Blogging the End of the World™
Satellite measurements of winter multi-year ice cover in the Arctic Ocean between 2004 and 2008, along with the corresponding downward trend in overall winter sea-ice volume, and switch in dominant ice type from multi-year ice to first-year ice. During the last few decades of the 20th century, the positive phase of the Northern Annular Mode […]
By Staff Writers, Addis Ababa (AFP) Oct 22, 2009 Twenty-five years after Ethiopia’s famine killed a million people and spurred a massive global aid effort, the government appealed Thursday for help for more than six million facing starvation. State Minister for Agriculture Mitiku Kassa said the drought-stricken country needed 159,000 tonnes of food aid worth […]
African leaders recognised climate change as a major cause of human displacement during a two-day summit on the plight of the continent’s refugees which closed Friday in Kampala. Several African nations adopted a document on the rights of the continent’s 17 million internally-displaced persons (IDP), refugees and returnees. “The important thing about this convention is […]
Visiting a semi-arid region of Uganda where the economic and environmental effects of climate change have been added to humanitarian needs and chronic under-development, the top United Nations emergency relief official today saw first-hand an area of potential conflict over increasingly shrinking resources. “They are living on the edge, daily facing the biggest challenges we […]
By Ben Arnoldy | The Christian Science Monitor, Oct 22, 2009 Stakmo, India — Chhewang Norphel makes artificial glaciers. The reason: The real ones have rapidly receded up the Himalayan slopes in his home district of Ladakh in northernmost India. Himalayan communities like Ladakh rely on glacial runoff to grow food, making them – along […]
Royal Society wants green revolution to deal with global population rise of 3 billion By Steve Connor, Science Editor Global food production needs to be increased by between 50 and 100 per cent if widespread famine is to be avoided in the coming decades as the human population expands rapidly, leading scientists said. A second […]
Nine weeks after a ruptured oil rig sprang a leak, the catastrophic consequences are becoming apparent. By Kathy Marks Sea birds are dying and thousands of marine creatures are at risk from a massive oil spill in the Timor Sea, off north-west Australia, warn the first scientists to survey the isolated site. A ruptured drilling […]
This is the future of peat wetlands all over the world, wherever humans are drawing down the water table. Thousands of illegal wells were drilled around the Tablas de Daimiel wetland in Spain, a UNESCO biosphere site, to irrigate local fields. The water table fell 12 meters (40 ft), the underground peat dried out, and […]
Technorati Tags: drought,agriculture,heat wave
• Less than 1% of Tablas de Daimiel remains as lagoons• Fires burning underground as illegal wells dry out peat By Giles Tremlett, in Madrid The EU has begun an investigation into a unique Spanish wetland park that is being devastated by underground fires. Local officials have admitted that mismanaged water resources at the […]
