By Joe Romm 31 October 2014 (Climate Progress) – An alarming satellite-based analysis from NASA finds that the world is depleting groundwater — the water stored unground in soil and aquifers — at an unprecedented rate. A new Nature Climate Change piece, “The global groundwater crisis,” by James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the NASA […]
By Amelia Urry13 October 2014 (Grist) – Perhaps you have heard about Ebola, otherwise known as The Most Terrifying Disease Of Our Modern Times (Sorry, MERs; panic is a fickle friend). But you might not have heard that Ebola’s origin story also features a favorite environmental arch-villain? And by “favorite,” I mean “actually the worst”: […]
By Emma Marris29 September 2014 COCHA CASHU BIOLOGICAL STATION, Peru (National Geographic News) – Ernesto Ráez-Luna, a prominent Peruvian ecologist and environmentalist, has spent his career fighting for the Amazon rain forest. In 2011, he was appointed as an adviser to Peru’s Ministry of the Environment. In this role, Ráez-Luna was involved in organizing the […]
By Joby Warrick and Steven Mufson 21 September 2014 (Washington Post) – For 140 years, the Rockefellers were the oil industry’s first family, scions of a business empire that spawned companies called Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and Chevron. So it was no trivial matter when a group of Rockefeller heirs decided recently to begin severing financial […]
21 September 2014 (Science Daily) – Carbon dioxide emissions continue to track the high end of emission scenarios, eroding the chances to keep global warming below 2°C, and placing increased pressure on world leaders ahead of the United Nations Climate Summit on the 23rd September. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement […]
[UPDATE: Petition to save the vaquita from extinction] By ELISABETH MALKIN 14 September 2014 SAN FELIPE, Mexico (The New York Times) – It is a rare moment when scientists can point to an animal at the edge of extinction and predict when it might disappear forever. But it is happening here, under the golden waters […]
27 August 2014 (euronews) – Is the sun setting on Japan’s tuna fishing industry? Faced with a recent report that the bluefin tuna population is close to collapse, Tokyo has done an about-turn and decided to slash catches by half. Last year the USA, Japan, China, and South Korea agreed to cut catches by 15% […]
By Johnny Langenheim 15 September 2014 (theguardian.com) – The tuna fishermen use a crane to lift the clutch of frozen sharks onto a flat bed truck backed up on the edge of the wharf at Benoa harbour in Bali, Indonesia. The sharks’ heads and dorsal fins are missing, but the crane operator obligingly tells me […]
By Jeremy Hance19 August 2014 (mongabay.com) – Around 100,000 elephants were killed by poachers for their ivory on the African continent in just three years, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Between 2010 and 2012 an average of 6.8 percent of the elephant population was killed annually, […]
By Jeremy Hance7 July 2014 (mongabay.com) – In the last four years the price of ivory in China has tripled, according to new research from Save the Elephants. The news has worrying implications for governments and conservationists struggling to save elephants in Africa amidst a poaching epidemic, which has seen tens-of-thousands of elephants butchered for […]
