Blogging the End of the World™
By Marwaan Macan-Markar 19 April 2012 BANGKOK – With Vietnam’s fertile Mekong delta threatened by rising sea levels and salt water ingress, the country’s future as a major rice exporter depends critically on research underway in the Philippines. Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) are working with Vietnamese counterparts in the town of […]
30 March 2012 (Médecins Sans Frontières) – The annual “hunger season” seems likely to be particularly serious in the Sahel this year, and a few particular regions may face acute nutritional crises in the coming months. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is therefore expanding its nutritional activities to address the seasonal “peak” in malnutrition […]
By Mary Beth Breckenridge, Akron Beacon Journal 20 April 2012 How strange has this spring been? Denise Ellsworth can tell you exactly. Ellsworth is one of the coordinators of the Ohio Phenology Garden Network, a patchwork of gardens that helps scientists track the timing of natural occurrences. The gardens supply data on when plants bloom, […]
Annual (line) and decadal (box) mean sea-surface temperature anomalies for the Australian region relative to the 1961–1990 average. The average value for the most recent 10-year period (2002–2011) is shown in darker grey. Sea-surface temperatures in the Australian region in 2010 were the highest on record, with nine of the months during 2011 ranked in […]
REYKJAVIK, 21 April 2012 (AFP) – China and Iceland announced a deal on the oil-rich Arctic region Friday after Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao flew in to Reykjavik on the first stage of a four-nation European tour. The deal was part of a package of six agreements signed on the first day of the Chinese premier’s […]
By Benjamin H. Strauss20 April 2012 Good morning, Senator Bingaman and colleagues. Thank you for your attention to this important topic. I am Dr. Ben Strauss, coauthor of two recent peer-reviewed papers making an assessment of sea level risk to the lower 48 states, as well as the summary report submitted with my written testimony. […]
By Miguel Llanos, msnbc.com19 April 2012 Most of the Southwest as well as parts of California and the Southeast can expect drought conditions to worsen through July, federal forecasters said Thursday. “Overall, the current Drought Outlook is not optimistic,” the National Weather Service said in summarizing its forecast. Besides affecting farmers and ranchers, drought means […]
By Bill Powell and Hideko Takayama20 April 2012 FORTUNE – More than a year has passed since a massive earthquake and a series of tsunamis triggered the worst accident at a nuclear power plant since Chernobyl in 1986, but the epic debacle at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station remains front and center in Japan, […]
By Sandy Bauers, Inquirer Staff Writer20 April 2012 The scientists were a little tired and burned out. For two weeks, they had been aboard a research ship in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to find and analyze deep-sea communities of coral on the dark bottom, nearly a mile below. A robot submersible was down there […]
Most are rural, many are tiny, and a few are huge and urban. The median household income for these 50 counties also varies widely. By Kali Geldis, MainStreet19 April 2012 Poverty on the rise The number of Americans living in poverty has been on the rise since the onset of the Great Recession, as many […]
