9 October 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – 2015 is likely to be among the worst years for forest fires on record. A lot of this destruction is caused by fires that are intentionally set to clear forests for agriculture. In Sumatra and southern Borneo, rainforest and peatlands are burned to make room for palm oil plantations. […]
By Damian Carrington 7 October 2015 (The Guardian) – Fires raging across the forests and peatlands of Indonesia are on track to pump out more carbon emissions than the UK’s entire annual output, Greenpeace has warned. As well as fuelling global warming, the thick smoke choking cities in the region is likely to cause the […]
By Alison GillespieOctober 6, 2015 (smithsonian.com) – It isn’t hard to find the big tree they call Lady Liberty in Florida. It stands at the end of a boardwalk about 16 miles north of Orlando, along with many gums, oaks, and magnolias in the middle of a small public park. What is hard is photographing […]
By Chris Mooney8 October 2015 (The Washington Post) – For just the third time on record, scientists say they are now watching the unfolding of a massive worldwide coral bleaching event, spanning the globe from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean. And they fear that thanks to warm sea temperatures, the ultimate result could be the […]
5 October 2015 (AFP) – Thirty-one percent of cacti, some 500 species, face extinction due to human encroachment, according to the first global assessment of the prickly plants, published Monday. The finding places the cactus among the most threatened taxonomic groups on Earth, ahead of mammals and birds and just behind corals, according to the […]
By Lynn Jenner23 September 2015 (NASA) – The widespread burning of lowland forests on Borneo as well as southern Sumatra, as seen in this image taken by the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite, is an annual, manmade occurrence. People use fires to manage agricultural lands which in this part of the world includes large […]
[cf. Starving polar bears observed killing and eating dolphins that were forced north by global warming and Status of polar bear populations for 2014. As of the beginning of 2015, the Polar Bear Specialist Group lists the Barents Sea population as “data deficient”, so the status of this population officially is unknown. –Des] By Lorenzo […]
By Fiona Harvey15 September 2015 (The Guardian) – Tuna and mackerel populations have suffered a “catastrophic” decline of nearly three quarters in the last 40 years, according to new research. WWF and the Zoological Society of London found that numbers of the scombridae family of fish, which also includes bonito, fell by 74% between 1970 […]
By Angel Canales14 September 2015 (ABC News) – Famous for its pink coloring, the Chinese white dolphin is under threat of extinction in Hong Kong. Among other things, their shrinking habitat has deprived them of food and shelter, experts say. “So that’s why it has seriously impacted the number of dolphins in Hong Kong,” Samantha […]
24 January 2015 (Polar Bear Specialist Group) – The present table was discussed during late fall and early winter 2014, and agreed upon by the group on 20 January 2015. This status table will be updated whenever there is new information available that is considered credible and valid by the group. This year’s status table […]
