By David Brodwin 23 August 2016 (U.S. News & World Report) – If you work hard and play by the rules you will get ahead, according to the American Dream. But working hard and playing by the rules now feels like running in place to a lot of Americans. The past few years of economic […]
By Anuradha Nagaraj18 August 2016 CHENNAI, India (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – More than a quarter of India’s land is turning to desert and the rate of degradation of agricultural areas is increasing, according to new analysis of satellite images. A report [pdf] from the Indian Space Research Organization says land degradation – broadly defined as […]
By Aaron Sidder22 July 2016 (National Geographic) – Vultures rest in the tree’s upper branches, their black bodies in stark contrast to the blanched wood beneath their feet. Below them, caimans and capybaras crawl in sucking mud through the Agropil lagoon, seeking water that is unlikely to arrive for many months. The river has dried […]
23 August 2016 (Reuters) – At least 300 people have died in eastern and central India and more than 6 million others have been affected by floods that have submerged villages, washed away crops, destroyed roads, and disrupted power and phone lines, officials said Tuesday. Heavy monsoon rains have caused rivers, including the mighty Ganges […]
25 July 2016 (Siberian Times) – The mountain of sawdust is the size of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools at a site in the Ust-Kutsky district of Irkutsk region. A council spokesman said: ‘It is now impossible to extinguish dump with such an amount of sawdust. ‘Obviously, it will keep burning for a few […]
By Michael Slezak14 August 2016 (Guardian) – First seabirds started falling out of the sky, washing up on beaches from California to Canada. Then emaciated and dehydrated sea lion pups began showing up, stranded and on the brink of death. A surge in dead whales was reported in the same region, and that was followed […]
By Arthur Neslen 11 August 2016 Ljubljana, the Upper Kolpa valley, and Zagreb (Guardian) – The death toll of animals killed by a razor wire fence designed to stop migrants crossing into Europe is mounting, amid warnings that bears, lynx, and wolves could become locally extinct if the barrier is completed and consolidated. The rising […]
By Robert Ferris19 Aug 2016 (CNBC) – Arctic sea ice is melting at a rate far faster than anyone thought, and it is already wildly, and perhaps permanently, changing the region, and the planet. Historically, sea ice forms every winter across the top of the planet, and covers much of the Arctic Ocean. Every summer, […]
[Translation by Bing Translator.] By Antônio Fonseca, Marcelo Justino, Carlos Souza Jr., and Adalberto Veríssimo22 August 2016 (Imazon) – In July 2016, SAD detected 539 square kilometers of deforestation in the Amazon, with a cloud cover of 7% of the territory. This represented a decrease of 1% compared to July 2015 when deforestation totaled 542 […]
[Jim Hansen’s supralinear sea level rise scenario looks increasingly likely. –Des] By Chris Mooney 17 August 2016 (Washington Post) – In a new study, scientists who study the largest ice mass on Earth — East Antarctica — have found that it is showing a surprising feature reminiscent of the fastest melting one: Greenland. More specifically, […]
