22 July 2012 (Guardian) – After the driest winter on record, Sir David Attenborough wouldn’t be the only Briton to blame the wettest English summer ever on global climate change, on some inexorable shift in the planetary machinery that upsets all reasonable expectation. There is a connection, although no single meteorological episode in any locality […]
By MATTHEW L. WALD and JOHN SCHWARTZ25 July 2012 WASHINGTON – From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms. On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional […]
By Bob Burgdorfer, with additional reporting by Jonathan Leff and Brian Winter; Editing by Peter Bohan and Leslie Gevirtz1 August 2012 CHICAGO (Reuters) – Alarm grew over the unrelenting Midwest drought on Tuesday, as one of the top corporate leaders in agriculture warned that the government must act quickly to reduce the amount of corn […]
ANJU, North Korea – More heavy rain pounded North Korea on Monday, submerging buildings, cutting off power, flooding rice paddies, and forcing people and their livestock to climb onto rooftops for safety. The rain follows downpours earlier this month that killed nearly 90 people and left more than 60,000 homeless, officials said. The floods come […]
By CARRIE ANTLFINGER30 July 2012 MILWAUKEE – State and county fairs in the sweltering and drought-stricken Midwest may see some skinnier pigs and smaller squash this year. The dozen pigs Greg Marzahl and his 15-year-old daughter are bringing to the Wisconsin State Fair are smaller than those he’d normally show. Marzahl, who had three grand […]
30 July 2012 (CSIRO) – The Southern Ocean is an important carbon sink in the world – around 40 per cent of the annual global CO2 emissions absorbed by the world’s oceans enter through this region. Reporting this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Australia’s national […]
By ORA MORISON, The Globe and Mail25 July 2012 The severe drought hitting U.S. farms may be just the latest sign of climate change and the impact it will have on the economy. Climate change and economics have been intersecting long before a drought descended upon the Midwest this year. Over the past 20 years, […]
Colorado forest before beetle infestation, September 2005 Colorado forest after beetle infestation, September 2011 Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from Thomas Veblen and Bill Romme28 July 2012 A single pine bark beetle is about the size of a grain of rice. But when the beetle population swells, it can have a major impact […]
By Alison Singer; Edited by Antonia Sohns26 July 2012 Rezaul Karim Chowdhury is from Kutubdia, a Bangladeshi island in the Bay of Bengal. When Chowdhury was younger, the palm-dotted tropical island spanned 65 square kilometers, but rising sea levels and erosion have since shrunk it by more than half, to only 25 square kilometers. With […]
[cf. Earth’s greatest mass extinction caused by coal: study] By Robert Bryce27 July 2012 Standing in the dispatch office of the North Antelope Rochelle Mine near Gillette, Wyo., Scott Durgin pointed at a flat-panel display. The regional vice president for Peabody Energy smiled. The most productive coal mine in the world was on target. Since […]
