By Madeleine Coorey 3 February 2012 AFP – Major flooding hit parts of Australia’s east Friday, stranding thousands of residents, prompting a military airlift and leaving some communities only accessible by helicopter. The deluge, which has sparked dozens of rescues and left about 7,275 people isolated in various parts of New South Wales state has […]
By Harold Thibault, Guardian Weekly31 January 2012 For visitors expecting to see China’s largest freshwater lake, Poyang is a desolate spectacle. Under normal circumstances it covers 3,500 sq km, but last month only 200 sq km were underwater. A dried-out plain stretches as far as the eye can see, leaving a pagoda perched on top […]
By KARLA ZABLUDOVSKY30 January 2012 MEXICO CITY – A drought that a government official called the most severe Mexico had ever faced has left two million people without access to water and, coupled with a cold snap, has devastated cropland in nearly half of the country. The government in the past week has authorized $2.63 […]
By Valerie Volcovici24 January 2012 NEW YORK – U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions will be 7 percent lower than their 2005 level of nearly 6 billion metric tons in 2020 as coal’s share of electricity production continues a steady descent over the next two decades, according to new government data. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released […]
Between 2000 and 2010, the worst drought ever recorded since Euro-American settlement hit the Colorado River Basin. Water levels in Lake Mead dropped to record lows. The drought not only threatened the supply of water to cities like Las Vegas, it also harmed the ecosystems and riparian areas that support countless fish, plants, and animals […]
30 January 2012 (ABC) – Lake Macquarie Council’s effort to manage the impact of rising sea levels has again raised the ire of developer Jeff McCloy, this time over his plans to develop the former Pasminco smelter site. A council flood study found thousands of lakeside properties would be in danger of flooding by 2100 […]
[Desdemona’s been following this story since the beginning: Mau forest evictees. It’s a true climate refugee tragedy and emblematic of the kinds of terrible decisions nations will be forced to make as large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable.] By Peter Kahare24 January 2012 RIFT VALLEY, Kenya (IPS) – Six-year-old Victor Muruga points to a […]
By Marlowe Hood 29 January 2012 More intense heat waves due to global warming could diminish wheat crop yields around the world through premature ageing, according to a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change. Current projections based on computer models underestimate the extent to which hotter weather in the future will accelerate this process, […]
Baghdad, 27 January 2012 (UPI) – Iraq is facing worsening water shortages caused by the failure of successive postwar governments to ensure supplies and extensive dam-building in neighboring states that could trigger sectarian conflict. “One prediction, which has yet to come true, has been made repeatedly by former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali since 1988: That […]
Prominent doom blogger Gail Zawacki, of Wit’s End fame, has succumbed to the demands of her high-school-aged kid and created a new website for her collection of photographs and scientific papers. Here’s how Gail describes the new site: I hadn’t paid much attention to climate change, even though I saw An Inconvenient Truth when it […]
