Blogging the End of the World™
Rivers in Australia’s most important farming region are in critical condition thanks to the long-running drought, with no sign of an end to the ‘big dry,’ officials said Tuesday. The Murray-Darling Basin Commission, which monitors the east coast region that accounts for some 40 percent of the nation’s farming production, said the level of water […]
By MICHAEL CASEY, AP Environmental Writer BAN LOMTUAN, Thailand – Preecha Jiabyu used to take tourists on a rowboat to see the banks of the Mae Klong River aglow with thousands of fireflies. These days, all he sees are the fluorescent lights of hotels, restaurants and highway overpasses. He says he’d have to row a […]
Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com Forest cover in the "Arc of Deforestation" of southern Amazonia will decline to around 20 percent 2016 due to continued logging and conversion of forests for cattle pasture and soy farms, report researchers writing in the journal Environmental Conservation. The results are independent of impacts resulting from climate change, which some […]
The thawing of permafrost in northern latitudes, which greatly increases microbial decomposition of carbon compounds in soil, will dominate other effects of warming in the region and could become a major force promoting the release of carbon dioxide and thus further warming, according to a new assessment in the September 2008 issue of BioScience. The […]
Although the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) significantly reduced cutting of old-growth forests on federal land, forests in the driest regions are now at greater risk of being lost to wildfire than to logging. A team of federal and university scientists recently completed a study and analysis of large-diameter forests and discovered that elevated fire […]
Group: Polar bears are starving, drowning, resorting to cannibalism By Marsha Walton (CNN) — Summer is over in the northern hemisphere, but it’s been another chilling season for researchers who study Arctic sea ice. "It’s definitely a bad report. We did pick up little bit from last year, but this is over 30 percent below […]
by Slim Allagui Thu Sep 25, 1:36 AM ET ILULISSAT, Denmark (AFP) – Dwindling shrimp stocks off Greenland’s coast have local fishermen and authorities fretting that one of the island’s main sources of income, known here as "pink gold", could soon vanish. "We must sound the alarm bells because it would be a catastrophe for […]
By REX SPRINGSTON, TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER Blue crab numbers have dropped so low in the Chesapeake Bay that federal officials declared the fishery a disaster yesterday. … The bay’s blue crab numbers have dropped nearly 70 percent in the past 15 years. Experts cite reasons including pollution and overfishing. Crab-fishery disaster declared Technorati Tags: crab,pollution,overfishing,extinction,End […]
By Morgan Erickson-Davis, mongabay.com Caspian Seal populations have declined 90% in the past 100 years, prompting the IUCN to switch their designation from Vulnerable to Endangered. A team from the University of Leeds performed a series of surveys in 2007 and 2008 which revealed that the birth rate has decreased from around 17,000 pups born […]
Billions of tons of carbon sequestered in the world’s peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere in the coming decades as a result of global warming, according to a new analysis of the interplay between peat bogs, water tables, and climate change. Such an atmospheric release of even a small percentage of the […]
