Deadly brain-eating amoeba moving north as climate warms

By Elizabeth Weise4 December 2013 (USATODAY) – Bridget Bahneman lost her daughter to an illness that wasn’t supposed to exist as far north as Minnesota. Seven-year-old Annie’s brain was destroyed by an amoeba called Naegleria fowleri that she was exposed to while swimming in a lake near their house. The “brain-eating amoeba” lives in fresh […]

Drowning Kiribati – ‘The ocean went back out in Hurricane Sandy, but one day it won’t. It will stay.’

By Jeffrey Goldberg    21 November 2013 (Bloomberg) – The spruce man with the trim mustache and the grim-faced bodyguard is dozing in his seat. A flight attendant leaves him a hot towel, and then another. The bodyguard, who wears the uniform of the Kiribati National Police—the shoulder patch depicts a yellow frigate bird flying clear […]

Catastrophic collapse of wildlife in Sahara Desert – Conservationists warn of looming extinctions including cheetahs and gazelles – Four species of large mammals already extinct

Contact: Mart Dixon (1-347-840-1242; mdixon@wcs.org) Stephen Sautner (1-718-220-3682; ssautner@wcs.org)3 December 2013 NEW YORK – A new study led by the Wildlife Conservation Society and Zoological Society or London warns that the world’s largest tropical desert, the Sahara, has suffered a catastrophic collapse of its wildlife populations. The study by more than 40 authors representing 28 […]

Shanghai orders cars off roads as record air pollution drives people indoors

6 December 2013 (Bloomberg News) – Shanghai ordered vehicles off the road and factories to cut production after pollution reached hazardous levels, as Hong Kong announced plans to introduce an air quality index that assesses health risks from smog. A heavy fog shrouding Shanghai caused widespread flight cancellations and sent an air quality index monitored […]

Hurricane Xaver batters Scotland as Germany braces for storm – Authorities warn of ‘most serious coastal tidal surge for over 60 years in England’

By Erik Kirschbaum and Belinda Goldsmith, with additional reporting by Matthias Baehr; editing by Ralph Boulton5 December 2013 BERLIN/LONDON, 5 December 2013 (Reuters) – Hurricane-force winds disrupted transport and power supplies in Scotland and threatened coastal flooding in England as they closed on northern Europe in what meteorologists said could be one of the most […]

Dust, global warming portend dry future for the Colorado River – Rocky Mountain snowpack melts six weeks earlier than in the 1800s

14 November 2013 (CIRES) –  Reducing the amount of desert dust swept onto snowy Rocky Mountain peaks could help Western water managers deal with the challenges of a warmer future, according to a new study led by researchers at NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder. With […]

Mass starvation of Australia sea birds as 25,000 wash up dead on Sunshine Coast – Up to five million birds may have died, unable to find baitfish to eat

By Bill Hoffman28 November 2013 (Sunshine Coast Daily) – Lindsay Dines has been watching dead mutton birds wash in at Teewah for more than a month. He knows death is part of their migratory fate. Their long, figure eight of the Pacific that starts in Tasmania, touches the northern hemisphere Aleutian Islands, and then California […]

Bloomberg: Five bad arguments from the coal industry

[Desdemona strongly supports the War on Coal: Earth’s greatest mass extinction caused by coal: study] By the Editors11 November 2013 (Bloomberg) – The logic is pretty straightforward. Carbon dioxide emissions are threatening the planet. In the U.S., coal plants are the second-largest source of those emissions, after transportation. Therefore, the Environmental Protection Agency should impose […]

China will get old before it gets rich – Precipitous decline in ratio of working-age people to total population

By Quoctrung Bui15 November 2013 (NPR) – China’s decision to (further) relax its infamous one-child policy is, as much as anything, an economic decision. China put the one-child policy in place decades ago, when the country feared a destabilizing population boom. It benefited in the short run — the country slowed its population growth and […]

After changes, how green is The New York Times? Climate-change coverage fell after environment desk killed

By MARGARET SULLIVAN23 November 2013 (The New York Times) – Early this year, The Times came under heavy criticism from many readers who care deeply about news coverage about the environment — especially climate change. In January, The Times dismantled its “pod” of reporters and editors devoted to that subject. And in March, it discontinued […]

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