New data show residential per capita water use across California – In some areas, residential use averages more than 500 gallons per person per day

By Matthew Heberger, Senior Research Associate18 November 2014 (Pacific Institute) – New monthly water use data for California water utilities shows that residential water use varies widely around the state, and that the response to the drought has been uneven. Moreover, in some areas, residential use averages more than 500 gallons per person per day, […]

Taps run dry in São Paulo drought, but water company barely shrugs

By Dom Phillips 18 November 2014 ATIBAIA, Brazil (Washington Post) – Seen from a micro-light aircraft, flying low near this small town in Brazil’s interior, the scale of the water crisis blighting São Paulo, a megalopolis 40 miles away, was frighteningly clear. Four of the five reservoirs in an interlinked system that supplies 6.5 million […]

NASA bombshell: Global groundwater crisis threatens our food supplies and our security

By Joe Romm 31 October 2014 (Climate Progress) – An alarming satellite-based analysis from NASA finds that the world is depleting groundwater — the water stored unground in soil and aquifers — at an unprecedented rate. A new Nature Climate Change piece, “The global groundwater crisis,” by James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the NASA […]

True altruism: Can humans change to save other species? ‘What makes us so good at destroying such vast quantities of other creatures is simply the vast quantity of us’

[Short answer: No.] By Verlyn Klinkenborg9 October 2014 (Yale Environment 360) – Ever since Darwin, biologists have been arguing about altruism — the concept that an individual may behave in a way that benefits its species, at a cost to itself. After all, the self-sacrifice implicit in altruistic behavior seems to run against the grain […]

Global warming: Dwindling chances to stay below 2°C temperature increase

21 September 2014 (Science Daily) – Carbon dioxide emissions continue to track the high end of emission scenarios, eroding the chances to keep global warming below 2°C, and placing increased pressure on world leaders ahead of the United Nations Climate Summit on the 23rd September. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement […]

New projection shows human population could reach 12 billion by 2100

By Felicity Nelson      20 September 2014 (Science Alert) – For over a decade, experts worldwide have assumed that population growth would level off by 2050, reaching approximately 9 billion. Now, new projections have turned that analysis on its head. The population analysis, published in Science this week, was conducted by demographer Patrick Gerland from the […]

Stanford Biologist warns Earth’s 6th mass extinction in progress

18 September 2014 (The Mind Unleashed) – Those who keep taking our biodiversity for granted: dumping corporate waste, spraying copious amounts of herbicides and pesticides, contaminating our water with […] industrial chemicals while generally ignoring the environment at large, have another thing coming. According to a Stanford biology professor, Rodolfo Dirzo, the earth has begun […]

New IPCC report: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability – Summary for policymakers and FAQ

30 March 2014 (IPCC) – The Final Draft Report, dated 28 October 2013, of the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability was accepted but not approved in detail by the 10th Session of Working Group II and the 38th Session of the IPCC on […]

Climate change set to displace hundreds of millions of people by end of century

WASHINGTON, 18 March 2014 (ANI) – A new UN report suggests that climate change will displace hundreds of millions of people by the end of this century, increasing the risk of violent conflict and wiping trillions of dollars off the global economy. The second of three publications by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, […]

Why global water shortages pose threat of terror and war – ‘Groundwater depletion is happening at a very rapid rate in almost all of the major aquifers in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world’

By Suzanne Goldenberg    8 February 2014 (The Observer) – On 17 January 2014, scientists downloaded fresh data from a pair of NASA satellites and distributed the findings among the small group of researchers who track the world’s water reserves. At the University of California, Irvine, hydrologist James Famiglietti looked over the data from the gravity-sensing […]

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