Disappearing puffins, stray whales, invading sailfish: The North Atlantic is in a bad way, and here’s why

By Rowan JacobsenMay/June 2014 Issue (Mother Jones) – The new poster child for climate change had his coming-out party in June 2012, when Petey the puffin chick first went live into thousands of homes and schools all over the world. The “Puffin Cam” capturing baby Petey’s every chirp had been set up on Maine’s Seal […]

Tree-killing beetles attacking California's forests – ‘We have no known treatment. We have no capacity to fend it off.’

7 June 2014 (CBS News) – Southern California is already plagued by a crippling drought and wildfires. Now you can add a legion of seemingly unstoppable beetles to the list of threats facing the region’s forests. They’ve already invaded hundreds of tree species, and they are showing no signs of slowing down. “We have lost […]

Prime Minister Abe presses for resumption of Japan’s annual slaughter in whale sanctuary – ‘I want to aim for the resumption of commercial whaling by conducting whaling research’

9 June 2014 (BBC) – Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said Japan will step up efforts to resume its annual whale hunt in the Antarctic. “I want to aim for the resumption of commercial whaling by conducting whaling research,” Mr Abe said. In March, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the whaling […]

Half of world’s forest species at risk – FAO publishes first global study of forest genetic resources

4 June 2014 (PhysOrg) – Half of the world’s forest species are at risk from climate change and farming, the United Nations warned on Tuesday, as it called for “urgent action” to manage them better. In its first global study of forest genetic resources, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) said woodland was shrinking […]

Sick sea lions flood shelters in California – Pups wash ashore all along the coast amid what scientists say are strains on the ocean

By Jim Carlton 6 June 2014 SAUSALITO, California – Record numbers of distressed sea lions have washed ashore in California for a second straight year, the latest example of a marine mammal facing severe problems amid what biologists say is overfishing and other human-caused strains on the world’s oceans. From January through May, a record […]

Sea star disease epidemic surges in Oregon, now present on entire U.S. West Coast, local extinctions expected – ‘This is an unprecedented event’

Contact: David Stauth, 541-737-0787; Kristen Milligan, 541-737-88624 June 2014 CORVALLIS, Oregon (OSU) – Just in the past two weeks, the incidence of sea star wasting syndrome has exploded along the Oregon Coast and created an epidemic of historic magnitude, one that threatens to decimate the entire population of purple ochre sea stars. Prior to this, […]

Global warming releases microplastic legacy frozen in Arctic Sea ice – ‘Concentrations of microplastics are at least two orders of magnitude greater than those in highly contaminated surface waters, such as those of the Pacific Gyre’

By Bob Yirka 27 May 2014 (PhysOrg) – A team of researchers with Dartmouth College in the U.S. and the University of Plymouth in the U.K. has found that a massive amount of tiny bits of rayon, plastics and other man-made materials are embedded in Arctic sea ice. In their paper published in the journal […]

Report: Impossible to conserve nature as is, thanks to climate change

By Elizabeth Harball and ClimateWire15 May 2014 (Scientific American) – When President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon in 1903, he famously admonished the attending crowd to avoid meddling with the landscape. “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it,” he said. True to Roosevelt’s message, America’s conservationists have since focused on maintaining […]

Brazil laundering illegal timber on a massive and growing scale – ‘Logging in the Brazilian Amazon is absolutely out of control’

By Jonathan Watts and John Vidal    14 May 2014 (theguardian.com) – Illegally logged timber in Brazil is being laundered on a massive and growing scale and then sold on to unwitting buyers in the UK, US, Europe, and China, Greenpeace claimed on Thursday. After a two-year investigation, the environmental campaign group says it has uncovered […]

Shells of marine life dissolving off the coast of the U.S. – ‘We did not expect to see pteropods being affected to this extent in our coastal region for several decades’

By Jeremy Hance8 May 2014 (mongabay.com) – It could be the plot of a horror movie: humans wake up one day to discover that chemical changes in the atmosphere are dissolving away parts of their bodies. But for small marine life known as sea butterflies, or pteropods, this is what’s happening off the West Cost […]

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial