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Archive for September 8th, 2010
Photos: Few Remaining River Dolphins Indicators of River, Human Health
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on September 8th, 2010
National Geographic: The Yangtze finless porpoise is one of two large marine mammals that used to ply China's longest river. It has outlived the now extinct Yangtze river dolphin, which was last seen in 2007. Just 1,600 to 1,800 of the finless porpoises were counted in 2006 along the middle Yangtze and in two lakes. A population of the porpoise that has been protected in one of the Yangtze's oxbow lakes--remnants of where the river used to run--has grown by three or four calves a year. To ...
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United Kingdom: Refurbished rivers bring salmon and trout flooding back
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on September 8th, 2010
Press Association: The quantities of sea trout and salmon found in some English rivers have hit record highs this year, figures showed today. The Environment Agency (EA) said fish and other wildlife had recovered well, thanks to efforts to clean up polluted rivers and improve their habitats. More than 15,000 salmon and sea trout have already been recorded migrating this year up the river Tyne – a waterway in which no salmon and trout were seen 50 years ago. The figure is the highest since records ...
Turkey’s Mount Ararat glaciers shrink: scientist
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on September 8th, 2010
AFP: The glaciers atop Mount Ararat, the peak in eastern Turkey where Noah's Ark is believed by devotees to have settled after the biblical flood, have shrunk by 30 percent in surface area over the last 30 years, a researcher said Wednesday. "We used satellite images to analyse the response of glaciers at the summit of Mount Ararat to climate change," geologist Mehmet Akif Sarikaya told AFP. "The glacier surface area decreased from eight square kilometres (3.04 square miles) in 1976 ...
United Kingdom: Sea trout return to cleaner rivers
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on September 8th, 2010
Independent: The numbers of sea trout and salmon found in some English rivers have hit record highs this year, thanks to efforts to clean up polluted waterways. More than 15,000 of the fish have been recorded migrating up the River Tyne -- in which no salmon and trout were seen 50 years ago -- according to studies by the Environment Agency. Record numbers of sea trout have been spotted in the Thames, a river once declared biologically dead, while the Mersey -- formerly the most polluted ...
Frogs and friends at risk from booming global wildlife trade
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on September 8th, 2010
Mongabay: Alejandra Goyenechea, International Counsel at Defenders of Wildlife and Chair of the Species Survival Network's (SSN) Amphibian Working Group, spoke with Laurel Neme on her "The WildLife" radio show and podcast about the global amphibian trade. In her interview, Alejandra Goyenechea discusses the benefits of frogs and the many threats – such as habitat loss, climate change, pollution, invasive species, disease, and overexploitation – to their survival. Did you know frogs indicate ...
Climate Change: Does Warming Help Cause Civil Wars?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on September 8th, 2010
Time: Say this about Marshall Burke and Halvard Buhaug--they know how to title their papers. Late last year Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled "Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa," which sums up the argument pretty well. Then on Sept. 6 Buhaug, a senior researcher at the Centre for the Study of Civil War in Oslo, published a new paper titled "Climate not to blame for ...
Fighting Dirty Water Is World’s New Ecological Battle
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on September 8th, 2010
IPS: A primary topic of discussion at a weeklong international water conference here can best be summed up in two words: "dirty water". Ironically, the venue for the vibrant debate - focusing mostly on pollutants, industrial waste and human sewage - is a city described as home for "world class water". And rightly so, claims Gosta Lindh, managing director of the municipally-owned Stockholm Water Company. Unlike people in most other parts of the world, "We are blessed with an almost ...
Questions, worries, arguments preceded Gulf blast
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on September 8th, 2010
AP: Something was wrong. BP was preparing to plug its well 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, and longtime technical adviser Jesse Gagliano was running computer models to finalize details. "We have a potential problem here," the Halliburton employee told three colleagues he met in the hallway in BP PLC's Houston headquarters. He said his computer model was predicting a "serious gas flow problem" with BP's well abandonment plan. His idea for addressing the issue would never be ...
Study: Irrigation masking global warming
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on September 8th, 2010
United Press International: Expanding irrigation is helping feed the world's billions of people and may even mask global warming, but the future could bring problems, scientists say. Columbia University researchers say some major groundwater aquifers, a source of irrigation water, will dry up in the future hitting people with the double blow of food shortages and higher temperatures, an article in the journal Geophysical Research says. "Irrigation can have a significant cooling effect on regional ...