Manufacturing and global trade impair health of people with no stake in either – Eleven percent of Chinese deaths due to air pollution are tied to goods consumed in the U.S. and Western Europe

  Irvine, California, 29 March 2017 (UCI) – The latest products may bring joy to people around the globe, but academic researchers this week are highlighting the heightened health risks experienced by people in regions far downwind of the factories that produce these goods and on the other side of the world from where they’re […]

Global warming could destroy far more Arctic permafrost than we thought – “The current pattern of permafrost reveals the sensitivity of permafrost to global warming”

By Chelsea Harvey 10 April 2017 (The Washington Post) – Climate change could cause another 4 million square kilometers, or about 1.5 million square miles, of permafrost to disappear with every additional degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming, a new study suggests. The estimate, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Climate […]

Hungry, exhausted, only half their normal weight: Tragedy for black bears in eastern Russia

27 March 2017 (The Siberian Times) – The Asiatic black bear is facing catastrophe in areas of eastern Russia, a leading scientist has warned. A short video highlights a bear, also known as Himalayan, climbing a tree in a snowy November. What’s unusual about that? By now, this bear should have been hibernating for several […]

Hunting accounts for massive declines in tropical animal populations

13 April 2017 (Radboud University) – Hunting is a major threat to wildlife particularly in tropical regions, but a systematic large-scale estimate of hunting-induced declines of animal numbers was lacking so far. A study published in Science on April 14 fills this gap. An international team of ecologists and environmental scientists found that bird populations […]

Forest fragmentation may be releasing much more carbon than we think

By Morgan Erickson-Davis31 March 2017 (Mongabay) – The earth’s forests have been broken into around 50 million fragments, the edges of which add up to a length that would make it a third of the way to the sun and which increase annual tropical deforestation carbon emissions by 31 percent. This, according to a new […]

Scientists foresee sharp rise in deadly heat stress as global temperatures climb – “Because the response is nonlinear, for each fraction of a degree the climate warms, the increase in heat stress is ever greater”

27 March 2017 (Loughborough University) – In December 2015, the international community pledged to limit global warming to below 2°C to prevent dangerous climate change. However, new analysis suggests that even if this target is met, the dangers to society posed by heat stress are likely to escalate. Writing in the Proceedings of the National […]

UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it

By Danny Westneat29 March 2017 (The Seattle Times) – A University of Washington professor started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters. But she got dragged down a rabbit hole of twitter-boosted conspiracy theories, and ended up mapping our political moment. It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of […]

“Parched” China city plans to pump water from Russian lake via 1,000 km pipeline

By Tom Phillips; additional reporting by Wang Zhen7 March 2017 Beijing (The Guardian) – China is reportedly considering plans to build a 1,000km (620 mile) pipeline to pump water all the way from Siberia to its drought-stricken northwest. According to reports in the Chinese media, urban planners in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, have […]

Rhino shot dead at Paris zoo by poachers who cut horn off with chainsaw

By Sunita Patel-Carstairs, News Reporter7 March 2017 (Sky News) – A rhino has been shot dead by poachers who broke into a zoo and sliced its horn off with a chainsaw. Four-year-old Vince was found dead by one of his keepers at Thoiry zoo, near Paris, on Tuesday morning. One or more attackers are believed […]

How poaching is killing off the world’s largest reindeer herd on Taimyr Peninsula

7 February 2017 (The Siberian Times) – A small motorboat stalks a herd of reindeer as they cross the Khatanga River in the far north of Siberia. In a barbaric act, poachers use axes and cleavers to cut the antlers from the helpless animals as they swim in the cold Arctic waters. Often, the frontal […]

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