By Suzanne Goldenberg16 May 2013 (The Guardian) – The Canadian government has nearly doubled its advertising spending to promote the Alberta tar sands in an aggressive new lobbying push ahead of Thursday’s visit to New York by the prime minister, Stephen Harper. The Harper government has increased its advertising spending on the Alberta tar sands […]
By Roberta Kwok8 May 2013 (The Guardian) – In the 1970s, a population of Arctic foxes on an island in the Bering Sea began to mysteriously decline. The animals were thin and mangy, and nearly all the cubs died. Today, only about 100 foxes remain. The animals were not felled by an infectious disease, a […]
By Keith Bromery 16 May 2013 (FSU) – A Florida State University researcher working as part of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) investigated the effects of dispersants on the movement of crude oil through water-saturated marine sand and found that dispersants potentially facilitate penetration of oil components into the seabed, where oxygen concentrations […]
By Suzanne Goldenberg in Newtok, Alaska13 May 2013 (Guardian) – Sabrina Warner keeps having the same nightmare: a huge wave rearing up out of the water and crashing over her home, forcing her to swim for her life with her toddler son. “I dream about the water coming in,” she said. The landscape in winter […]
By Jeff Burnside8 May 2013 SEATTLE (KOMO News) – A chemical threat lies hidden in millions of American homes, and top government scientists believe it could be killing cats. Right now in the special session of the state legislature, lawmakers are fighting powerful interests to ban versions of the chemical. Dr. Dennis Wackerbarth is a […]
By Matt McGrath, Environment correspondent12 May 2013 (BBC News) – More than half of common plant species and a third of animals could see a serious decline in their habitat range because of climate change. New research suggests that biodiversity around the globe will be significantly impacted if temperatures rise more than 2C. But the […]
By Jonathon Gatehouse3 May 2013 (Maclean’s) – As far as the government scientist was concerned, it was a bit of fluff: an early morning interview about great white sharks last summer with Canada AM, the kind of innocuous and totally apolitical media commentary the man used to deliver 30 times or more each year as […]
(Rainforest Rescue) – Perched atop the remains of the last tree, an orangutan looks helplessly on what was until recently the forest he was living in but is now only ruins. Armed with chainsaws and bulldozers, workers of Bumitama Gunajaya Agro (BGA), a palm oil company, have completely destroyed the rainforest for miles. Three other […]
By Kerry Sheridan10 May 2013 WASHINGTON (AFP) – The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has broken above 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, US monitors announced Friday, indicating a record level for greenhouse gases. Climate scientists say that the symbolic threshold should serve as a call for action […]
By Jeffrey Kluger (TIME) – Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was […]
