15 August 2012 (AFP) – A tropical storm slammed into the Philippines on Wednesday, dumping heavy rains and causing renewed flooding and landslides in a nation hit by weeks of destructive monsoon weather. Tropical Storm Kai-tak made landfall over the northeast of the main island of Luzon before dawn, packing powerful winds and dumping up […]
Rome, 9 August 2012 (FAO) – The FAO Food Price Index climbed 6 percent in July 2012 after three months of decline. The Index, which measures the monthly change in the international prices of a basket of food commodities, averaged 213 points, up 12 points from June. That was still well below the peak of […]
By Mynardo Macaraig, AFP 13 August 2012 Philippine authorities warned Monday an intensifying storm could bring more misery to the flood-battered capital and surrounding areas, where nearly half a million were in evacuation centres. While flooding that covered 80 percent of Manila last week had largely subsided, vast areas of mainly rice-growing provinces to the […]
By David Biello, Scientific American27 July 2012 Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into […]
Record drought across the United States in 2012 followed a year of record flooding in the Mid-West in 2011, producing two very different areas of hypoxia, or oxygen deficient water, on the Louisiana continental shelf. The 2012 area of low oxygen, commonly known as the ‘Dead Zone,’ measured 7,480 square kilometers (= 2,889 square miles) […]
MOSCOW, 3 August 2012 (RIA Novosti) – Fires are spreading across vast Siberian forests in a flashback to the summer of 2010, when the worst drought on record sparked fires that killed dozens of Russians. The total area of forests gripped by fire in Russia has increased to 11 million-12 million hectares, Grigory Kuksin, head […]
By Gilbert P. Felongco, Correspondent11 August 2012 Manila (Gulf News) – Filipinos should learn to accept that typhoons and other weather disturbances would increase in intensity as a result of effects of climate change, Environment Secretary Ramon Paje said. “Filipinos must learn to accept the growing intensity of typhoons as the new ‘normal’” the environment […]
WASHINGTON, 8 August 2012 (AP) – This probably comes as no surprise: Federal scientists say July was the hottest month ever recorded in the Lower 48 states, breaking a record set during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. And even less a surprise: The U.S. this year keeps setting records for weather extremes, based on […]
Caption by Aries Keck8 August 2012 Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest takes on many different patterns. In Rondônia, a state in Western Brazil, deforestation took on the fishbone pattern revealed in these Landsat images from 1975 and 2012. Access to this remote region began with the building of a major road stretching from north to […]
By KELLY SLIVKA2 August 2012 In yet another display of the inexorable interdependence of Earth’s ecosystems, a bad summer for Midwestern farmland has turned out to be a good one for life in the Gulf of Mexico. Researchers from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium have found that this summer’s hypoxic zone in the Gulf of […]
