California water allocation hits record-low level

  By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – California officials said on Tuesday that drought and environmental restrictions have forced them to cut planned water deliveries to irrigation districts and cities statewide to just 5 percent of their contracted allotments. Although the state Water Resources Department typically ends up supplying more water than first projected […]

Seas could rise 1.4m by 2100, warns Antarctic climate review

  A review of climate change in Antarctica forecasts that by 2100 the world’s seas will have risen to levels previously considered too extreme to be realistic. The review, Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment [pdf], was compiled by 100 scientists associated with the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. Using 20 of the most […]

Graph of the Day: Food Stamp Usage Across the U.S., November 2009

The number of food stamp recipients has climbed by about 10 million over the past two years, resulting in a program that now feeds 1 in 8 Americans and nearly 1 in 4 children. Food Stamp Usage Across the Country Technorati Tags: financial collapse,poverty,North America

Tuvalu: What happens when your country drowns?

By Rachel Morris, www.motherjones.com, November/December 2009 Issue IT’S A BRIGHT, BALMY SUNDAY afternoon and I’m driving through the western outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand, the kind of place you never see on a postcard. No majestic mountains, no improbably green pastures—just a bland tangle of shopping malls and suburbia. I follow a dead-end street, past […]

And what if climate refugees have no place to go?

PARIS, Nov 29 (AFP) Nov 29, 2009 — The UN refugee agency says some 24 million people worldwide have fled their homes due to environmental factors, and warns their ranks could grow tenfold by mid-century, spurred greatly by climate change. Sheer numbers and the lack of legal status under international law mean a vicious humanitarian […]

Graph of the Day: Annual Carbon Flux from Land-Use Changes, 1850-2000

Annual emissions of carbon from changes in land use (Note P = 1015).20 Virtually all of the carbon released to the atmosphere from land use changes now comes from the tropics. Tropical deforestation, including logging and the permanent and temporary conversion of forests to croplands and pastures, releases about 1-2 PgC/yr. This is 15-35% of […]

Wyangala Dam: Then and Now

Australia, already the driest inhabited continent on Earth, is drying up for good. The state of New South Wales is particularly hard-hit, with catastrophic mega-fires destroying the eucalyptus forests, major rivers reduced to muddy streambeds, and dams drained to nothing but algae-filled ponds. Wyangala Dam is an example of how it will end. Now down […]

EPA: Uranium from polluted mine in Nevada wells

By SCOTT SONNER, Associated Press Writer, Sunday, November 22, 2009 YERINGTON, Nev. (AP) — Peggy Pauly lives in a robin-egg blue, two-story house not far from acres of onion fields that make the northern Nevada air smell sweet at harvest time. But she can look through the window from her kitchen table, just past her […]

Nobel expert: Global warming causing Irish floods; ‘We have reaped what we have sown’

By PATRICK REYNOLDS, www.IrishCentral.com Staff WriterPublished Friday, November 27, 2009, 9:23 PMUpdated Friday, November 27, 2009, 10:44 PM Ireland’s massive flooding has almost certainly been the result of climate change, says Nobel Prize-winner and Ireland’s leading climatologist, Prof. John Sweeney. “We have reaped what we have sown,” he said. Devastating floods  have swept large parts […]

Climate refugees: Mau Forest evictees in Kenya

The extraordinary forced relocation of illegal settlers from Kenya’s Massai Mau Forest Complex foreshadows the plight of climate refugees for the rest of the 21st century and beyond. Expect this kind of tragedy to be repeated many times in upcoming decades. In this case, settlers have defied Kenya law and encroached deeply into the forest […]

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial