Video: Two very different reports on China’s ghost cities

Desdemona has been following the “ghost city” story since Business Insider first collected satellite photos of new, empty cities in China in 2010. NBC News did a story on the ghosts that haunt China’s landscape in 2012. Business Insider has a new story for 2013: Scary new satellite pictures of China’s ghost cities. Now, Wade […]

Air pollution linked to 1.2 million premature deaths in China

By EDWARD WONG1 April 2013 BEIJING (The New York Times) – Outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, nearly 40 percent of the global total, according to a new summary of data from a scientific study on leading causes of death worldwide. Figured another way, the researchers said, China’s […]

Climate change is here, ready or not. So what now?

By Eugene Linden  30 March 2013 (US NEWS) – Welcome to a warmer, wilder world! We need to stop debating and start accepting that climate change is happening. Eugene Linden on how adaptation and market forces (hint: insurance companies) might temper the coming catastrophe. To paraphrase Hemingway, climate change first comes gradually and then all […]

Ecuador auctions off three million hectares of Amazon rainforest to China oil firms

By Jonathan Kaiman26 March 2013 BEIJING (guardian.co.uk) – Ecuador plans to auction off more than three million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, angering indigenous groups and underlining the global environmental toll of China’s insatiable thirst for energy. On Monday morning a group of Ecuadorean politicians pitched bidding contracts to representatives of […]

Sharks win endangered species protection – ‘The smell of corruption and underhand deals around the halls was foul, and it was everywhere’

By Gary Stokes, Coordinator, Sea Shepherd Hong Kong18 March 2013 BANGKOK (Sea Shepherd Conservation Society) – The room erupts in cheers and applause as the result of the vote is announced, the Oceanic white tip shark is now safely listed on the CITES Appendix II. Shortly followed by the three Hammerheads, the Porbeagle Shark and […]

China plans first commercial trip through Arctic shortcut in 2013

By Alister Doyle, Reuters Environment Correspondent, with additional reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Louise Ireland 12 March 2013 OSLO (Reuters) – A Chinese shipping firm is planning the country’s first commercial voyage through a shortcut across the Arctic Ocean to the United States and Europe in 2013, a leading Chinese scientist said on Tuesday. […]

Chief of U.S. Pacific forces calls climate change biggest worry – ‘You could have millions of people displaced, and security will start to crumble pretty quickly’

By Bryan Bender9 March 2013 CAMBRIDGE (Boston Globe) – America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region: climate […]

Graph of the Day: Global shark landing trends, 1950-2010

ABSTRACT: Adequate conservation and management of shark populations is becoming increasingly important on a global scale, especially because many species are exceptionally vulnerable to overfishing. Yet, reported catch statistics for sharks are incomplete, and mortality estimates have not been available for sharks as a group. Here, the global catch and mortality of sharks from reported […]

How a drought in China may have helped spark the Arab Spring – ‘We will have more droughts, more floods, and they will be more severe’

By Raveena Aulakh Environment Reporter5 March 2013 (Toronto Star) – Drought in eastern China. A shortage of wheat. An uprising in Egypt. On the face of it, the three don’t seem related. But two years after revolutions swept through the Arab world, a new study argues that climate change played a significant role in the […]

Checking on the world’s biggest dead mall – South China Mall still a ‘ghost town’ – ‘For all intents and purposes you just took the money and poured it down a black hole’

[Desdemona was fascinated by this story in 2010; apparently, the prospects of the South China Mall haven’t improved since then.] By Johan Nylander3 March 2013 Dongguan, China (CNN) – They built it, but the shoppers didn’t come. New South China Mall in Guangdong Province opened in 2005. With 5 million square feet of shopping area, […]

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