By John Upton3 February 2015 (Climate Central) – Efforts to restrain deforestation are working, which means pollution from farming has increased in importance. The federal raids in Alta Floresta, Brazil surprised locals in 2005. The year before, nearly 60,000 acres of rainforest had been torn out of the municipality. Now farmers and loggers were being […]
By Ed Crooks15 February 2015 New York (Financial Times) – Discoveries of new oil and gas reserves dropped to their lowest level in at least two decades last year, pointing to tighter world supplies as energy demand increases in the future. Preliminary figures suggest the volume of oil and gas found last year, excluding shale […]
By Gwynn Guilford13 February 2015 (Quartz) – Trillions of microscopic plastic bits litter the oceans of Earth, converging in huge trash vortexes before becoming lodged in the seabed and getting gobbled up by tiny fish. But since countries don’t report how much plastic they’re flushing, it’s been impossible to tell how much there is—or where […]
By Antônio Fonseca, Carlos Souza Jr., and Adalberto Veríssimo23 February 2015 (Imazon) – […] In January 2015, 288 square kilometers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon were detected by SAD. That represents a 169% increase in relation to January 2014 when deforestation totaled 107 square kilometers. In January 2015, deforestation was concentrated in Mato Grosso […]
27 January 2015 (CSIRO) – Snowfall in the Australian alps is projected to decrease, especially at low elevations. There is very high confidence that as warming progresses there will be a decrease in snowfall, an increase in snowmelt and thus reduced snow cover. These trends will be large compared to natural variability and most evident […]
[This is an interesting situation: A technogenic climate catastrophe that isn’t caused by global warming, but instead by deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. –Des] By Zachary Davies Boren 23 February 2015 (The Independent) – As Brazil continues to battle a historic drought, millions of people in its largest city are about to run out of […]
January 2015 (Risky Business Project) – This graph shows the mean number of days in a typical Midwest summer when the temperature and humidity could reach Humid Heat Stroke Index (HHSI) category II, III, or even greater. These are days when the heat and humidity could be so high that it will be dangerous for […]
14 February 2015 (Canada Journal) – A team of British Columbia-led researchers believe banning fishing in international waters would help protect fish stocks and boost coastal economies. The analysis of fisheries data indicates that if increased spillover of fish stocks from protected international waters were to boost coastal catches by 18 per cent, current global […]
By Maria Gallucci23 February 2015 (IBT) – Taylor Shellfish Company was grappling with a crisis in the summer of 2009. Millions of oyster larvae were dying in its Washington hatcheries, and production had dropped by 80 percent. Down the coast, Oregon’s hatcheries faced the same problem. Highly acidic ocean water, it turned out, was dissolving […]
By Tim Elfrink23 February 2015 (New Times Miami) – Living in Miami in 2015 and harboring any doubts about sea level rise is roughly equivalent to being a volcano truther in Pompeii circa 79 AD. The catastrophe is happening. The only question is just how quickly climate change will sink parts of South Florida. The […]
