’s end for Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Providence, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., the report said.

June, July and August are expected to see above-normal temperatures over most of the contiguous United States, from inland California to New Jersey, and from as far north as Idaho and Wyoming to Texas, Florida and the desert Southwest, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a May 17 forecast.

The last 12 months, from May 2011 to April 2012, were the warmest in the contiguous United States since modern record-keeping began; last month was the hottest April on record for the Northern Hemisphere.

These figures show climate change is already being powerfully felt, and more dangerously hot summer days are in prospect under a business-as-usual scenario, said Dan Lashof, director of NRDC’s climate and clean air program.

WASHINGTON, May 16 (Reuters) – The number of extreme rainstorms – deluges that dump 3 inches or more in a day - doubled in the U.S. Midwest over the last half-century, causing billions of dollars in flood damage in a trend climate advocates link to a rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Across the Midwest the biggest storms increased by 103 percent from 1961 through 2011, a study released by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council reported on Wednesday.

States in the upper Midwest fared worse than those in the south part of the region, the study found, with the number of severe rainstorms rising by 203 percent in Wisconsin, 180 percent in Michigan, 160 percent in Indiana and 104 percent in Minnesota.

Illinois saw an 83 percent increase in extreme storms, Missouri had 81 percent, Ohio 40 percent and Iowa 32 percent, according to the study.

“The increase in extreme storms, because of the linkage to flooding, probably represents the Midwest’s greatest vulnerability to climate change,” said study author Stephen Saunders, president of the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization.

Overall annual precipitation for the region rose 23 percent between 1961 and 2011, the study found, using data from weather stations.

The worst flood year during the period was 2008, followed by 1993. Those two years saw the worst Midwest flooding since the 1930s, Saunders said by telephone.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On the wall of a tiny structure buried under forest debris in Guatemala, archaeologists have discovered a scribe’s notes about the Maya lunar calendar, which they say could be the first known records by an official chronicler of this ancient civilization.

These notes pertain to the same Maya calendar that is sometimes erroneously thought to predict the world’s end on or about December 22, 2012. The researchers who helped uncover and decipher the wall’s inscriptions said the Maya calendar foresaw a vast progression of time, with the December 2012 date the beginning of a new calendar cycle called a baktun.

“They were looking at the way these cycles were turning,” said William Saturno of Boston University, an author of an article on the find in the journal Science. “The Maya calendar is going to keep going and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future, a huge number that we can’t even wrap our heads around.”

The faint numerical inscriptions on the wall in Guatemala measure out time in approximate six-month increments, based on six lunar cycles, with small stylized pictures of Maya gods to indicate which deity was the patron of a specific slice of time, the researchers said Thursday in an online briefing.

“It seems pretty clear that what we have here is a lunar calendar,” said David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin, another author of the Science article. The findings will also be published in the June issue of National Geographic, which funded some of the research.

The numbers on the wall were likely written by a scribe or calendar priest, who would have been an important figure in the Maya court, where monarchs were keenly interested in astronomy and sought to harmonize sacred rituals with events in the sky.

The wall was used the way a modern scientist might use a whiteboard, to write down frequently consulted formulas instead of having to look them up in a book, he said.

FORT BELVOIR, Virginia (Reuters) – To sustain themselves on Afghanistan’s rugged frontlines, U.S. Army troops have learned to sip, not guzzle.

The liquid they must conserve is JP-8, a kerosene-based, all-purpose fuel the Army uses in aircraft and Humvees and to generate power for computers, lights and heat. Consumption of JP-8 – short for Jet Propellant-8 – often comes at a grim cost.

The fuel arrives by tanker trucks dispatched in heavily guarded convoys that are frequently attacked by insurgents. For every 20 convoys that roll across the harsh terrain, one U.S. soldier dies, said Colonel Peter Newell, head of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF) at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

Newell’s operation keeps that statistic in mind as it aims to make troops more sustainable – meaning that as they live and work on isolated bases they consume an absolute minimum of fuel. It also means they spend less time guarding fuel convoy routes and more time on tasks like combat, security and communications.

Plans to gradually reduce the size of the U.S. force in Afghanistan, which is due to shrink to 68,000 by the end of the summer, have made fuel conservation more challenging. Soldiers are more spread out now, Newell said, and many work out of small outposts of 150 soldiers or fewer. These outposts are often put up and dismantled after just a few months of operations.

The remaining soldiers are “performing more and more missions,” Newell said. “Now they’re driving longer than ever.” Newell’s team is working this year with 15 to 20 outposts spread across Afghanistan.

The program is part of a larger Pentagon effort to improve energy efficiency and reduce U.S. military dependence on foreign crude oil. There’s the Navy’s “Great Green Fleet” plan to deploy naval ships powered by alternative fuels, and the Green Hornet F/A-18 fighter jet, fueled in part by biofuel.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Some of Greenland’s glaciers are moving about 30 percent faster than they did 10 years ago, contributing to rising global sea levels, but that still may not be enough to reach the most extreme projections for 2100, scientists reported on Thursday.

Researchers have been monitoring the big ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica for decades as one indication of the impact of human-spurred climate change.

Made of compacted snow, these glaciers can move toward the sea, and when they get there, they dump water into the oceans around them. The faster they move, the more water they add, and the higher the oceans get.

Not all glaciers move at the same pace, according to Twila Moon and her co-authors at the University of Washington and Ohio State University, whose research is published in the current issue of the journal Science.

Inland glaciers with no outlet to the sea poke along at top speeds of 30 to 325 feet a year, the researchers found, while those that end at the ocean can travel 7 miles a year.

The glaciers that flow to the sea around Greenland are the ones to watch, Moon said in a telephone interview, because that is where four-fifths of the loss of ice in Greenland occurs.

Satellite surveys of more than 200 glaciers showed that these comparatively fast-movers in the east, southeast and northwest areas of Greenland increased their speed by an average of 30 percent from 2000 to 2011.

WASHINGTON, April 26 (Reuters) – Three out of four U.S. voters favor regulating carbon dioxide as a greenhouse-gas pollutant, and a majority think global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress, a survey of American attitudes on climate and energy reported on Thursday.

The survey was released one day after Rolling Stone magazine published an interview with President Barack Obama in which he suggested that climate change would become a campaign issue this year.

In results often at odds with the political debate in Washington, the survey conducted for Yale and George Mason University also found most Americans would vote for a candidate who raised taxes on coal, oil and natural gas – fossil fuels that emit climate-warming carbon dioxide when burned – while cutting income tax, in a revenue-neutral “tax swap.”

This maneuver, which would not add to federal revenues but would change where they came from, has long been discussed by such disparate political actors as former Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, and Bob Inglis, a Republican former congressman.

Sixty-one percent of Americans surveyed said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported the tax swap, while 20 percent said they would be less likely.

In 2010, Democrats took a different approach, pushing legislation through the House of Representatives that aimed to lower carbon emissions by raising the price of fossil fuels. But the effort died in the Senate amid strong Republican opposition.

While Democrats are frequently perceived as being “greener” than Republicans and independents, the survey found sizable majorities of all three groups favored the tax swap and other environmentally friendly policies, said Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) – The number of earthquakes in the central United States rose “spectacularly” near where oil and gas drillers disposed of wastewater underground, a process that may have caused geologic faults to slip, U.S. government geologists report.

The average number of earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater in the U.S. midcontinent – an area that includes Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas – increased to six times the 20th century average last year, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey said in an abstract of their research.

The abstract does not explicitly link rising earthquake activity to fracking – known formally as hydraulic fracturing - that involves pumping water and chemicals into underground rock formations to extract natural gas and oil.

But the wastewater generated by fracking and other extraction processes may play a role in causing geologic faults to slip, causing earthquakes, the report suggests.

“A remarkable increase in the rate of (magnitude 3) and greater earthquakes is currently in progress,” the authors wrote in a brief work summary to be discussed Wednesday at a San Diego meeting of the Seismological Society of America.

“While the seismicity rate changes described here are almost certainly manmade, it remains to be determined how they are related to either changes in extraction methodologies or the rate of oil and gas production,” the abstract said.

From 1970 through 2000, the rate of magnitude 3 or greater quakes was 21 plus or minus 7.6 each year, according to USGS figures. Between 2001 and 2008, that increased to 29 plus or minus 3.5.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – To figure out what is likely to happen to Earth’s climate this century, scientists are looking 3 million years into the past.

They have concluded that the most revealing slice of time is the Pliocene Epoch, a warm, wet period between 3.15 million and 2.85 million years ago, when the world probably looked and felt much as it does now. Global temperatures and the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were similar to today’s climate, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Knowing more about the Pliocene is useful for climate modelers around the world who create sophisticated computer programs to simulate what global warming could bring to Earth.

But recreating ancient climate conditions has also given fuel to those who question human-caused global warming. In the Pliocene Epoch, there were no humans to spur carbon dioxide emissions, so the similarity in carbon dioxide levels between then and now points to natural causes, they say.

As Harry Dowsett, a USGS scientist who has made a career of studying the Pliocene, put it, this was a time “before man was able to do anything to Earth.”

Hindcasting – looking backward to project forward – relies on tools that are not regularly used in paleontology, the study of fossil evidence of past ages. Techniques like radio-carbon dating, which tracks the gradual decay of radioactive carbon, only work back to about 1 million years ago.

Instead, paleoclimatologists who study ancient climate find clues in cores drilled in sediment layers on ocean bottoms and in some leaf remains. They then examine different isotopes (atomic weights, with varying numbers of neutrons) of non-radioactive, stable carbon.

By Deborah Zabarenko

(Reuters) – A new Tennessee law protects teachers who explore the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of evolution and climate change, a move science education advocates say could make it easier for creationism and global warming denial to enter U.S. classrooms.

The measure, which became law Tuesday, made Tennessee the second state, after Louisiana, to enable teachers to more easily teach alternative theories to the widely accepted scientific concepts of evolution and human-caused climate change. At least five other states considered similar legislation this year.

The heart of the law is protection for teachers who “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.”

Science education advocates say this leaves latitude for teachers to bring in material on creationism or climate change denial, which they consider unsound science.

The law was billed as a triumph of academic freedom by proponents of creationism or intelligent design, who reject the concept that human beings and other life forms evolved through random mutation and natural selection.

The Tennessee measure “protects teachers when they promote critical thinking and objective discussion about controversial science issues such as biological evolution, climate change and human cloning,” said a statement from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which promotes intelligent design.