By Sarah Boseley8 February 2016 (Guardian) – A global epidemic far worse than the Ebola outbreak is a real possibility and could kill many millions if the world does not become better prepared to deal with the sudden emergence and transmission of disease, the UN has said in a hard-hitting report. The report has emerged […]
By Michael Slezak3 February 2016 (Guardian) – A national inquiry into the fires devastating world heritage forests in Tasmania is urgently needed, say conservationists and academics. The call comes as experts say fires like those could be the new normal. The Australian Conservation Foundation has called for the public inquiry as dozens of fires continue […]
By Andrew Mambondiyani; editing by Megan Rowling8 February 2016 MUTARE, Zimbabwe (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Shylet Mutsago, a 63-year-old who lives near the diamond fields of Marange, cannot hide her anger over how mining in this gem-rich part of eastern Zimbabwe has failed to improve the lives of local people. From a distance she watches […]
By Brian Lada8 February 2016 (AccuWeather) – The El Niño-influenced weather pattern over the past several months has brought above-normal temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast, causing the ice coverage on the Great Lakes to be significantly lower than it has been over the past two winters. As of 2 February 2016, the total ice […]
By Mike Gaworecki 4 February 2016 (mongabay.com) – Recent research by the U.S. Forest Service finds that the world lost interior forest at three times the rate of forest loss as a whole. They write that this fragmentation could severely jeopardize the ability of remaining forests to provide critical wildlife habitat and other ecological functions. […]
[This is a disaster. CSIRO is a world-class research organization for climate science, on par with the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Germany’s Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research. Crippling Australia’s climate science capability deals a significant blow to humanity’s struggle to survive our greatest existential threat: […]
By Michael Mann25 January 2016 (RealClimate) – With the official numbers now in 2015 is, by a substantial margin, the new record-holder, the warmest year in recorded history for both the globe and the Northern Hemisphere. The title was sadly short-lived for previous record-holder 2014. And 2016 could be yet warmer if the current global […]
By Claire Salisbury1 February 2016 (mongabay.com) – The Amazon’s freshwater ecosystems are at risk because current policy and existing protected areas fail to protect the connectivity of the water cycle, scientists warn. The new study, published in Global Change Biology, examines the factors degrading the Amazon basin’s hydrological connectivity: the movement of water — and […]
By Vanessa Schipani1 February 2016 (FactCheck.org) – While on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz gave a speech to local residents that contained inaccurate and misleading claims about climate science and its terminology: Cruz claimed “none of the alarmists say ‘global warming’ anymore — now it’s ‘climate change.’ ” That’s […]
September 2012 (Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory) – Ice cover on the Great Lakes has been declining since 1973. This figure shows the linear trends for the six lakes. The linear trend was estimated using the least squares regression (LSR). The linear equation is in the form: x=a+bt, where x is the ice cover (in […]
