By Valerie Volcovici24 January 2012 NEW YORK – U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions will be 7 percent lower than their 2005 level of nearly 6 billion metric tons in 2020 as coal’s share of electricity production continues a steady descent over the next two decades, according to new government data. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released […]
By Margaret Kriz Hobson28 January 2012 A group of 573 scientists today released a letter (PDF) to President Obama asking him to stop oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic waters until experts can study the proposed oil development’s impacts on sensitive Arctic ecosystems and native subsistence activities. … “We want to make it a high priority […]
By arevamirpal::laprimavera 28 January 2012 Toshihiro Takatsuji, associate professor at Nagasaki University announced the result of his measurement of radioactive cesium in the air at an international symposium, and said a high level of cesium-134 (11,300 becquerels/kg) was detected from the dust collected in the filter paper in early April last year in Nagasaki City, […]
Prominent doom blogger Gail Zawacki, of Wit’s End fame, has succumbed to the demands of her high-school-aged kid and created a new website for her collection of photographs and scientific papers. Here’s how Gail describes the new site: I hadn’t paid much attention to climate change, even though I saw An Inconvenient Truth when it […]
By Cain Burdeau of the Associated Press28 January 2012 NEW ORLEANS – On the day the Deepwater Horizon sank, BP officials warned in an internal memo that if the well was not protected by the blow-out preventer at the drill site, crude oil could burst into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 3.4 […]
By SHARON LaFRANIERE27 January 2012 BEIJING – Weary of waiting for the authorities to alert residents to the city’s most pernicious air pollutant, citizen activists last May took matters here into their own hands: they bought their own $4,000 air-quality monitor and posted its daily readings on the Internet. That began a chain reaction. Volunteers […]
By David Ljunggren, with additional reporting by Jeff Jones in Calgary; editing by Peter Galloway26 January 2012 OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada disassociated itself on Thursday from an embarrassing official policy paper that said the country’s independent energy regulator, now studying a controversial oil pipeline, is in fact a government ally. Critics have long charged the […]
By Mike Barrett, NaturalSociety12 January 2012 It has recently been reported that certain research was suppressed concerning the bee decline which has been occurring over the past few years. It seems that the large sum of money raked in by Bayer, a maker of pesticides, was enough to kick research under the carpet that linked […]
By arevamirpal::laprimavera 26 January 2012 When it was someone else’s problem (Chernobyl), Japan was telling the truth about the effect of radiation, particularly on children. Here’s Tokyo Brown Tabby’s translation and captioning of a TV program from 1993. Ironically, the female newscaster has morphed into one of the strongest proponents (even today) of nuclear power […]
23 January 2012 (UNEP) – Industrially produced nutrient fertilizers (nitrogen, phosphorus) are essential to global food security and have been the main driver of dramatically improved agricultural yields over the last sixty years to feed a growing population. At the same time, excess nutrients from inefficient use in farming and insufficient treatment of nutrients in […]
