Each day, research is released indicating that what’s happening worldwide with rising temperatures and global weather patterns are a result of man’s influence on those chaning weather patterns through his activities, such as the increasing use of fossil fuels.

And to feed our addition to fossil fuels, we are turning our technological expertise to exploiting unconventional sources of oil from shale and sand.

According to the Guardian Environmental Network, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming hold oil shale reserves estimated to contain 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil,  based on information from the U.S. Department of Energy, half of which the department says is recoverable. Eastern Utah alone holds tar sands oil reserves estimated at 12 billion to 19 billion barrels, the article said.

 The tar sands region of northern Alberta, Canada contains recoverable oil reserves conservatively estimated at 175 billion barrels, and with new technology could reach 400 billion barrels and would be partially transported via pipeline that will go through Nebraska.

 Deep gas-bearing shales of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain West, Great Lakes, Northeast, and Gulf Coast contain countless trillions of feet of natural gas. If current projections turn out to be accurate, there would be enough oil and gas to power the United States for at least another century, according to the article.

“But even as one of the largest energy booms in history has erupted along a great arc of the continent, the consequences are prompting civic discontent, lawsuits, and political battles in state capitals,” the article said. “The boom is producing fresh scars on the land and new threats to scarce water supplies. Government studies show that exploiting unconventional fossil-fuel reserves generates more C02 emissions than drilling for conventional oil and gas and uses three to five times more water.

“It’s a pact with the devil,” says Randy Udall, a consulting energy analyst from Colorado. “The tar sands and shale oil and shale gas require a lot of water. It sets up a collision course for the West.”

In communities from Wyoming to Texas, the article said that thousands of trucks now rumble down rural roads, carrying the huge amounts of water — 2 million to 4 million gallons per well — needed to free oil and natural gas from shales by blasting them with high-pressure fluids. In places such as North Dakota, which receives modest amounts of rainfall, local residents and conservationists worry that the energy boom will deplete aquifers.

And the explosion in development of these unconventional fossil fuels raises a troubling question at the national level: At a time when the country should be embracing a renewable energy revolution, it is hurtling in the opposite direction, developing on a massive scale sources of energy that cause considerably more environmental harm than conventional oil and gas drilling, according to the article.

And with a lot of those unconventional recovery methods just starting, will it only add to the environmental harm already taking place in the world.

Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, led by GISS’s director, James Hansen, have analyzed summer temperatures and found that an unparalleled heat wave in eastern Europe, coupled with intense droughts and fires around Moscow, along with a string of exceptionally warm days in July in the eastern United States that strained power grids, forced nursing home evacuations, and slowed transit systems have reinvigorated questions about humanity’s role in climate change.

What the researchers found was that globally, June through August, was the fourth-warmest summer period in GISS’s 131-year-temperature record. The same months during 2009, in contrast, were the second warmest on record. The slightly cooler 2010 summer temperatures were primarily the result of a moderate La Niña (cooler than normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean) replacing a moderate El Niño (warmer than normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean).

According to NASA,  as part of their analysis, Hansen and colleagues released a series of graphs that help explain why perceptions of global temperatures vary — often erroneously — from season to season and year to year. For example, unusually warm summer temperatures in the United States and eastern Europe created the impression of global warming run amuck in those regions this summer, while last winter’s unusually cool temperatures created the opposite impression. A more global view, as shown below for 2009 and 2010, makes clear that extrapolating global trends based on the experience of one or two regions can be misleading.

“Unfortunately, it is common for the public to take the most recent local seasonal temperature anomaly as indicative of long-term climate trends,” Hansen notes. “[We hope] these global temperature anomaly maps may help people understand that the temperature anomaly in one place in one season has limited relevance to global trends.”

Last winter, for example, Hansen said unusually cool temperatures in much of the United States caused many Americans to wonder why temperatures seemed to be plummeting, and whether the Earth could actually be experiencing global warming in the face of such frigid temperatures. A more global view, seen in the lower left of the four graphs above, shows that global warming trends had hardly abated. In fact, despite the cool temperatures in the United States, last winter was the second-warmest on record.

Meanwhile, the global seasonal temperatures for the spring of 2010 — March, April, and May — was the warmest on GISS’s record. Does that mean that 2010 will shape up to be the warmest on record? Since the warmest year on GISS’s record — 2005 — experienced especially high temperatures during the last four calendar months of the year, it’s not yet clear how 2010 will stack up.

“It is likely that the 2005 or 2010 calendar year means will turn out to be sufficiently close that it will be difficult to say which year was warmer, and results of our analysis may differ from those of other groups,” Hansen notes. “What is clear, though, is that the warmest 12-month period in the GISS analysis was reached in mid-2010.”

The Russian heat wave was highly unusual. Its intensity exceeded anything scientists have seen in the temperature record since widespread global temperature measurements became available in the 1880s. Indeed, a leading Russian meteorologist asserted that the country had not experienced such an intense heat wave in the last 1,000 years. And a prominent meteorologist with Weather Underground estimated such an event may occur as infrequently as once every 15,000 years.

In the face of such a rare event, there’s much debate and discussion about whether global warming can “cause” such extreme weather events. The answer — both no and yes — is not a simple one.

Weather in a given region occurs in such a complex and unstable environment, driven by such a multitude of factors, that no single weather event can be pinned solely on climate change. In that sense, it’s correct to say that the Moscow heat wave was not caused by climate change.

However, if one frames the question slightly differently: “Would an event like the Moscow heat wave have occurred if carbon dioxide levels had remained at pre-industrial levels,” the answer, Hansen asserts, is clear: “Almost certainly not.”

The frequency of extreme warm anomalies increases disproportionately as global temperature rises.

“Were global temperature not increasing, the chance of an extreme heat wave such as the one Moscow experienced, though not impossible, would be small,” Hansen says.

More than 90 percent of Nebraska’s 14 million-plus acres of corn and soybeans are made up of gentically modified organisms  whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques.

But can the same science be used to help combat global warming?

In a study conducted by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the researchers found that forests of genetically altered trees and other plants could sequester several billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year and so help ameliorate global warming.

Besides increasing the efficiency of plants’ absorption of light, researchers said that they might be able to genetically alter plants so they send more carbon into their roots–where some may be converted into soil carbon and remain out of circulation for centuries.

Other possibilities include altering plants so that they can better withstand the stresses of growing on marginal land, and so that they yield improved bioenergy and food crops, according to the research. Such innovations might, in combination, boost substantially the amount of carbon that vegetation naturally extracts from air, according to the research authors’ estimates.

Study said that the researchers stress that the use of genetically engineered plants for carbon sequestration is only one of many policy initiatives and technical tools that might boost the carbon sequestration already occurring in natural vegetation and crops.