By Michael Carlowicz; design by Paul Przyborski22 October 2013 (NASA) – About 300 to 500 kilometers (200 to 300 miles) offshore, a city of light appeared in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. There are no human settlements there, nor fires or gas wells. But there are an awful lot of fishing boats. Adorned […]
29 October 2013 (mongabay.com) – Roads are rapidly expanding across the Brazilian Amazon opening up once remote rainforests to loggers, miners, ranchers, farmers, and land speculators, finds a new study published in the journal Regional Environmental Change. Researchers from Imperial College London and Brazil-based Imazon used maps of existing roads and satellite imagery to track […]
By Tamino19 October 2013 (Open Mind) – Many of you are probably aware of a “report” which is intended to contradict the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. Its authors call it the “NIPCC” report for “Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change.” It’s supposed to represent the very best that so-called “skeptics” have to […]
This Landsat 5 satellite image shows the Amur/Heilong River on 19 September 2010. The Landsat 8 satellite acquired this image on 27 September 2013. The Amur River, swollen by record rainfall, has swallowed up the Chinese town of Bachaxiang. By Holli Riebeek27 October 2013 (NASA) — The Amur River (Heilong Jiang in Chinese) flows […]
By Emily Badger28 October 2013 (The Atlantic) – Poverty shapes people in some hard-wired ways that we’re only now beginning to understand. Back in August, we wrote about some provocative new research that found that poverty imposes a kind of tax on the brain. It sucks up so much mental bandwidth – capacity spent wrestling […]
By Adam Sobel28 October 2013 (CNN) – Many of our immediate responses to Hurricane Sandy were successful. Scientists accurately forecast the storm; authorities ordered the proper actions; many people heeded the orders; and there was a massive government response in the aftermath. What went most wrong, and continues to go wrong, is our handling of […]
By Alex Kirby, Climate News Network27 October 2013 LONDON (Climate Central) – Researchers say the southern part of the Amazon rainforest is at a far higher risk of dieback than the models used in the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research team, led by Professor Rong Fu of […]
27 October 2013 (Norwegian Meteorological Institute) – A universal increase in flood maxima is not evident in Europe. Individual river gauges in Europe provide no conclusive and general proof as to how climate change has affected flood risk so far. There is evidence, however, that the number of large floods has increased. The key causal […]
By Douglas Main24 October 2013 (LiveScience) – Plenty of studies have shown that the Arctic is warming and that the ice caps are melting, but how does it compare to the past, and how serious is it? New research shows that average summer temperatures in the Canadian Arctic over the last century are the highest […]
By Rhett A. Butler 23 October 2013 (mongabay.com) – Illegal logging remains pervasive in the Brazilian state of Pará, finds an assessment released Monday by Imazon. Analyzing satellite data and records from Pará’s environmental agency Sema, the Brazil-based NGO found that 78 percent of logging documented via satellite between August 2011 and July 2012 was […]
