On the Tibetan Plateau, temperatures are rising and glaciers are melting faster than climate scientists would expect based on global warming alone. A recent study of ice cores from five Tibetan glaciers by NASA and Chinese scientists confirmed the likely culprit: rapid increases in black soot concentrations since the 1990s, mostly from air pollution sources […]
By Staff WritersKathmandu (AFP) Dec 6, 2009 More than a billion people in Asia depend on Himalayan glaciers for water, but experts say they are melting at an alarming rate, threatening to bring drought to large swathes of the continent. Glaciers in the Himalayas, a 2,400-kilometre (1,500-mile) range that sweeps through Pakistan, India, China, […]
By ADAM MORTONDecember 5, 2009 THE world has little chance of avoiding at least two degrees of global warming this century – the projected threshold for unpredictable and accelerated climate changes – if the emissions targets proposed by rich nations are locked in at next week’s Copenhagen summit, an analysis has found. A report by […]
By Chris Buckley BEIJING (Reuters) – Droughts and floods stoked by global warming threaten to destabilize China’s grain production, the nation’s top meteorologist has warned, urging bigger grain reserves and strict protection of farmland and water supplies. Extreme weather damage can now cause annual grain output in China, the world’s biggest grain producer, to […]
By 2030, demand in India will grow to almost 1.5 trillion m3, driven by domestic demand for rice, wheat, and sugar for a growing population, a large proportion of which is moving toward a middle-class diet. Against this demand, India’s current water supply is approximately 740 billion m3. As a result, most of India’s river […]
NEW DELHI – INDIA’S water needs are set to double by 2030, which could dry up its river basins, according to new research released on Tuesday that paints a grim picture for supplies across the emerging world. Global fresh water demand by 2030 will be 40 per cent higher than current supplies and agriculture is […]
Taxis queue up to fill their tanks on an overpass in Chongqing, China, Wednesday, November 18, 2009. Central and eastern Chinese provinces faced the worst natural gas shortage in years as supplies were diverted to snowstorm-hit northern China, while producers lacked incentives to expand output because of poor margins. Photo by Imaginechina: AP China has […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com, November 25, 2009 Rhino poaching has hit a fifteen-year high, and the rising price for black-market rhino horn is likely the reason why. For the first time in a decade rhino horn is worth more than gold: a kilo of rhino horn is worth approximately 60,000 US dollars while gold is […]
Cambridge, UK, 10 November 2009—The illicit trade in ivory, which has been increasing in volume since 2004, moved sharply upward in 2009, according to the latest analysis of seizure data in the Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS). ETIS, one of the two monitoring systems for elephants under CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered […]
Via reader Gail: Unusually early snow storms in north-central China have claimed 40 lives, caused thousands of buildings to collapse and destroyed almost 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) of winter crops, the Civil Affairs Ministry said Friday. Nineteen of the deaths resulted from traffic accidents related to the storms that began Nov. 9, the ministry said […]
