By Saffron Howden, with AAPDecember 11, 2010 Across the east, riverside communities have spent the week battling to protect their livelihoods. THE SWEEP of heavy grey across south-eastern Australia this week flooded hundreds of towns across four states, prompted the evacuation of thousands of homes and caused untold damage to the nation’s food bowl. From […]
By RUSSELL GOLD And BEN CASSELMANDecember 8, 2010 The oil industry has said the Deepwater Horizon rig catastrophe was a unique event, the result of an unprecedented series of missteps that are unlikely to be repeated. The recent history of offshore drilling suggests otherwise. In the months before and after the rig exploded and sank, […]
By Hamish Boland-RudderDecember 7, 2010 AS NSW counts the cost of crop losses, evacuations, and property destruction brought by flooding rains, communities are preparing to deal with the human side of the disaster. The Macquarie River, which flows through the Warren Shire, has reached its highest level in 20 years after more than 100 millimetres […]
The Daily TelegraphNovember 24, 2010 12:00AM COMMERCIAL tuna fishermen have been accused of using whale sharks as giant lures to increase their catch. Whale sharks naturally attract schools of fish and Greenpeace has accused the industry of setting their nets around the gentle giants after it obtained photos showing a juvenile whale shark being hoisted […]
By Chalpat SontiNovember 11, 2010 The equivalent of an extra 17,600 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water will be taken from Perth’s aquifers this year, as a prolonged dry spell bites hard on supplies. The Department of Water has approved the Water Corporation’s application to take 165 gigalitres from the Gnangara and Jandakot aquifers. That is […]
By Lee-Maree GalloOctober 25, 2010 – 11:36AM Increased snowfall in the Antarctic has been linked to drought in south-western Australia. Researchers, including Australian Antarctic Division principal research scientist Tas van Ommen, have been analysing ice cores in the Antarctic and revealed snowfall variability may be linked to climate in the Southern Ocean and the South-West. […]
ScienceDaily (Oct. 11, 2010) — The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade, a group of researchers conclude in the first major study to ever examine “evapotranspiration” on a global basis. Most climate models have suggested that […]
ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2010) — The “turtle and dugong capital of the world”, the northern Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait region, faces increased pressure under climate change from human actions such as fishing, hunting, onshore development and pollution. “Depletion of turtle and dugong numbers increases their vulnerability to other threats and lowers their ability […]
By James PatonOct 5, 2010 8:16 PM PT Future oil spills off the coast of Australia’s Queensland state are “inevitable” as ship traffic increases, according to a report analyzing the April grounding of a Chinese coal carrier on the Great Barrier Reef. The incident involving the vessel Shen Neng 1 “highlights the vulnerability of Queensland’s […]
By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.comOctober 06, 2010 A new global assessment of forest stocks by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows a sharp acceleration of primary forest loss since 2005 despite gains in the extent of protected areas. FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 reveals some 13 million hectares of forest were cleared […]
