More than 300 wildfires are burning in Alaska right now. That’s an even bigger problem than it sounds.

By Chris Mooney 26 June 2015 (Washington Post) – Following on a record hot May in which much snow cover melted off early, Alaska saw no less than 152 fires erupt last weekend. The numbers have only grown further since then, and stood at 317 active fires Friday, according to the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, […]

California drought is part of a much bigger water crisis

By Abrahm Lustgarten, Lauren Kirchner, Amanda Zamora, and ProPublica26 June 2015 (Scientific American) – Why do I keep hearing about the California drought, if it’s the Colorado River that we’re “killing”? Pretty much every state west of the Rockies has been facing a water shortage of one kind or another in recent years.  California’s is […]

Fort McKay elders talk about life before the tar sands – ‘It’s hard for me to live in this Earth now, because it’s being destroyed’

By Brandi Morin24 June 2015 (APTN) – Just outside of the Fort McKay First Nation, sitting behind a chain-link fence is a dark lake dotted with scare-crow like structures dressed in bright orange suits and hard hats bobbing up and down in the water. This is a tailings pond. There are warning signs, “Danger” and […]

EPA’s new fracking study: A close look at the numbers buried in the fine print – At least 12.2 million Americans live or drink water from within a mile of a fracked well

By Sharon Kelly25 June 2015 (DeSmog) – When EPA’s long-awaited draft assessment on fracking and drinking water supplies was released, the oil and gas industry triumphantly focused on a headline-making sentence: “We did not find evidence of widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” But for fracking’s backers, a sense of […]

‘The Grind’: Annual whale slaughter begins in Faroe Islands – ‘Almost like a national honour sport’

By Felicity Capon  24 June 2015 (Newsweek) – Two activist ships are racing to the Faroe Islands, in the North Atlantic to attempt to stop the “barbaric” annual slaughter of hundreds of whales and dolphins currently taking place in the autonomous Danish province. Two vessels, the Sam Simon and the Bob Barker, which are owned […]

Climate change threatens 50 years of progress in global health, study says – ‘Climate change is a medical emergency’

By Damian Carrington and Sarah Boseley22 June 2015 (The Guardian) – Climate change threatens to undermine half a century of progress in global health, according to a major new report [Policy Responses to Protect Public Health; pdf]. But the analysis also concludes that the benefits to health resulting from slashing fossil fuel use are so […]

Ocean dead zones swirl off Africa, threatening coastlines with mass fish kills

By Robert Scribbler5 May 2015 (RobertScribbler.wordpress.com) – The world ocean is now a region of expanding oxygen-deprived dead zones. It’s an upshot of a human-warmed ocean system filled with high nutrient run-off from mass, industrialized farming, rising atmospheric nitrogen levels, and increasing dust from wildfires, dust storms, and industrial aerosol emissions. Warming seas hold less […]

Mark Steyn’s newest attack on Michael Mann and global warming’s ‘Hockey Stick’ graph

[Right now, the prudent thing for Mark Steyn to do is to keep his mouth shut, but it seems that he can’t resist defaming Michael Mann. –Des] By Greg Laden22 June 2015 (Science Blogs) – There is a new attack by an anti-science and anti-environment talking head on a well respected climate scientist and his […]

California water cuts leave city days away from running out of water – ‘We don’t want this town to become a ghost town, it was a beautiful master-planned community’

By Nick Janes16 June 2015 MOUNTAIN HOUSE (CBS13) – The community of Mountain House is days away from having no water at all after the state cut off its only water source. Anthony Gordon saves drinking water just in case, even though he never thought it would come to this. “My wife thinks I’m nuts. […]

Worldwide displacement hits all-time high as war and persecution increase – Biggest increase ever seen in a single year, situation likely to worsen

GENEVA, June 18 (UNHCR) – Wars, conflict, and persecution have forced more people than at any other time since records began to flee their homes and seek refuge and safety elsewhere, according to a new report from the UN refugee agency. UNHCR’s annual Global Trends Report: World at War [pdf], released on Thursday (June 18), […]

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