Blogging the End of the World™
By BILL POOVEY KINGSTON, Tenn. — The Tennessee Valley Authority’s top executive says changing the way waste is stored at its power plants should reduce the risk of another disastrous coal ash spill like the one that tarnished a riverside community a year ago. But he isn’t offering any guarantees. Tom Kilgore said eliminating all […]
Reuters: Climate change and the fast diminishing glaciers in the Andes are posing a serious threat to water supplies in the Bolivian highlands. The rapid pace at which glaciers are melting in the Andes mountain range is posing a serious threat to the water supply of many Andean countries, and particularly Bolivia. Scientists expect that […]
(Reuters) FOR CENTURIES a monastic fortress in Bhutan’s Himalayas has sheltered ancient Buddhist relics and scriptures from earthquakes, fires and Tibetan invasions. Now the lamas here may have met their match – global warming. At least 53 million cubic metres of glacier melt is threatening to break the banks of a lake upstream in the […]
COPENHAGEN—The Altiplano, or high plain, of Bolivia and Peru is getting a new climate. In the past 60 years temperatures have risen, rainfall patterns have changed and soils have begun to dry out even further. As a result, farmers move their crops further up the mountainsides, like endangered species seeking refuge at cooler elevations. Floods […]
Much of the U. S. has been warmer in recent years, and that affects which trees are right for planting. The Arbor Day Foundation has recently completed an extensive updating of U.S. Hardiness Zones based upon data from 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the continental United States. Hardiness Zone Changes Between 1990 […]
AAP — Koalas are highly vulnerable to climate change and face starvation, a leading conservation group has warned. The koala – an Australian icon known the world over – has made it on to a global list of 10 well-known species threatened by climate change, along with the fish that inspired the cartoon character, Nemo. […]
December 14, 2009–Like polar bears, ringed seals (above, a newborn rests in the snows of Nunavut, Canada) depend on summer sea ice in the Arctic for their survival. No one knows what will happen to the seals and other species if polar summer ice completely disappears due to global warming–which may occur in the Arctic […]
Seas were nearly 10 metres higher than now in previous interglacial period. By Richard A. Lovett With climate talks stalling in Copenhagen, a study suggests that one problem, sea level rise, may be even more urgent than previously thought. Robert Kopp, a palaeoclimatologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and his colleagues examined sea level […]
By 2050, ocean acidity could increase by 150 percent. This increase is 100 times faster than any change in acidity experienced in the marine environment over the last 20 million years. By Nanet Poulsen 14/12/2009 06:10 The secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) released Monday a major study in collaboration with the UNEP […]
Organic carbon (OC) concentrations in the Zuoqiupu ice core for the monsoon (June–September) and nonmonsoon (October–May) seasons, and for the annual mean. Fig. 3 shows the Zuoqiupu data broken down by monsoonal and nonmonsoonal periods. The monsoonal period has lower BC and OC concentrations because of the high precipitation rate, but the source is unambiguously […]
