Nairobi, December 30 (allafrica.com) – Severe drought, exacerbated by poverty and conflict, hit at least four countries in 2011 – Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia – displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Thousands in Somalia and Ethiopia began the year by making the dangerous journey to Yemen. Others from these two countries headed for South […]
Video by David Blair22 December 2011 The United Nations says that 250,000 Somalis are suffering from famine in three regions including Mogadishu, a fact that Abdiweli Mohammed Ali, who leads Somalia’s officially recognised government, has denied. “I don’t believe there’s a famine in Mogadishu. Absolutely no,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “You know the aid […]
By CORNELIA DEAN26 December 2011 The intense, deep blue skies of the American Southwest, skies that have drawn painters and photographers for a century or more, are a product of the region’s extremely dry air. Yet here’s another interesting fact: Though we think of the Southwest as dry — and it is dry — its […]
By Stephen Leahy27 December 2011 UXBRIDGE, Canada (Tierramérica) – The water supplied by the glaciers of the Cordillera Blanca, vital to a huge region of northwest Peru, is decreasing 20 years sooner than expected, according to a new study. Water flows from the region’s melting glaciers have already peaked and are in decline, Michel Baraer, […]
Washington DC, December 20 (SPX) – The science behind counting fish in the ocean to measure their abundance has never been simple. A new scientific paper authored by NOAA Fisheries biologist Eric Prince, Ph.D., and eight other scientists shows that expanding ocean dead zones – driven by climate change – have added a new wrinkle […]
By George Webster, for CNN23 December 2011 When Tropical Storm Washi ripped through the southern Philippine city of Cagayan de Oro last weekend, it dumped in one day more than the city’s entire average rainfall for the month of December. According to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration, a total of 181 millimeters […]
White dots indicate documented localities with forest mortality related to climatic stress from drought and high temperatures. Background map shows potential environmental limits to vegetation net primary production (Boisvenue and Running, 2006). Only the general areas documented in the tables are shown—many additional localities are mapped more precisely on the continental-scale maps. Drought and heat-driven […]
By JUSTIN GILLIS20 December 2011 In my article over the weekend about the climate risks from buried Arctic carbon, I omitted any discussion of one issue that sometimes appears in the news: methane deposits under relatively shallow seawater near the coasts of Siberia, Canada and Alaska. It was a purposeful omission because my piece focused […]
By Jim Forsyth; Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Greg McCune20 December 2011 SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) – The massive drought that has dried out Texas over the past year has killed as many as half a billion trees, according to new estimates from the Texas Forest Service. “In 2011, Texas experienced an exceptional drought, prolonged high […]
By Mark Boslough19 December 2011 The Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate Change was held during Halloween week. It was most notable for the breadth of opinion — and the span of credibility — of its speakers. I have long complained about the lack of willingness of most contrarians to attend and […]
