By Andres SchipaniBBC News, Khapi For the Incas, and most of the Andean civilisations, snow-capped mountains were divinities to be honoured, as they supplied water. But now it seems those gods are losing their powers. Researchers say that the glaciers are in dramatic retreat across the Andes due to rising temperatures. In the small village […]
By PAUL TATNELLApril 30, 2010 – 4:53PM Sydney has experienced its fifth warmest April on record with a month of balmy nights and little rain. But don’t put away the warm clothes just yet with predictions that winter is on the way; it’s just running a little late. The average April minimum temperature was 1 […]
By Jim Robbins For many years, Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana, planned her field season for the same two to three weeks in July. That’s when her quarry — tiny, black, mountain pine beetles — hatched from the tree they had just killed and swarmed to a new one to start […]
BY GWYNETH DICKEY New evidence gleaned by analyzing calcium embedded in Chinese limestone suggests that volcanoes, which spewed massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for a million years, caused the biggest mass extinction on Earth. In a paper published April 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of […]
Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Cynthia Osterman WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Deaths from heat waves, property damage from floods and rising seas from melting glaciers are a few of the things Americans can expect as a result of climate change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in a report released Tuesday. The report, called Climate […]
By JESSICA MAHARApril 21, 2010 THE rain dances must have worked, with NSW suffering less drought than at any time in the past nine years – this month, just 7.3 per cent of the state is drought declared. The Primary Industries Minister, Steve Whan, said he hoped the figures marked a turning point for the […]
LONDONWed Apr 28, 2010 1:38pm EDT (Reuters) – The world’s floating ice is in “constant retreat,” showing an instability which will increase global sea levels, according to a report published in Geophysical Research Letters on Wednesday. Floating ice had disappeared at a steady rate over the past 10 years, according to the first measurement of […]
By Ntungwe Elias Ngalame 26 Apr 2010 13:26:00 GMT YAOUNDE, Cameroon (AlertNet) – When visitors arrived in Yaounde recently for the 8th annual meeting of the African Road Maintenance Funds Association, they got an odd greeting from a Cameroon host delegate. “Yaounde, a city flanked by seven hills, is an environmentally friendly place with a […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.comApril 26, 2010 The West African nation of Niger is facing an increasingly alarming food crisis as the UN announced it would double the number of people it was feeding today despite continuing budget shortfalls in its World Food Program (WFP). Failing rains have caused crop yields in Niger to decline, while […]
Reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Peter Galloway (Reuters) – In what looks to be another sign the Arctic is heating up quickly, British explorers in Canada’s Far North reported on Tuesday that they had been hit by a three-minute rain shower over the weekend. The rain fell on the team’s ice base off Ellef […]