By GARDINER HARRIS12 March 2013 CHERRAPUNJI, India (The New York Times) – Almost no place on Earth gets more rain than this small hill town. Nearly 40 feet falls every year — more than 12 times what Seattle gets. Storms often drop more than a foot a day. The monsoon is epic. But during the […]
By Matthew Campbell and Chris V. Nicholson 7 March 2013 (Bloomberg) – Investing in climate change used to mean financing the fight against global warming. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and other firms took stakes in wind farms and tidal-energy projects, and set up carbon-trading desks. Then, as efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions faltered, […]
By Raveena Aulakh 16 February 2013 (Toronto Star) – Masud, 19, lives in Korail, Dhaka’s largest slum. Its roughly 70,000 residents dwell in the shadow of the affluent Gulshan neighbourhood, with its mansions, restaurants, and western-style shopping centres. Masud, her husband Mohammed, and their year-old daughter Karima share a one-room shanty that can be crossed […]
By Roger Harrabin, Environment analyst3 March 2013 (BBC) – Britain must become more resilient to both drought and flooding, Environment Agency chairman Chris Smith has said. New figures from the agency show that one in every five days saw flooding in 2012, but one in four days saw drought. Rivers such as the Tyne, Ouse, […]
By Adam Vaughan 28 February 2013 (guardian.co.uk) – Public concern in environmental issues including global warming, the loss of species and air pollution has dropped to its lowest level in two decades, according to an international poll released this week. The GlobeScan poll, undertaken last summer before superstorm Sandy hit the Caribbean and New York, […]
By Matt Bowen26 February 2013 (Fairfax NZ News) – Bilbo Baggins’ lush green shire could have the life sucked out of it after Waikato’s undeclared drought restricted Hobbiton’s water supply. It’s the region’s driest summer in five years and, with no rain in sight, Matamata’s best known tourist attraction may become three hectares of parched […]
By Justin Engel 22 February 2013 BAY CITY, MICHIGAN (The Bay City Times) – Climate change is real, a retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expert says: And it’s causing parts of the Great Lakes water levels to descend. Roger Gauthier, a retired hydrologist with the Corps, closed out the Saginaw Bay Watershed Initiative Network/Saginaw […]
By JACK HEALY22 February 2013 DENVER (The New York Times) – After enduring last summer’s destructive drought, farmers, ranchers and officials across the parched Western states had hoped that plentiful winter snows would replenish the ground and refill their rivers, breaking the grip of one of the worst dry spells in American history. No […]
Pasadena, California, 15 February 2013 (JPL) – A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade. Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National […]
By Simon Tisdall17 February 2013 (guardian.co.uk) – When super-typhoon Bopha struck without warning before dawn, flattening the walls of their home, Maria Amparo Jenobiagon, her two daughters and her grandchildren ran for their lives. The storm on 4 December was the worst ever to hit the southern Philippines: torrential rain turned New Bataan’s river into […]
