[cf. Peak Coal in China? Not so fast –Des] By Tom Phillips, with additional reporting by Luna Lin 4 November 2015 (Beijing) – China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, has been dramatically underreporting the amount of coal it consumes each year, it has been claimed ahead of key climate talks in Paris. Official Chinese data, […]
By Hannah Waters8 October 2015 (Audobon) – The winter of 2011 was a bad one for seabirds nesting at Midway Atoll, a remote spread of islands in the central Pacific. First, two big storms, hit, in January and February, causing large waves to flood the islands. Then in March the islands were washed over by […]
[The interesting thing about this story is that it never mentions global warming, even though we know that there’s a strong correlation between rising temperatures and wildfires, e.g., Study finds climate change is increasing length of wildfire seasons across globe. –Des] By Bill Theobald6 November 2015 WASHINGTON (USA TODAY) – The damage caused by the […]
[cf. 60,000 antelopes died in 4 days, and no one knows why and Saiga antelope population declines 95% in 15 years] By Emma Howard3 November 2015 (The Guardian) – More than half of the world’s population of an endangered antelope died within two weeks earlier this year, in a phenomenon that scientists are unable to […]
[cf. Toxic algae bloom may be largest ever off U.S. West Coast – ‘We’ve never had to close essentially half our coast’, and Scientists fear toxic algae bloom spreading on Pacific coast – Stretching from southern California to Alaska, this year’s blooms thought to be the largest ever recorded] By Lisa Fernandez5 November 2015 (NBC […]
[cf. Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean – ‘The fact that a record-hot planet Earth coincides with a record-cold northern Atlantic is quite stunning’] By Lisa Sorg4 November 2015 (Coastal Review) – There it is, hanging out in the northern Atlantic Ocean, off the southern tip […]
By Adam Voiland19 October 2015 (NASA) – Heavy smoke continued to pour from peat fires in Borneo, Indonesia, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image on 19 October 2015. Red outlines indicate hot spots where the sensor detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires. Gray smoke hovers […]
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, 19 October 2015 (AFP) – International efforts to douse raging Indonesia fires will fail and Southeast Asia could face several more weeks of choking smoke until the rainy season starts, Malaysia’s environment minister warned on Monday, October 19. Facing growing pressure, Indonesia earlier this month agreed to accept international help after failing […]
By Jonathan Watts30 October 2015 (Rio de Janeiro) – Brazilian rangers, firefighters and indigenous communities are battling against a wildfire that has blazed for two months and devastated some of the last Amazonian forest in the northern state of Maranhão, including part of the territory of an uncontacted tribe. The fire – which has spread […]
By Chris Mooney 29 October 2015 (Washington Post) – A new scientific study says that rapidly warming waters off the New England coast have had a severe consequence — the collapse of a cod fishery that saw too many catches even as overall cod numbers declined due to warmer seas. It’s just the latest in […]