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Archive for February 11th, 2010
United States: Romanticism undone: Invasive species, global warming taking toll on plants at Thoreau’s Walden Pond
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on February 11th, 2010
Scientific American: Henry David Thoreau famously catalogued the plants around Walden Pond more than 150 years ago, and the information he gathered then is helping to illustrate the effects of invasive species and global warming on the area today. According to a paper published January 26 in the journal PLoS ONE, climate change has given invasive and nonnative species a leg up in the Walden Pond area, and native species are the losers. (A nonnative species is considered invasive if it has the potential to ...
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United States: Logging helps the planet?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on February 11th, 2010
San Francisco Bay Garden: The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), an environmental group with offices in San Francisco, filed a series of lawsuits last month challenging the state's approval of 15 logging plans it says do not adequately address greenhouse gas emissions and climate impacts. But the loggers take the opposite stance, arguing that their trees capture carbon and lessen global warming. The logging plans submitted by Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) involve more than 5,000 acres of forests in the ...
Chinese farming practices are acidifying soils
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on February 11th, 2010
Mongabay: A new study in Science shows that farming practices in China are acidifying the nation's soils and threatening long term productivity at a time when food concerns worldwide have never been higher. The culprit is the increasing use of nitrogen fertilizer. "Chinese agriculture has intensified greatly since the early 1980s on a limited land area with large inputs of chemical fertilizers and other resources," the authors note, pointing out that nitrogen fertilizer consumption in China ...
Russia: Green groups warn of Siberian lake pollution
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on February 11th, 2010
Agence France-Presse: Russian environmental groups on Thursday warned that the reopening of a paper mill on the edge of Siberia's Lake Baikal posed a danger of pollution to one of the world's largest freshwater reserves. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last month gave the go-ahead for the reopening of the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill which has been shut since 2008 and is owned by billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska. WWF Russia representative Evgueni Schwartz told reporters, "It is very ...
What Does Winter Weather Reveal about Global Warming?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on February 11th, 2010
Scientific American: No single weather event proves or disproves the fundamental science of climate change, but extreme weather is what scientists expect from global warming. David Biello reports Snowpocalypse. Snowmageddon. Whatever your preferred appellation, this week's winter storms brought misery to denizens of the U.S. East Coast and prompted some at least to question the scientific theory of climate change. After all, shouldn't global warming deliver us from ice, snow and cold? The site of ...