A brave call from the ‘Dalai Lama of the Amazon’ – ‘Large-scale mining seems like a big monster that wants to destroy the earth, to destroy nature

By Leila Salazar-Lopez11 August 2014 (Amazon Watch) – Recently I had the great honor of meeting Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, a shaman and internationally renowned spokesman for the Yanomami people of Brazil, while he was on a global speaking tour with our friends at Survival International. It was disturbing to learn that Davi had been receiving […]

Derelict fishing nets have turned the bottom of the sea into a death trap

By Gwynn Guilford13 August 2014 (Quartz) – Each year, at least 640,000 tonnes of nets and other fishing gear goes overboard and never comes back. But just because it’s lost to the sea doesn’t mean that derelict gear stops doing its jobs. The lobster pots, crab traps and dense thickets of nets that litter the […]

Humans have tripled mercury levels in upper ocean – Pollution may soon overwhelm deep seas’ ability to sequester mercury

By Anne Casselman6 August 2014 (Nature) – Mercury levels in the upper ocean have tripled since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and human activities are to blame, researchers report today in Nature. Although several computer models have estimated the amount of marine mercury, the new analysis provides the first global measurements. It fills in […]

Cusco Running Club: Global warming and Peru

My guest post is up at Cusco Running Club: Global Warming and Peru. Check it out if you’re interested in the effects of abrupt climate change in the rural Andes: Global warming is real You may have heard that global warming isn’t happening, or that it’s a hoax, or that it has “paused” in recent […]

Japan whale poachers end Pacific slaughter with 115 whales dead

By Reissa Su30 July 2014 (International Business Times) – Japan has wrapped up its whaling campaign in the Pacific with 115 whales caught and killed in its two-and-a-half month operation. It is the second whaling hunt of Japan since the United Nations’ international court had ordered Japan to stop catching and killing whales in the […]

Climate disinformer Roger Pielke, Jr. out at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog

By Laurence Lewis28 July 2014 (Daily Kos) – When Nate Silver’s new FiveThirtyEight blog hired climate disinformer Roger Pielke, Jr., there was a fierce backlash from climate scientists and activists. As I wrote, in an extensive post: Climate change is the most important issue humanity has ever faced. On the questions of whether it is […]

Climate models on the mark, Australian-led research finds – ‘We’re still setting records even during the cold phase because we’re still warming’

By Peter Hannam, Environment Editor21 July 2014 (Sydney Morning Herald) – A common refrain by climate sceptics that surface temperatures have not warmed over the past 17 years, implying climate models predicting otherwise are unreliable, has been refuted by new research led by James Risbey, a senior CSIRO researcher. Setting aside the fact the equal […]

California halts injection of fracking waste, warning it may be contaminating aquifers – State’s drought has forced farmers to rely on groundwater, even as aquifers have been intentionally polluted due to exemptions for oil industry

  By Abrahm Lustgarten18 July 2014 (ProPublica) – California officials have ordered an emergency shut-down of 11 oil and gas waste injection sites and a review more than 100 others in the state’s drought-wracked Central Valley out of fear that companies may have been pumping fracking fluids and other toxic waste into drinking water aquifers […]

U.S. coastal flooding on the rise, U.S. government study finds – ‘The effects of rising sea levels are only going to become more noticeable and much more severe in the coming decades’

By Ryan McNeill; editing by John Blanton28 July 2014 (Reuters) – Flooding is increasing in frequency along much of the U.S. coast, and the rate of increase is accelerating along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts, a team of federal government scientists found in a study released Monday. The study examined how often 45 […]

Walmart planned for endangered forest lands in South Florida – ‘You wonder how things end up being endangered? This is how.’

By Jenny Staletovich13 July 2014 (Miami Herald) – One of the world’s rarest forests, a section of Miami-Dade County’s last intact tracts of endangered pine rockland, is getting a new resident: a Walmart. About 88 acres of rockland, a globally imperiled habitat containing a menagerie of plants, animals and insects found no place else, was […]

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