By Marlene Cimons14 June 2013 (LiveScience) – Drought has beset the Earth since before farming began. In developing nations, it brings suffering and death. In wealthier countries like the United States, it brings economic devastation when crops wither and die, and forests burn. The United States continues to feel the aftereffects of the 2012 drought […]
By Melissa Hathaway, guest blogger14 June 2013 It has been well publicized over the last 30 – 40 years that carbon dioxide is driving the greenhouse effect, resulting in: global warming; carbon cycle imbalances; the melting of the polar caps; and changes to the deep sea currents which carry warm water from the equator towards […]
By John Vidal, environment editor 12 June 2013 (The Guardian) – The wettest autumn since records began, followed by the coldest spring in 50 years, has devastated British wheat, forcing food manufacturers to import nearly 2.5m tonnes of the crop. “Normally we export around 2.5m tonnes of wheat but this year we expect to have […]
By Shadia Nasralla; Editing by Alastair Macdonald, Tom Pfeiffer, and Kevin Liffey9 June 2013 CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt’s foreign minister, vowing not to give up “a single drop of water from the Nile”, said on Sunday he would go to Addis Ababa to discuss a giant dam that Ethiopia has begun building in defiance of […]
By MD. ASADULLAH KHAN8 June 2013 (The Daily Star) – With two centuries of an unprecedented population boom, likely to reach 9 billion by 2050, land degradation by human activities and climatic upheavals poses a threat to food security, especially in a land-scarce country like Bangladesh. Historically known, it took the human species about 150,000 […]
By Nathanael Johnson7 Jun 2013 (Grist) – Even the farmers who think climate change is a hoax have to adapt to it. Agriculture depends profoundly on the weather, and yesterday Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a suite of new government programs to help farmers adjust to a more extreme climate. “The bottom line is […]
By Tim Johnson3 June 2013 SAN PEDRO YEPOCAPA, Guatemala (McClatchy) – Across Central America, even as rains arrive, many coffee plantations contain only spindly, nearly defoliated bushes, the result of a blight known as coffee leaf rust whose devastation, so far, has yet to affect the prices of premium highland coffee that baristas serve around […]
(USGS) – Map of the United States (excluding Alaska) showing cumulative groundwater depletion, 1900 through 2008, in 40 assessed aquifer systems or subareas. Colors are hatched in the Dakota aquifer (area 39) where the aquifer overlaps with other aquifers having different values of depletion. Graphic: USGS ABSTRACT: A natural consequence of groundwater withdrawals is the […]
By Stephen Leahy31 May 2013 REYKJAVÍK, Iceland (IPS) – Soil is becoming endangered. This reality needs to be part of our collective awareness in order to feed nine billion people by 2050, say experts meeting here in Reykjavík. And a big part of reversing soil decline is carbon, the same element that is overheating the […]
[A warmer world is a wetter world: record rains on three continents. –Des] 31 May 2013 (Spiegel) – Rain, rain and, yes, more rain. Welcome to Germany! For weeks, rain has been pounding Germany, whose serotonin-sapped residents are straining to hold on to the last vestiges of hope after already having suffered through the darkest […]
