By Timothy Cama12 May 2015 (The Hill) – Pope Francis’ closest adviser castigated conservative climate change skeptics in the United States Tuesday, blaming capitalism for their views. Speaking with journalists, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga criticized certain “movements” in the United States that have preemptively come out in opposition to Francis’s planned encyclical on climate change. […]
By Ben Dreyfuss10 May 2015 (Mother Jones) – As you may know, there is a drought in California. The water? It’s gone! The state? It’s dry! The consequences? Very bad, indeed. Where did the water go? I have no idea. I’m not a private detective who specializes in missing water. Why did the water leave? […]
By Chris Nichols9 May 2015 SACRAMENTO (UT San Diego) – Severe dry spells aren’t unique to California. Just ask Australia, where the Millennium Drought stretched from 1997 to 2009, devastating the southeastern portion of the country and forever changing how it uses water. For months now, water experts in California have asked their counterparts Down […]
By Paul Greenberg and Boris Worm8 MAY 2015 (The New York Times) – On Friday we humans observed V-E Day, the end to one part of a global catastrophe that cost the planet at least 60 million lives. But if we were fish, we would have marked the day differently — as the beginning of […]
By Richard Marsden11 May 2015 (Daily Mail) – English wine production soared to a record 6.3 million bottles last year – buoyed by climate change. Vintners say similar conditions now exist in England to those in parts of France ten to 20 years ago, allowing types of grapes such as chardonnay and pinot noir – […]
By Joby Warrick11 May 2015 (Washington Post) – Global sea levels are climbing at a faster rate than previously thought, according to a new analysis that underscores scientists’ concerns about the impact of melting glaciers and ice sheets near the Earth’s poles. The new research published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that […]
By Justin Pidot 11 May 2015 (Slate) – Imagine visiting Yellowstone this summer. You wake up before dawn to take a picture of the sunrise over the mists emanating from Yellowstone hot springs. A thunderhead towers above the rising sun, and the picture turns out beautifully. You submit the photo to a contest sponsored by […]
By Nathanael Johnson11 May 2015 (Grist) – Like lots of people in drought-desiccated California, I have been hustling to educate myself about the power dynamics of water in the state. And so I read this appreciation of California water historian, Norris Hundley Jr., with great interest. It portrays Hundley as the historian whose picture is […]
By R. Quentin Grafton, John Williams, Qiang Jiang8 March 2015 (Food Security) – This graph shows a set of projections of surplus or deficit in food production (billions kcalories) for eight scenarios for dryland and irrigated cropping based on 19 countries. In all scenarios we adopted an irrigation regime of 200 mm of water. In […]
By Lucy Westcott 11 May 2015 (Newsweek) – Afghanistan has the equivalent of 400,000 football fields of opium fields, despite significant efforts and money spent by the United States on curbing the development of the country’s drug supply. The country’s enormous drug reserve is one of several issues holding back the U.S.’s Afghanistan reconstruction efforts, […]
