By ELISABETH ROSENTHALJanuary 21, 2011 KINANGOP, Kenya — Simon Joakim Kiiru remembers a time not long ago when familiar birdsongs filled the air here and life was correlated with bird sightings. His lush, well-tended homestead is in the highlands next to the Aberdare National Park, one of the premier birding destinations in the world. When […]
By James Mitchell Crow 18 January 2011 The floods that have devastated swathes of southern Queensland are beginning to perturb one of the world’s largest World Heritage Sites, the Great Barrier Reef, scientists in Australia say. Southern parts of the reef, which extends more than 2,000 kilometres along the Queensland coast in northeastern Australia, are […]
By James Meikle, www.guardian.co.uk Thursday 20 January 2011 14.15 GMT Populations of wild birds in the UK are falling dramatically with even slight recent recoveries apparently stalled, government figures showed today. Only seabird populations remain comfortably above 1970 levels, while farmland bird numbers continue to plunge from a brief mid-1970s peak to half those of […]
By Jonathan TilovePublished: Wednesday, January 19, 2011, 12:34 PM WASHINGTON — Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, agreed Wednesday that the politics of boom overrode the logic of response during the effort to contain and clean up the BP oil spill. Allen, who was the National […]
By Jonathan Tilove Wednesday, January 12, 2011, 9:30 PM About of a third of the way through the National Oil Spill Commission’s 400-page report, there is a 43-page chapter on the oil spill response and containment efforts that suggests that berms and boom were pretty much a bust, collecting more headlines than oil. Along the […]
December 2010 had the lowest ice extent for the month since the beginning of satellite records. The linear rate of decline for the month is –3.5% per decade. The low ice conditions in December occurred in conjunction with above-average air temperatures in regions where ice would normally expand at this time of year. Air temperatures […]
By The Associated Press Published: Friday, January 07, 2011, 12:32 PM Oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster remains in marshes off the coast of Louisiana, where officials are renewing complaints about the cleanup effort by the oil giant BP and the federal government. State and parish officials took media on a tour Friday morning of […]
By David DeFranza, Washington, DCon January 6, 2011 Between 2005 and 2006, author Fen Montaigne traveled to Antarctica with Fraser to observe the life cycle of the penguins. “This colony was once much larger,” Montaigne says, “but in recent years all the Adélie colonies in the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula have been in steep decline as […]
By John Platt Jan 6, 2011 11:20 AM Six Australian birds that have not been seen in decades have been declared extinct by a team of scientists assessing the health of the country’s bird species. In most cases they could have been saved, says team leader Stephen Garnett, professor of tropical knowledge at Charles Darwin […]
Budapest (AFP) Dec 21, 2010 – A leading French environmental group warned Tuesday that October’s toxic mud spill in Hungary could cause long-term damage and called for a broad European effort to monitor its effects. “We are concerned for the mid- and long-term,” Charlotte Nithart, the director of the Robin des Bois (Robin Hood) environmental […]
