By TOMOKO OTAKE, Staff writer26 June 2011 In order to address public concerns over post-3/11 food safety, the government should be more forthcoming in the monitoring and disclosure of data regarding radiation contamination of soil, Akira Sugenoya, mayor of Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, told this reporter recently. Sugenoya, a medical doctor, speaks from experience, having […]
[Answer: No.] By Michael Moyer 21 Jun 2011 A recent article on the Al Jazeera English web site cites a disturbing statistic: infant mortality in certain U.S. Northwest cities spiked by 35 percent in the weeks following the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The author writes that “physician Janette Sherman MD and […]
At the end of 2010, some 43.7 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to conflict and persecution, the highest number in more than 15 years. This included 15.4 million refugees, 27.5 million IDPs, and more than 837,500 individuals whose asylum application had not yet been adjudicated by the end of the reporting period. The […]
Growing share of income for the rich: Inequality in the U.S. has has grown steadily since the 1970s, following a flat period after World War II. In 2008, the wealthiest 10 percent earned almost the same amount of income as the rest of the country combined. *Based on the salary, bonuses and stock options of […]
By FishOutofWater, for Japan Nuclear Incident Liveblogs16 June 2011 […] A map of citizen-measured radiation levels shows radioactivity is distributed in a complex pattern reflecting the mountainous terrain and the shifting winds across a broad area of Japan north of Tokyo, which is in the center of the of bottom of the map. Radiation limits […]
By www.mongabay.comJune 17, 2011 Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon continued to rise as Brazil’s Congress weighed a bill that would weaken the country’s Forest Code, according to new analysis by Imazon. Imazon’s near-real time deforestation tracking system found that 165 square kilometers (103 square miles) of forest was cleared last month, a 72 percent rise […]
By Ugo Bardi17 June 2011 […] Gaia herself, poor lady, might not emerge unscathed from the fight. She may be robust, but she is not eternal. Look at this graph [above], from a paper by Franck, Bounama and Von Bloh. As you see, the earth’s biosphere, Gaia, peaked with the start of the Phanerozoic age, […]
By Kim DeRose, kderose@support.ucla.edu 16 June 2011 Fluctuations in climate can drastically affect the habitability of marine ecosystems, according to a new study by UCLA scientists that examined the expansion and contraction of low-oxygen zones in the ocean. The UCLA research team, led by assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences Curtis Deutsch, used a specialized […]
By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY16 Jun 2011 The so-called dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico — a region of oxygen-depleted water off the Louisiana and Texas coasts that is harmful to sea life — is predicted to be the largest ever recorded when it develops later this summer, scientists report. The unusually large size […]
Predicted patterns of Indus flows above Tarbela with changes in snow-melt patterns and volume under climate change (World Bank Pakistan Country Water Assistance Strategy, 2005, quoting Rees and Collins, 2006) Forward predictions, as shown in the graph, should see a mid-term increase in annual average runoff (consistent with mass balance) and/or an increase in groundwater […]
