Last year, as wildfires raged in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, visitors to Guadalupe Mountains National Park had to settle for a more limited view when hiking up Guadalupe Peak, Texas’ highest point.

“All summer, there was a haze here,” said Jonena Hearst, the park’s geologist. Even before the fires, she said, visibility had been decreasing slightly over time.

Sand dunes rise above a windy, desolate stretch of beach, miles beyond where most tourists venture. Occasional flocks of brown pelicans are visible, arcing through the sky above the water.

Photographs of oil-soaked brown pelicans became emblematic of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill two years ago, but the Texas coast now stands to benefit.

“I love watching them fly,” said Sonny Perez, manager of the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, which includes some of the remote northern reaches of South Padre. “They’re like little bombardiers going across.”

Texas has endured its worst one-year drought in recorded history. And the hottest July. August is on course to be hotter still, setting another record.
So, is this the result of climate change?

Scientists hedge, particularly when it comes to the drought, because they are reluctant to pin any single weather event on climate change. They point to La Niña, an intermittent Pacific Ocean phenomenon that affects storms, as the immediate cause.

In a victory for environmentalists, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, reaffirmed a lower-court decision to reinstate a Clinton-era rule that substantially limited development of roads on national forest lands.

The biggest opportunity to improve the nation

An impasse over coal-fired power plants in Kansas has ended, with the new governor, Mark Parkinson, agreeing to allow construction of a large coal plant in the western part of the state. A Kansas utility, Sunflower Electric, had hoped to build two large coal plants.

LOCKHEED MARTIN is best known for building stealth fighters, satellites and other military equipment. But since late 2006 the company has taken on a different kind of enterprise

In an ambitious proposal to counter global warming, an upstart power developer wants to build a coal-fired electric plant on the outskirts of New York City that would capture its emissions of carbon dioxide and pump the pollutant 70 miles offshore. The gas would be injected into sandstone a mile beneath the ocean floor in the hope that it would stay there for eons.

Solar cells adorn the roofs of many homes and warehouses across Germany, while the bright white blades of wind turbines are a frequent sight against the sky in Spain.

Wind and solar power grew at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate, especially in the United States under the green-minded administration of the new president, Barack Obama.