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Archive for October 19th, 2010
PERU: A Highway Built to Be Flooded
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
Inter Press Service: Construction workers are fighting the clock to finish the last stretch of the Southern Inter-Oceanic Highway, in southeastern Peru, apparently unaware that about 100 kilometres of this road connecting to Brazil will be covered by water once the Inambari hydroelectric dam is built nearby. The residents have yet to be convinced that an alternative route can be built for this highway for which they fought so many years. Heavy machinery goes back and forth, carrying tonnes of soil. ...
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India: Extreme Weather Sows Uncertainty in Farmers’ Lives
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
Inter Press Service: When dark clouds waft above, hearts pound in fear and nightmarish thoughts strike the minds of the inhabitants of this desert town, which lies more than 3,048 metres above sea level in the northern Indian province of Ladakh. Located more than 1,000 kilometres from New Delhi, Ladakh is part of the western Himalaya where extreme weather conditions are common – the cold and dry kind, that is. Usually, precipitation in Ladakh, which sits on the western part of the Tibetan plateau, ...
Website whets wildlife appetite
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
BBC: The UN Environment Programme is turning to the wiki-world in an attempt to improve protection of the natural one. Its new venture - protectedplanet.net - aims to help people visit little-known protected areas, so generating revenue and improving knowledge about them. The launch at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting came amid reports warning that protection of the sea needs to be increased rapidly. A target to protect 10% of oceans by 2012 will be ...
UK crops to face water supply crunch, may relocate
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
Reuters: Agricultural crops in Britain may need to be moved to new areas as the threat of both drought and flooding rises in the coming decades, a report commissioned by the Royal Agricultural Society of England said on Monday. The report said climate change was expected to produce higher temperatures, drier summers and wetter winters across much of England. "This is likely to mean reduced river flow and less water available for agriculture," said one of the report's authors, Alison ...
Extreme Drought Ahead, Scientists Predict
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
LiveScience: Extreme drought is likely in store in the coming decades for parts of the United States and the broader Western Hemisphere, scientists said today (Oct. 19), cautioning that we should expect dry conditions unlike anything seen in modern times. The likely culprit: warming temperatures linked to climate change. "We are facing the possibility of widespread drought in the coming decades, but this has yet to be fully recognized by both the public and the climate change research ...
Climate Change: Drought May Threaten Much of Globe within Decades
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
FLEXNEWS: The United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming decades, according to a new study by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Aiguo Dai. The detailed analysis concludes that warming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has ...
Drought could hit world’s populous areas: study
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
Reuters: Some of the world's most populous areas -- southern Europe, northern Africa, the western U.S. and much of Latin America -- could face severe, even unprecedented drought by 2100, researchers said Tuesday. Increasing drought has long been forecast as a consequence of climate change, but a new study from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research projects serious impact by the 2030s. Impacts by century's end could go beyond anything in the historical record, the study ...
Much of planet could see extreme drought in 30 years: study
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
AFP: Large swathes of the planet could experience extreme drought within the next 30 years unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut, a study released Tuesday warns. "We are facing the possibility of widespread drought in the coming decades, but this has yet to be fully recognized by both the public and the climate change research community," National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Aiguo Dai, who conducted the study, said. "If the projections in this study come even ...
Drought Forecast Looks Bleak
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
Discovery News: Severe and worsening drought awaits the continental United States and other middle-latitude regions as global warming tightens its grip on the 21st Century, a new study warns. While public and political attention focuses on temperature change, this new analysis of 22 computer climate models by drought specialist Aiguo Dai at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., suggests that the more dire consequences of our changing climate may be sharp changes in regional ...
Local opposition kills C$5 billion Canadian dam plan
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 19th, 2010
Reuters: TransCanada Corp and Atco Ltd have abandoned plans to build a C$5 billion ($4.85 billion) dam on the Slave River in northern Alberta after a local native group refused to back the project. The planned dam was a run-of-river project that would have generated 1,200 to 1,300 megawatts of electricity from the Slave, an undeveloped river that carries more that two-thirds of Alberta's waterflow north to Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. The project, first proposed two ...