Blogging the End of the World™
By Peter Griffiths LONDON (Reuters) – Global warming will leave the Arctic Ocean ice-free during the summer within 20 years, raising sea levels and harming wildlife such as seals and polar bears, a leading British polar scientist said on Thursday. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, said much of […]
By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tuesday, October 13, 2009 A heretofore undisclosed underground flow of mine pool water between Consol Energy’s Blacksville No. 1 and No. 2 mines may have contributed to the highly salty, polluted discharges that caused the massive, month-long fish kill on Dunkard Creek. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said stream […]
The combined global land and ocean surface temperatures for August 2009 ranked as the second warmest August on record since records began in 1880. The combined global land and ocean temperature anomaly was 0.62°C (1.12°F), falling only 0.05°C (0.09°F) short of tying the record set in 1998. Sea surface temperatures (SST) during August 2009 were […]
International law is unfit to deal with the millions of people expected to flee their home countries to escape droughts and floods intensified by climate change, a group of lawyers has said. Under existing laws, host countries must protect and care for cross-border refugees, who are defined as those forced to migrate because of violence […]
By Tomasz Johnson, special to mongabay.com A chainsaw chugs into life and tears into the trunk of a tree as tall as a two-storey house. Petrol and man work together as the chain sets its teeth into the wood and edges its way through. The tree creaks, leans, and falls with a great crash to […]
Paris (AFP) Oct 13, 2009 – More than 100,000 people in northern Iraq have abandoned their homes since 2005 because of water stress, after drought and over-extraction of groundwater caused the collapse of an ancient water system, UNESCO said on Tuesday. “Drought and excessive well pumping have drawn down aquifer levels in the region, causing […]
From TreeHugger: Though it may be a number of years before your life is personally impacted by climate change, for people in low-lying island nations and the world’s great river deltas rising sea levels and saltwater ruining land is already a fact of life. One such place is the Carteret Islands off the coast of […]
By Emma Graham-Harrison and Lucy Hornby BEIJING, Oct 13 (Reuters) – Nearly 1,000 children living in a major Chinese lead smelting base have excessive levels of the heavy metal in their blood, state media said on Tuesday, as environmentalists called on firms to detail their pollution. The country’s biggest smelter has acknowledged some responsibility in […]
By Frank Pope, Ocean Correspondent Scientists say man-made noise equipment, including anti-seal sonar devices used in fish farms, is driving deep-water animals such as whales to shore, where they die. A northern bottlenose whale was washed up dead on a beach in Prestatyn, North Wales, on Saturday morning, the tenth of the species to become […]
Food production will have to increase by 70% over the next 40 years to feed the world’s growing population, the United Nations food agency predicts. The Food and Agricultural Organisation says if more land is not used for food production now, 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050. The world population is expected […]
