Blogging the End of the World™
By Kierán Suckling, (520) 275-5960August 20, 2010 NEW ORLEANS— Today marks the end of the fourth month since BP’s negligence and lack of government oversight caused the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig to explode, sending more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. To assess how much damage was done and […]
As climate warms, many species in the United States are shifting their ranges northward and to higher elevations. The map shows the response of Edith’s checkerspot butterfly populations to a warming climate over the past 136 years in the American West. Over 70 percent of the southernmost populations (shown in yellow) have gone extinct. The […]
Multiple clusters of fires burned in British Columbia, sending a thick plume of smoke over the Pacific Ocean in mid-August 2010. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on August 13. East of the snowcapped Coast Mountains, numerous fires, many of them clustered into large groups, send smoke […]
By Jason DowlingAugust 16, 2010 MELBOURNE’S water storages are having their best winter run-off since 1995, swelling above 38 per cent full and adding more than 220 billion litres to last year’s historically low levels. More good news is expected in coming weeks, with big inflows expected from the winter/spring filling season. But this exceptional […]
By Tamara Baluja, The Province; with files from Laura Baziuk August 22, 2010 B.C.’s ferocious wildfires have resulted in an air-quality advisory that remained in effect Saturday for B.C., Alberta and even parts of Saskatchewan as smoke continues to drift east. There have been unconfirmed reports that the smoke has even drifted to the western […]
By Mail Foreign ServiceLast updated at 9:57 AM on 22nd August 2010 Tired, desperate and starving, these two men come to blows as they fight over a food package handed out by a local charity. With more than 20million people displaced by flooding that is now officially the worst disaster Pakistan has ever faced, the […]
By TIM SULLIVAN (AP)22 August 2010 HAMDANI LEGARI, Pakistan — The old man stepped carefully through his village, dodging craters as deep as graves where they had been mining soil for embankments to hold back the floodwaters. Already, nearly half this village of tenant farmers had been destroyed. The crops wiped out. But Mohammed Ayoub […]
By the CNN Wire StaffAugust 22, 2010 9:13 a.m. EDT Multan, Pakistan (CNN) — After weeks of massive flooding that killed at least 1,539 people, water is finally receding in parts of the country. But for the millions of survivors, another nightmare looms. Much of Pakistan’s economy and infrastructure has been washed away by the […]
By Mark Seddon Saturday, 21 August 2010 00:16 UK A fresh outbreak of Dutch elm disease is threatening the existence of the UK’s remaining English elm trees. … They were wiped out in their many millions from the 1970s, when a virulent strain of a fungal disease arrived on imported Canadian logs and fanned out […]
By PAUL QUINLAN of GreenwireAugust 20, 2010 Montana regulators acknowledged this week that homebuilders are using permit-exempt wells to bypass laws intended to protect water supplies in arid areas, but they nonetheless rejected a bid to close what critics call a loophole to undermine ranchers’ water rights. While the state environmental agency pledged to revisit […]
