By David Ritter 8 July 2013 (The Guardian) – A mighty political struggle is dividing Australia, but it is not the mêlée taking place in Canberra. It is the battle that pitches the kids on my street: bouncy Jack, serious Cristiana, little toddling Lily and all of their mates, and every other child from across […]
By Jeremy Hance7 July 2013 (mongabay.com) – The newest update to the IUCN Red List has downgraded the status of the Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis) from Endangered to Critically Endangered, reflecting the deteriorating state of arguably the world’s most degraded river system. The downgrade follows a survey last year that counted only 1,000 […]
By Jonathan Kaiman8 July 2013 BEIJING (The Guardian) – Air pollution causes people in northern China to live an average of 5.5 years shorter than their southern counterparts, according to a study released on Monday which claims to show in unprecedented detail the link between air pollution and life expectancy. High levels of air pollution […]
By Henry Gass 8 July 2013 (Scientific American) – Invasive animals are a scourge the world over, and on many islands they have decimated local plants and animals. New Zealand has contended with such losses for centuries as rats and stoats (short-tailed weasels) from abroad have helped to wipe out 19 bird species. These small […]
5 July 2013 (ICTMN) – The horses, desperate for water, had come to drink from a pool of rainwater that had run off a hill and flooded land on the Navajo reservation. What they got was a mud bath that turned deadly as they became trapped in the bentonite clay of the Chinle Formation, which […]
By John Abraham 7 July 2013 (The Guardian) – Perhaps I have been naïve, but for many years I have held the view that economists were good decision makers and that part of being a good decision maker was to seek out good information. Well-informed decisions, I thought, allowed people to earn better returns, to […]
By Julie Cart3 July 2013 BOISE, Idaho (Los Angeles Times) – Early morning is a frenetic time at a wildfire command post. Biologists, meteorologists, foresters and firefighters hustle into tents and grab laptops to review overnight reports, prepping for the day’s assault. Fire behavior analysts run computer models that spit out information crucial to putting […]
By Jonathan Tirone; Editing by James Hertling8 July 2013 VIENNA (Bloomberg) – Waterways warmed by climate change will increase electricity prices by as much as a third in southern Europe as producers struggle to cool power stations, a study showed. Countries from Romania to Bulgaria and Slovenia face the biggest price increases, according to research […]
Tim Radford for Climate News Network8 July 2013 (The Guardian) – Global warming has increased five-fold the probabilities that Australians will bake in record hot summers, according to new research from the University of Melbourne. And human activities – including greenhouse gas releases from fossil fuels – must account for at least half of these […]
Jakarta, 2 July 2013 (AFP) – Indonesian villagers have beaten a Sumatran orangutan to death, an animal protection group said Tuesday, the latest case of one of the critically-endangered primates being killed by humans. The adult female died Thursday after being rescued from a village in Aceh province with numerous injuries by the Sumatran Orangutan […]
