Blogging the End of the World™
HARARE: Zimbabwe has lost about 200 rhinoceroses — a quarter of its total population — to rampant poaching over the last three years as security and the economy deteriorated, state media reported on Tuesday. The southern African country has been badly damaged by an economic crisis, which critics blame on President Robert Mugabe’s seizure of […]
By ROBERT F. WORTHPublished: October 31, 2009 JAHILIYA, Yemen — More than half of this country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction. Even as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by […]
By James Morgan, BBC News, Kenya At the edges of Kenya’s Lake Nakuru, Paul Opiyo picks up a dead flamingo and warns some eager tourists not to touch it, just in case. He points down to his feet – the brown earth is speckled with brittle white feather shafts. “We should be underwater, standing here,” […]
Nairobi — With exactly a week to go before a deadline for those settled in a section of the Mau Forest complex expires, thousands of anxious settlers are grappling with the inevitability of eviction. A two-pronged plan in the past week has cleared any doubts on the government’s determination to get the settlers out and […]
Scientists unravel how warming temperatures will trigger more wild fires in California’s Yosemite National Park. By Matt Walker, Editor, Earth News Wild fires within California’s world famous Yosemite National Park are set to become more frequent and severe due to climate change. New research has unpicked how this may happen; and it is not just […]
(a) Seasonal Melt Departure (SMD) for June-August and (b) seasonal maximum daily temperature anomalies at three coastal meteorological stations in Greenland for June-August from 1973 to 2007 (Mote 2007). The recent marked retreat, thinning, and acceleration of most of Greenland’s outlet glaciers south of 70° N has increased concerns over contributions from the Greenland Ice […]
Conservation groups warn of ‘alarming’ loss of biodiversity as thousands of animals face imminent extinction By Andy McSmith, Tuesday, 3 November 2009 Six years ago, these tiny mustard-coloured toads could be found in their thousands, living under the spray from an African waterfall. No one even knew they existed until 1996. Yet today the Kihansi […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com, November 02, 2009 The most recent survey among the ice fields atop Mount Kilimanjaro found that the ice atop Africa’s most famous mountain could be gone in twenty years—and maybe even sooner. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science the study [pdf] was conducted by a team of […]
Shanghai (AFP) Oct 31, 2009 – China on Saturday opens a new bridge over the Yangtze that will pave the way for rapid development of the country’s “last virgin island,” Chongming — now just an hour’s drive from booming Shanghai. With a surface area 50 percent bigger than Singapore, the island has captured the imagination […]
BEIJING (Reuters) – Many Chinese wheat-growing provinces in the north seeded clouds over the weekend to help end a persistent drought and encourage the growth of winter wheat. In Shandong, one of the country’s major wheat-growing areas, jets and rockets were used to bring rain and ease the drought that had hit 800,000 hectares of […]
