Huffpost Green

The 2014 Atlantic hurricane season could be a real yawner if early forecasts hold true.

Phil Klotzbach and William Gray released their outlook Thursday, calling for nine named storms, including three hurricanes, one intense. That’s far below the average of 12 named storms, including six hurricanes, three major.

The two renowned climatologists say they expect El Niño, the large-scale weather pattern that suppresses storm formation, to emerge by the heart of the season in August. They also note the tropical Atlantic has cooled in the past few months.

Huffpost Crime

 Megan Huntsman was clear about what she did with six of her newborn babies.

Huntsman, 39, told police she either strangled or suffocated them immediately after they were born. She wrapped their bodies in a towel or a shirt, put them in plastic bags and then packed them inside boxes in the garage of her home south of Salt Lake City.

What’s not clear is why. A day after her arrest on charges of killing her six babies, investigators and her neighbors puzzled over the grisly discovery, including how she could have concealed a half-dozen pregnancies over a 10-year period.

International efforts to combat global warming are so broken that it’s come to this: hoovering massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the sky.

A body of scientists convened under the auspices of the United Nations is giving more weight to the idea that vacuuming vast stores of CO2 from the skies and burying it in the ground may be necessary to limit the temperature rise to the internationally agreed safe level of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. The plan’s not quite like a giant thermostat for the whole globe, but the metaphor’s not completely off either.

While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has touched on so-called geoengineering approaches in the past, the increased discussion of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere reflects a sense in academic climate policy circles that “it is more okay” to do so, said David Keith, a climate…

Huffpost Politics

A new pair of reports suggests that the super rich are richer than we thought.

The first report by Professors Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley) and Gabriel Zucman (LSE and UC Berkeley) addresses the question of how to measure total wealth, finding that there is an increasing concentration in the top one-thousandth.

So where is all this wealth going? The second report, by Zucman, demonstrates that a lot of the money is held in offshore tax havens. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman summed up the numbers Friday, arguing that they tell us “something important about how the world really works.”

The average American consumes about 3,400 milligrams of sodium every day. That amount — almost a teaspoon and a half of salt a day — has long been considered to be too much to maintain good health. But a surprising new study concludes that amount may be just about right.

The typical American sodium intake is well within the realm of “healthy” for most Americans, according to research published Wednesday in the American Journal of Hypertension. The study is a collaboration between Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Copenhagen University Hospital. The researchers reported that a range of sodium intake between around 2,600 milligrams to 5,000 milligrams daily — higher than existing guidelines — is associated with a decreased rate of both mortality and cardiovascular disease.