Blogging the End of the World™
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 […]
Alpine glaciers are now releasing nasty chemicals that settled on them decades ago and have since been banned By Jessica Hamzelou Bad hair and shoulder pads are not the only things from the 1980s that we’d rather not see again. Nasty chemicals banned in that decade are also on the list. Unfortunately, melting Alpine glaciers […]
The salinity in Lake Alexandrina at Milang increased to 6,000 EC in April 2009 and is currently about 5,500 EC, which is significantly higher than the long term average (see Figure 7). Upstream of the Goolwa Barrage, the salinity increased to 32,000 EC in March 2009 and is now about 20,000 EC (compared with seawater […]
Hope for frog conservation got bleaker with a recent study showing that fungus-associated extinction is reducing amphibian biodiversity in Central America By Carina Storrs Threats to wildlife survival, such as habitat loss and climate change, tend to strike some species harder than others, and the threat of chytrid, a deadly amphibian fungus, appears to be […]
By Bob Janiskee Scientists working in Denali National Park suspect that permafrost melting that’s caused by climate warming might be an important reason why many of Alaska’s shallow lakes and wetlands have shrunk or disappeared. If the trend continues, wetland-dependent wildlife might be severely impacted. … Bush pilots and others familiar with the black spruce […]
