Mountain pine beetle (MPB) is an insect native to the forests of western North America and is also known as the Black Hills beetle or the Rocky Mountain pine beetle. MPB primarily develop in pines such as lodgepole, ponderosa, Scotch and limber pines, and less commonly affect bristlecone and piñon pines. Symptoms of Infestation Popcorn-shaped […]
By Robin McKie, science editor, www.guardian.co.uk11 August 2012 Sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a far greater rate than previously expected, according to data from the first purpose-built satellite launched to study the thickness of the Earth’s polar caps. Preliminary results from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe indicate that 900 cubic kilometres […]
[12,588 hectares = 48.6 square miles. This afternoon, the sky in Seattle is an eerie, hazy yellow from Siberia smoke carried on the jet stream, the incinerated remains of trees and animals. This may be the most under-reported story of 2012.] By Jennifer Zielinski 13 August 2012 It may be forest fire season but the […]
By Mynardo Macaraig, AFP 13 August 2012 Philippine authorities warned Monday an intensifying storm could bring more misery to the flood-battered capital and surrounding areas, where nearly half a million were in evacuation centres. While flooding that covered 80 percent of Manila last week had largely subsided, vast areas of mainly rice-growing provinces to the […]
By David Biello, Scientific American27 July 2012 Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into […]
By Eugene Robinson9 August 2012 Excuse me, folks, but the weather is trying to tell us something. Listen carefully, and you can almost hear a parched, raspy voice whispering: “What part of ‘hottest month ever’ do you people not understand?” According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July was indeed the hottest month in […]
10 August 2012 (ABC) – The Nuclear Association in French Polynesia has raised concerns that Murorua Atoll, the site of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, is in danger of collapsing. Murorua e Tatou says the issue was detailed in a leaked report from the Ministry of Defence to the French government dated March 2010. […]
By arevamirpal::laprimavera 6 August 2012 As one of the readers noted in the other post, the radiation contamination in Tochigi and Gunma Prefectures (northern Kanto) has been little noted. The highest official measurement for wild mushrooms was last year, when 28,000 Bq/kg of radioactive cesium was found in wild mushrooms in Fukushima Prefecture. The reason […]
By Shanghai Newsroom and Kazunori Takada; Editing by Jason Subler and Robert Birsel8 Aug 2012 SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Typhoon Haikui struck China on Wednesday, packing winds of up to 110 km per hour (68 mph), prompting officials to evacuate nearly 2 million people and grounding hundreds of flights to and from Shanghai and other cities. […]
Record drought across the United States in 2012 followed a year of record flooding in the Mid-West in 2011, producing two very different areas of hypoxia, or oxygen deficient water, on the Louisiana continental shelf. The 2012 area of low oxygen, commonly known as the ‘Dead Zone,’ measured 7,480 square kilometers (= 2,889 square miles) […]
