By James Campbell, Sunday Herald Sun MELBOURNE is shrouded in a smoke haze as the Victoria fires continue to burn across the state. Visibility at Melbourne airport is down to 2km with the Bureau of Meteorology warning the haze could linger until the end of next week. The Environment Protection Authority has issued a smoke […]
Penguins are on the verge of a precipitous decline, one conservation group warns. A combination of changing weather patterns, overfishing, pollution, and other factors have conspired against the aquatic, flightless birds, according to a long-running study conducted by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society. The study’s findings were presented today by University of Washington […]
By KYLE HOPKINS – McClatchy Newspapers An already-fragile population of killer whales that hunts Prince William Sound never recovered from the Exxon Valdez oil spill and is doomed to die off, biologists said last week. … One of the most striking surprises to emerge from the annual Alaska Forum on the Environment was the tale […]
By Mica Rosenberg NEZAHUALCOYOTL, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexico City is facing a crisis over where to put its trash — enough to fill four sports stadiums a year — with its sprawling dump already crammed to bursting and under a closure order. One of the world’s biggest landfills, the Nezahualcoyotl dump site is a […]
TAIPEI (Reuters) – Coral reefs off the southeast coast of Taiwan have turned black with disease possibly due to sewage discharge, threatening fragile undersea ecosystems and tourism, a study released Friday said. The discovery on a problem long suspected but seldom documented shows that coral is suffering widely in waters up to five meters (16.4 […]
By Rex Springston NEWPORT NEWS – The light of a cold dawn revealed an endangered species on the James River — waterman Rodgers Green of Gloucester. Green catches oysters the old-fashioned way, with 16-foot tongs that resemble two rakes attached like scissors. Disease, pollution and long-ago overharvesting have sunk Virginia’s oyster population to about 1 […]
PATANCHERU, India – When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000. And it wasn’t just ciprofloxacin being […]
Charles Perrow GLOBAL CATASTROPHES AND TRENDS: The Next Fifty Years. Vaclav Smil. xii + 307 pp. The MIT Press, 2008. $29.95. Prolific writer Vaclav Smil characterizes his latest book, Global Catastrophes and Trends, as “a multifaceted attempt to identify major factors that will shape the global future and to evaluate their probabilities and potential impacts.” […]
New research strengthens the link between water pollution and rising male fertility problems. The study shows for the first time how a group of testosterone-blocking chemicals is finding its way into UK rivers, affecting wildlife and potentially humans. The study identified a new group of chemicals that act as ‘anti-androgens’. This means that they inhibit […]
Raw sewage and pollution from agricultural run-off polluted 83 percent of China’s coastal waters in 2008, state media said Saturday. China’s coastal waters last year witnessed 68 red tides, or algae blooms, which feed off nutrients found in excess pollution and sap water of oxygen, killing off large amounts of sea life, Xinhua news agency […]
