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Archive for March 3rd, 2011
In Arctic, climate-change threats include giardia, food poisoning
Posted by Arctic Sounder: Alex DeMarban on March 3rd, 2011
Arctic Sounder: Melting ice cellars that threaten to caused food poisoning as whale meat rots. The first recorded case of giardia, just as beavers show up for the first time. Algae blooms and melting river banks that contaminate water systems.
Climate change presents new risks for food care, sanitation and wellbeing in the Arctic, but little research has been done in remote villages experiencing some of the biggest temperature swings.
That's beginning to change, thanks to a pair of reports [http://www.anthc.org/chs/ces/climate/climateandhealthreports.cfm]...
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Study offers warning about next potential mass extinction
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 3rd, 2011
USA Today: The Earth has undergone mass extinctions, during which more than 75% of existing species disappear, exactly five times in the past 540 million years. If things continue as they are we may be at the beginning of the sixth, a group of biologists and paleontologists suggest in a cautionary paper in Wednesday's edition of the journal Nature.
One possible cause of the largest extinction event in the history of life on Earth was a meteor that crashed off the coast of Australia about 251 million years...
BP executives awarded bonuses despite Deepwater Horizon disaster
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 3rd, 2011
Guardian: BP, the company at the centre of the worst oil spill in US history, has awarded bonuses to two of its senior directors, according to its annual report.
Byron Grote, the finance director, and Iain Conn, the head of refining, have both received payouts of more than £100,000 on top of their regular salaries although those bonuses are dramatically lower than in 2009.
The payments have been made even though the share price of the oil group has continued to suffer from the Deepwater Horizon accident,...
E.P.A. Struggles to Regulate Natural Gas Industry
Posted by New York Times: Ian Urbina on March 3rd, 2011
New York Times: When Congress considered whether to regulate more closely the handling of wastes from oil and gas drilling in the 1980s, it turned to the Environmental Protection Agency to research the matter. E.P.A. researchers concluded that some of the drillers’ waste was hazardous and should be tightly controlled. But that is not what Congress heard. Some of the recommendations concerning oil and gas waste were eliminated in the final report handed to lawmakers in 1987. “It was like the science didn’t matter,”...
Human Planet
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 3rd, 2011
BBC: Accompanying the film crews was photographer Timothy Allen. His stunning still images captured unique glimpses of people living in the world's most extreme environments. Take a look at some of them, and listen to him explain how he snapped the most arresting shots.
Vietnam, Laos Split Over Mekong Dam
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 3rd, 2011
Inter Press Service: The first in a new series of 11 dams planned across the Mekong, South-east Asia’s largest river, could break a special bond between two communist-ruled countries.
Critics in Vietnam see red over a 1,260-megawatt hydropower project planned by their smaller, poorer, land-locked neighbour, Laos. They call it an environmental disaster.
Laos, however, wants to be the powerhouse of the region – to sell power to its neighbours and earn enough to help the poor, that is a third of its population of...
Protester Says He Didn’t Plan Lease Bids
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 3rd, 2011
New York Times: An environmental protester charged with fraudulently buying federal oil and gas leases at an auction here in 2008 took the witness stand at his criminal trial on Wednesday and told the jury he had acted spontaneously, with no clear plan or intent to harm.
"My intent when I got in there was to wave a red flag,' said the defendant, Tim DeChristopher, 29, who faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of making false statements and disrupting a federal auction. Only as the auction proceeded, he...
Water, CO2 the priorities for China’s 5-year plan
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 3rd, 2011
Reuters: Tackling environmental problems from carbon emissions to water pollution will be a key focus of a new five-year plan that China will launch during its annual parliament session starting on Saturday.
The plan for 2011-2015 will include new directives aimed at reversing the damage done by 30 years of untrammeled growth, and it will also aim to give a fillip to clean and renewable energy.
The challenges were put in stark focus in an essay by environment minister Zhou Shengxian on Monday.
"The...
The next great extinction could be coming sooner than you think
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 3rd, 2011
Time: It's no secret that wildlife around the world is under severe stress. The most recent Red List from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated that 33% of the species evaluated by the group are at least threatened. The causes are many--hunting, disease, habitat loss, invasive species, even climate change--but they mostly boil down to one main reason: us.
The good news is that we have confirmed extinction for just a handful of species that we know of--though scientists have...
Deep ice growth on Antarctica’s ghost mountains
Posted by New Scientist: Jeff Hecht on March 3rd, 2011
New Scientist: Anyone who lives in areas where snow accumulates over the winter learns that new snow builds on top of old mounds. So it's only natural to assume the same process created the great ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.
Not so, say Robin Bell of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and her colleagues. Their radar observations show that the East Antarctic ice sheet is also growing from the bottom up. "We usually think of ice sheets like cakes - one layer at a time, added...