Desert Southwest may be first U.S. victim of climate change – ‘Even the best-case scenario is not too good’

By Lauren Morello and ClimatewireDecember 14, 2010 A 60-year drought that scorched the Southwest during the 12th century may be a harbinger of things to come as greenhouse gases warm the Earth, according to research published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study’s authors used tree rings to reconstruct a […]

Global warming deal decades away as ‘dysfunctional’ U.S. delays commitment

By Alex Morales, Kim Chipman and Jim Efstathiou Jr.Dec 12, 2010 9:00 PM PT Delegates at the United Nations climate talks stayed up two nights in a row last week to agree on a proposal to slow global warming. Next year’s negotiations may be even tougher. The plan approved on Dec. 11 creates a climate […]

Veron: The end is in sight for the world’s coral reefs

By Joe RommDecember 7, 2010 Reefs are the ocean’s canaries and we must hear their call. This call is not just for themselves, for the other great ecosystems of the ocean stand behind reefs like a row of dominoes. If coral reefs fail, the rest will follow in rapid succession, and the Sixth Mass Extinction […]

Image of the Day: Record Low Rio Negro Viewed from Orbit

 Rio Negro, 9 December 2008     Rio Negro, 10 December 2010 By Holli RiebeekDecember 11, 2010 Widespread, severe drought gripped much of the Amazon Basin in 2010, straining the network of water that makes up the Amazon River. By December 3, one of the Amazon’s largest tributaries, the Negro River, reached a record-low 13.63 […]

Fertile Crescent turning barren

By Katie Horner12.7.2010 at 2:57pm This past October, the Levant Desalination Association and NOSSTIA, an organization of expat Syrian scientists, arranged a conference in the capital city of Damascus to discuss Syria’s water crisis. Hydrology experts and research scientists at the conference reported that between 2002 and 2008, the national water supply fell from 1,200 […]

The ApocaDocs 2010 Year In Review (With Punchlines)

The top 100 stories from the 1629 news items recorded by the ApocaDocs in 2010. [A feature that Desdemona is sorely tempted to emulate.] Mon, Jan 11, 2010from BBC: World’s biodiversity ‘crisis’ needs action, says UNEight years ago, governments pledged to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, but the pledge will not be […]

Climate change increases risks of toxic pollutants

By Alison Brown, edie newsroom10 December 2010 A UN study has found that climate change increases exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and heightens their toxic effects on humans and the environment. The study was previewed at the Climate Change Conference in Cancun this week. POPs are persistent and toxic and can affect generations of […]

Floodwaters still washing away lives in Pakistan

By MARY FITZGERALD Foreign Correspondent for The Irish TimesSaturday, December 11, 2010 Dadu, southern Pakistan — The world has moved on from the disaster, but in villages and camps the horror is still unfolding THE IRONY of being surrounded by water but not having enough to drink is not lost on Longkhan Solangi, the wiry […]

Peak Humanitarian Aid

Peak Humanitarian Aid: The period during which accelerating climate crises overwhelm the capacity of industrial civilization to handle them. Has this peak arrived, along with the others? The July 2010 flood catastrophe in Pakistan suggests that it has. The United Nations reports that the scale of the flood damage is larger than the combined damage […]

Graph of the Day: Summer Temperature Anomalies in Moscow, 1950-2010

By Heidi Cullen and Claudia TebaldiOctober 27th, 2010 The summer of 2010 brought intensely hot weather to large portions of the northeastern U.S., central Europe, and Russia. Russia was especially hard hit as a heat wave — with daily high temperatures hitting 100°F — contributing to the deaths of as many as 15,000 people in […]

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