Kenya’s Mombasa port is the highway through which Africa’s poached animal products pass – Since 2009, ivory from 25,000 slaughtered elephants has passed through the port

By Briana Duggan25 July 2015 (PRI) – Tourists visiting Kenya’s steamy coastal city of Mombasa will likely pose in front of what is perhaps the city’s most iconic symbol, two giant arches made of aluminum and designed to look like elephant tusks. Given to the city by Britain’s Princess Margaret in 1956, the structure was […]

Record ocean temperatures threaten Hawaii’s coral reefs – ‘Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes’

By Jeff Masters  24 July 2015 (Weather Underground) – Record warm sea surface temperatures in Hawaii’s waters threaten to bring a second consecutive year of record coral bleaching to their precious coral reefs this summer. According to NOAA, ocean temperatures in the waters near and to the south of the Hawaiian Islands were 1 – […]

Alaska’s wildfire season of 2015 may be the state’s worst ever – ‘What happens in the summer of 2015 has the potential to change the whole trajectory for the next 100 years or more’

By Chris Mooney 26 July 2015 FAIRBANKS, Alaska (Washington Post) – Hundreds of wildfires are continually whipping across this state this summer, leaving in their wake millions of acres of charred trees and blackened earth. At the Fairbanks compound of the state’s Division of Forestry recently, workers were busy washing a mountain of soot-covered fire […]

Half of Columbia River sockeye salmon dying due to hot water – ‘The river flow is abnormally low, but on top of that we’ve had superhot temperatures for a really long time’

By Keith Ridler27 July 2015 BOISE, Idaho (Associated Press) – More than a quarter million sockeye salmon returning from the ocean to spawn are either dead or dying in the Columbia River and its tributaries due to warming water temperatures. Federal and state fisheries biologists say the warm water is lethal for the cold-water species […]

Graph of the Day: Overall child well-being by U.S. state, 2015

21 July 2015 (KidsCount.org) – The KIDS COUNT Data Book [pdf] is an annual publication that assesses child well-being nationally and across the 50 states, as well as in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Using an index of 16 indicators, the report ranks states on overall child well-being and in economic well-being, education, […]

Climate scientists: When the end of human civilization is your day job – ‘The business-as-usual world that we project is really a totally different planet’

By John H. Richardson7 July 2015 (Esquire) – The incident was small, but Jason Box doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s been skittish about the media since it happened. This was last summer, as he was reading the cheery blog posts transmitted by the chief scientist on the Swedish icebreaker Oden, which was exploring […]

Protesters film ‘incomprehensible’ slaughter of hundreds of whales in the Faroe Islands – ‘I hate whale meat but I love to kill them’

By John Vidal24 July 2015 (The Guardian) – Faroese villagers have slaughtered about 250 pilot whales in the past 24 hours according to Sea Shepherd activists monitoring the traditional summer hunts in the north Atlantic islands. The whale pods, which migrate past the islands in July and August, were herded by flotillas of small boats […]

Washington state’s terrifying new climate threat: ‘Urban wildfires’ – ‘We’re seeing significant amounts of fires in places where we’ve never seen fires before’

By Lindsay Abrams22 July 2015 (Salon) – Wildfire season isn’t what it used to be. In Washington state, a combination of ongoing drought and rapid development made 2014 particularly nightmarish, and this year’s unusually hot conditions are fueling another season of dangerous blazes — more than 300 so far, including one, 3,000-plus acre wildfire that […]

Premier of British Columbia fears raging forest fires new norm, blames global warming

By Keven Drews22 July 2015 WEST KELOWNA, B.C. (The Canadian Press) – Relentless forest fires burning across British Columbia may be the new normal, Premier Christy Clark warned as she stood not far from a raging fire that threatened homes in her own riding. Clark spoke near the Westside Road fire outside West Kelowna on […]

Two Sea Shepherd crew arrested in Faroe islands for interfering with whale slaughter

By John Vidal22 July 2015 (The Guardian) – Two international volunteers with the Sea Shepherd conservation society face prison if found guilty on Thursday of interfering with a hunt for pilot whales in the Faroe islands. Susan Larsen of San Francisco and Tom Strearth of Bremen, Germany, were arrested by the Danish navy earlier this […]

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