(MI) The Mudpuppy – Almost every time there’s a post on Mlive about climate change or global warming, one or more people usually chime in about “global cooling.”

(ON) The Toronto Star – A new book on sustainability suggests there is an environmental disaster lurking in your home. Maybe he’s looking at you right now, tongue hanging out, waiting for you to put down the newspaper and take him for his morning walkies.

(MI) Bay City Times - A small chemical leak caused about 15 minutes of excitement here today. About 2:45 p.m., a 10,000-gallon anhydrous ammonia tank sprung a leak at Dow AgroSciences, 305 N. Huron (M-25), said Harbor Beach Fire Chief John Lermont.

(MI) Detroit Free Press – This park is the perfect way to honor the former governor, who was devoted to protecting Michigan’s natural resources and to ensuring public access to them – at the same time championing the state’s cities, especially Detroit; hence his “odd couple” relationship, as he called it, with Coleman Young.

(ON) The Globe and Mail - The Rubik’s cube of international negotiations opens in six weeks in Copenhagen. Anyone who had hoped for a comprehensive world deal on lowering greenhouse-gas emissions and therefore reducing the threats from climate change will be disappointed.

(MI) Muskegon Chronicle – A Muskegon contractor played a major role in building the nation’s largest commercial solar energy plant, which was to be visited by President Barack Obama today.

By Alice Rossignol and Jeff Gillies
Oct. 27, 2009
Wisconsin researchers hope six-legged fungus farmers can speed the switch from gasoline to plant-based fuels.
The farmers are leafcutter ants, and for millions of years they’ve been breaking down plants into the ingredients people now hope to use to brew environmentally friendly fuels.
By studying how plants break down in a leafcutter ant colony, we might do a better job of breaking them down in a big biofuel production facility, said Cameron Currie, a bacteriology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - A Great Lakes restoration plan hatched by President Barack Obama in the heat of last year’s campaign has been embraced as a prescription to heal centuries of pollution and mismanagement.

(OH) The Toledo Blade - The mighty lake sturgeon – an odd-looking North American fish that has been on Earth no fewer than 150 million years and that coexisted with dinosaurs for at least 85 million years – is making a comeback in the Great Lakes region after nearly going extinct in the early 1900s.

(MI) The Mudpuppy – Ah, fall. Cool air, crisp leaves, fine particulate matter?  The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is asking people to think twice about burning leaves when they clean up their yards this season. Mulching, by mowing those leaves over, is a better alternative, along with composting, DEQ officials say.