Archive for August 9th, 2010

Cranes return after 400 year absence

BBC: x

Floods strand 300 foreigners in India’s Ladakh

Reuters: Indian military helicopters Monday plucked about 150 foreign tourists to safety in the Himalayan region of Ladakh where flash floods have killed 156 people. At least 300 people remained missing from last week's floods triggered by heavy rains that destroyed homes, uprooted telephone towers and deposited boulders and mud up to 15 feet high on highways, cutting road links with the rest of India. The remote region borders Pakistan, beset by the worst floods in 80 years which have ...

Flooding in north-west China

Guardian

Russia: Moscow deaths double in heatwave

BBC: Moscow's health chief has confirmed the mortality rate has doubled as a heatwave and wildfire smog continue to grip the Russian capital. There were twice the usual number of bodies in the city's morgues, Andrei Seltsovsky told reporters. Meanwhile, a state of emergency has been declared around a nuclear reprocessing plant in the southern Urals because of nearby wildfires. And there was a new warning over shortfalls in Russia's grain harvest. Prime Minister ...

Rarest of the rarest: top 10 lost amphibians

Guardian

Scientists hunt for ‘lost frogs’ around the globe

Mongabay: From now through October, teams of scientists will be scouring through leaf litters, in shallow pools, under rocks, and in tree trunks for the world's 'lost frogs'. Searching in 14 countries on five continents, the researchers are looking for some 100 species of frogs that have not been seen in decades and in some cases up to a century. While some of the species may well be extinct, researchers are holding out hope that they can find the ones that are still hanging on, albeit by a ...

Analysis: Pakistan floods, Russia heat fit climate trend

Reuters: Devastating floods in Pakistan and Russia's heatwave match predictions of extremes caused by global warming even though it is impossible to blame mankind for single severe weather events, scientists say. This year is on track to be the warmest since reliable temperature records began in the mid-19th century, beating 1998, mainly due to a build-up of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization (WMO). "We will always have climate ...

BP oil spill: Endangered species still at risk

Guardian: US officials recorded a big jump in the numbers of dolphins and endangered brown pelican and sea turtle injured or killed by the BP spill over the past week, even as officials were proclaiming that the oil was rapidly disappearing from the Gulf. Some 1,020 sea turtles were caught up in the spill, according to figures (pdf) today – an ominous number for an endangered species. Wildlife officials collected 177 sea turtles last week – more than in the first two months of the spill and a ...

Global warming threatens Asian rice production: study

AFP: Even modest rises in global temperatures will drive down rice production in Asia, the world's biggest grower of the cereal grain that millions of poor people depend on as a staple food, a study published Monday warned. Researchers from the United States, the Philippines and the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) looked at the impact of rising daily minimum and maximum temperatures on irrigated rice production between 1994-1999 in 227 fields in China, India, Indonesia, ...

Pennsylvania broke law on natgas water use: group

Reuters: Pennsylvania regulators are illegally allowing natural gas companies to withdraw water from rivers and streams for use in the Marcellus Shale drilling boom, an environmental group claims. The Allegheny Defense Project says the state's Department of Environmental Protection has no legal right to permit drillers, as it does, to take millions of gallons of water from rivers in the western part of the state. That right belongs to owners of riparian land -- that which borders ...