CHINA: The United States will put Chinese human rights violations on the back burner for now, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday, because "we pretty much know what they are going to say," and because it could hinder progress on other global problems such as climate change. China's explosive population growth has ramped up its coal consumption, and in recent years it has passed the United States as the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases. The need for both countries to cooperatively reign in their emissions is a top foreign-policy priority of the Obama administration and is a major reason why Clinton is in China this weekend. (Source: Washington Post)

 

MEDDLING WITH METALS: Environment ministers from 140 nations agreed on Friday to negotiate a global treaty to phase out the use of mercury, following an announcement earlier in the week from President Obama that the United States is now in favor of a legally binding ban. About 6,000 tons of the toxic metal enter the environment every year, 2,000 tons of which come from coal-fired power plants. Mercury damages the human nervous system, liver and vision, and its effects are most destructive to fetuses and young children. (Source: Reuters)

 

AMERICAN IDLE: Leaving a car running for more than 60 seconds near any New York City school is now illegal, thanks to a new law partly aimed at protecting schoolchildren from street-level smog. New York authorities have been trying to limit idling by school buses for years, but the law's sponsor says that in addition to lowering school-zone tailpipe emissions, it's intended to raise awareness of excessive idling throughout the city. The Environmental Defense Fund says that in the Big Apple alone, idling vehicles release 940 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, 24 tons of soot particles, 6,400 tons of carbon monoxide, and 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide. (Source: Associated Press)

 

SHADOW OF A DROUGHT: Federal water managers may have to cut off all water to some of the largest farms in California if the state's brutal drought doesn't let up, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced Friday. It would be the first such move in 15 years; farmers say food prices could rise if they have to switch to well water, and California officials warn of $1 billion in lost revenue and 40,000 lost jobs. (Source: AP)

 

IMPERMAFROST: One of the most nefarious aspects of global warming is all the feedback loops it creates — instances in which rising temperatures spur some natural phenomenon that releases more greenhouse gases, which in turn heat up the planet even more. A study on one such loop, known as "water vapor feedback," was published this week in the journal Science, and the L.A. Times reported Friday on another vicious climate cycle: methane released by melting permafrost. Bubbles of the especially potent greenhouse gas are embedded in the "permanently" frozen ground, and as global warming thaws Arctic lands, that methane is gurgling up and floating skyward. Siberian lakes alone could release 50 billion metric tons of methane, according to a University of Alaska researcher, which would be about 10 times the amount currently in the atmosphere. (Sources: New Scientist, Los Angeles Times)

 

DISCOMFORT FOOD: One in four Americans is stricken with food poisoning each year, the CDC says, although many of the cases are never linked to wider outbreaks like the salmonella that infected hundreds of people in recent weeks and killed nine. A CDC official tells the AP that the U.S. food supply is "one of the safest in the world," then adds, "But increasingly, our food supply is the world." Authorities are quick to quell alarmism about the recent high-profile outbreaks, but some experts fear a globalized food industry is making them more likely and more dangerous. For more on the recent outbreak and the potential for future ones, see Translating Uncle Sam. (Source: AP)

 

MADAME MONSIEUR BUTTERFLY: When scientists collected a mustachioed butterfly in 1920, they didn't realize it was a previously undiscovered species, and neither did scientists who collected another one in a remote Colombian valley almost 90 years later. The latter research team returned to the the London Natural History Museum and compared the butterflies they had observed on their expedition to the 3 million specimens already in the the museum's collection. When they found an unnamed specimen buried in the collection that had unusually hairy mouthparts, they made the connection and named the species Splendeuptychia ackeryi, or Magdalena valley ringlet. There are almost 20,000 known butterfly species, 40 percent of which live in South America. (Source: LiveScience)

 

— Russell McLendon