By ADAM FRANK21 August 2013 ROCHESTER (The New York Times) – IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent. In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, […]
By Jeremy Hance19 August 2014 (mongabay.com) – Around 100,000 elephants were killed by poachers for their ivory on the African continent in just three years, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Between 2010 and 2012 an average of 6.8 percent of the elephant population was killed annually, […]
By Jonathan Amos20 August 2014 (BBC News) – A new assessment from Europe’s CryoSat spacecraft shows Greenland to be losing about 375 cu km of ice each year. Added to the discharges coming from Antarctica, it means Earth’s two big ice sheets are now dumping roughly 500 cu km of ice in the oceans annually. […]
By Tom Philpott4 August 2014 (Mother Jones) – Science papers don’t generate much in the way of headlines, so you’ll be forgiven if you haven’t heard of one called “Groundwater Depletion During Drought Threatens Future Water Security of the Colorado River Basin,” recently published by University of California-Irvine and NASA researchers. But the “water security […]
By Mauri S. Pelto19 July 2014 (Glacier Cnange) – The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) record of mass balance and terminus behavior (WGMS, 2013) provides a global index for alpine glacier behavior. Mass balance was -638 mm in 2012, negative for the 22nd consecutive year. Preliminary data for 2013 from Austria, Canada, Nepal, New Zealand, […]
By Laura McClure 15 August 2014 (TED) – Scientist Sylvia Earle (TED Talk: My wish: Protect our oceans) has spent the past five decades exploring the seas. During that time, she’s witnessed a steep decline in ocean wildlife numbers — and a sharp incline in the number of ocean deadzones and oil drilling sites. An […]
By Gwynn Guilford13 August 2014 (Quartz) – Each year, at least 640,000 tonnes of nets and other fishing gear goes overboard and never comes back. But just because it’s lost to the sea doesn’t mean that derelict gear stops doing its jobs. The lobster pots, crab traps and dense thickets of nets that litter the […]
By Anne Casselman6 August 2014 (Nature) – Mercury levels in the upper ocean have tripled since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and human activities are to blame, researchers report today in Nature. Although several computer models have estimated the amount of marine mercury, the new analysis provides the first global measurements. It fills in […]
My guest post is up at Cusco Running Club: Global Warming and Peru. Check it out if you’re interested in the effects of abrupt climate change in the rural Andes: Global warming is real You may have heard that global warming isn’t happening, or that it’s a hoax, or that it has “paused” in recent […]
By Peter Hannam, Environment Editor21 July 2014 (Sydney Morning Herald) – A common refrain by climate sceptics that surface temperatures have not warmed over the past 17 years, implying climate models predicting otherwise are unreliable, has been refuted by new research led by James Risbey, a senior CSIRO researcher. Setting aside the fact the equal […]
