By Kate Mackenzie2 May 2012 Bernstein’s energy analysts have looked at the upstream costs for the 50 biggest listed oil producers and found that — surprise, surprise — “the era of cheap oil is over”: Tracking data from the 50 largest listed oil and gas producing companies globally (ex FSU) indicates that cash, production and […]
[cf. U.S. worry about water, air pollution at historic lows – Concern about global warming dead last] 30 April 2012By Ben Cubby CONCERN for the environment has dwindled into a ”middling” issue that many people do not have strong feelings about, a major study into Australian attitudes towards society, politics and the economy has found. […]
[Declaring an end to the Big Dry seems premature, cf.: While the systematic accumulation of rainfall deficits was reversed with the heavy spring and summer rainfall of 2010, the total two-year record rainfall makes up for about one third of the total rainfall ‘missed out on’ since 1996. Additionally, the recovery peaked in autumn 2011, […]
By Saffron Howden1 May 2012 IN THE absence of any exact figure, Gunnedah’s koala population is best measured by the number spotted on the three kilometre drive from town to the local sanctuary. Five years ago, three or four sightings were not uncommon. Now, ”you’d be lucky” to see one, says Nancy Small, who has […]
By Richard A. Kerr27 April 2012 How bad will global warming get? The question has long been cast in terms of how hot the world will get. But perhaps more important to the planet’s inhabitants will be how much rising greenhouse gases crank up the water cycle. Theory and models predict that a strengthening greenhouse […]
By Brandon Keim 1 May 2012 Herbicide-resistant superweeds threaten to overgrow U.S. fields, so agriculture companies have genetically engineered a new generation of plants to withstand heavy doses of multiple, extra-toxic weed-killing chemicals. It’s a more intensive version of the same approach that made the resistant superweeds such a problem — and some scientists think […]
By Peter Brannen30 April 2012 Provincetown, Mass. – Normally for a few days in spring, beachgoers on this hook of land stretching into Cape Cod Bay witness one of the rarest scenes in the animal kingdom: dozens of surface-skimming North Atlantic right whales, lumbering just a few hundred yards from shore. But that rite of […]
23 April 2012 – Flooding hit rural areas in Colombia and Peru on Sunday, driving hundreds from their homes, flooding crops and taking at least three lives in the Boyaca province. In the Colombian town of La Parada, southwest of the capital Bogota, the Tachira River overflowed its banks and flooded some 200 homes. Water […]
The Amazon has reached record breadth, width, and height this rainy season. According to Peru’s Health Ministry, the river has grown at least 6.5 feet during the floods, with the Marañón River, which feeds the Amazon, increasing some 13 feet. Neither river has swelled this much since the 1970s, when a similar flood affected the […]
