Free Republic

This morning we showed up at Moore Square at 9:00 a.m., just like we have done virtually every Saturday and Sunday for the last six years. We provide, without cost or obligation, hot coffee and a breakfast sandwich to anyone who wants one. We keep this promise to our community in cooperation with five different large suburban churches that help us with manpower and funding. Today officers from Raleigh Police Department prevented us from doing our work, for the first time ever. An officer said, quite bluntly, that if we attempted to distribute food, we would be arrested.

It appears global warming is not for the thin-skinned — and that’s bad news for amphibians. Frogs, toads, newts and the like have permeable skins, which makes them especially sensitive to environmental change. It also makes them good species to monitor to get an idea of the health of our planet. In 2004, researchers conducting a global assessment concluded that almost a third of the world’s known amphibian species were threatened with extinction. Now, a new study suggests that global warming may be to blame for amphibians’ precarious state. The study, published last week in the scientific journal Nature, found...