By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) – Atmospheric levels of the main greenhouse gas are hitting new highs, with no sign yet that the world economic downturn is curbing industrial emissions, a leading scientist said on Thursday. "The rise is in line with the long-term trend," Kim Holmen, research director at the Norwegian Polar […]
Tom Clifford, Foreign Correspondent LA PAZ // The Bolivian capital and its twin city of El Alto are facing a water crisis this year, a leading climatologist says. Demand for water is likely to exceed supply in 2009, with the entire Chacaltaya glacier, which supplies nearly two million people, set to disappear within 12 months, […]
Scientist Tim Flannery recalls the long, wet Victorian winters now replaced by a drier and dangerous climate by Tim Flannery The day after the great fire burned through central Victoria, I drove from Sydney to Melbourne. For much of the way – indeed for hundreds of miles north of the scorched ground – smoke obscured […]
By JIM CARLTON MENDOTA, Calif. — Dwindling water supplies are compounding economic woes in California’s Central Valley, causing farmers to leave fields fallow and confront the prospect of going under. The state’s water supply has dropped precipitously of late. California is locked in the third year of one of its worst droughts on record, with […]
The state of Victoria in southern Australia has recently been hit with hundreds of bush fires during a record-breaking heatwave – temperatures well above 38°C (100°F). Unfortunately, these fires have proved to be the deadliest in Australian history, with at least 166 deaths reported so far. The fires mostly appear to have been started by […]
(University of California – Berkeley) Amphibian populations have dropped worldwide, but most studies have detailed only the effects on frogs. A new UC Berkeley study documents that salamander populations also are plummeting. The study, which looked at tropical salamanders in Central America, found that the most common salamanders in the high-elevation cloud forests 40 years […]
by Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor THE ice caps are melting so fast that the world’s oceans are rising more than twice as fast as they were in the 1970s, scientists have found. They have used satellites to track how the oceans are responding as billions of gallons of water reach them from melting ice sheets […]
The steady retreat of glaciers on China’s Qinghai-Tibet plateau during the past 40 years is troubling, scientists in the Asian nation said Wednesday. Xin Yuanhong, senior engineer in charge of a three-year field study, said the glaciers at the headwaters of the Yangtze, China’s longest river, now cover 406 square miles, down from 482 square […]
by Marc Moncrief Victorians should cancel whatever plans they may have had for tomorrow and take whatever steps necessary to prepare for what Premier John Brumby is calling the "worst day in the history of the state". With temperatures set to soar to the mid-40s throughout Victoria, Mr Brumby said the conditions were worse […]
Several hundred little brown bats are dead from White-Nose Syndrome in Lackawanna County, and the Pennsylvania Game Commission is looking to residents for help uncovering other sites where this deadly disorder may have surfaced. Last week, bats were found dead outside of an abandoned mine near Carbondale by a citizen who later reported the findings […]
