RSS Feed
Archive for March 20th, 2011
United Kingdom: Climate change hits home
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 20th, 2011
ScienceDaily: Direct experience of extreme weather events increases concern about climate change and willingness to engage in energy-saving behaviour, according to a new research paper published in the first edition of the journal Nature Climate Change this week.
In particular, members of the British public are more prepared to take personal action and reduce their energy use when they perceive their local area has a greater vulnerability to flooding, according to the research by Cardiff and Nottingham universities....
Posted in 
India government: forest target ‘unrealistic’
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 20th, 2011
Mongabay: Not long ago much of India was covered in vast and varied forests. Today just over one-fifth (21%) of the nation remains under forest cover, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) but an ambitious plan hopes to bring the forest cover percentage to 33%, or one third of the country. However that goal has been dubbed 'unrealistic' by India's influential Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, as reported by The Hindu.
The goal is "unrealistic in a country like India...
Local floods raise climate fears
Posted by MSN UK News: None Given on March 20th, 2011
MSN UK News: People who have experienced flooding are more concerned about climate change, research suggests
People who have experienced flooding in their local area are more concerned about climate change, researchers have said.
Members of the public who have had floods, such as those in summer 2007 which hit swathes of the UK, in their area are more likely to think they are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and believe that global warming is a problem.
They are also more likely to think they...
Climate change a concern for flood victims
Posted by WalesOnline: None Given on March 20th, 2011
WalesOnline: People who have experienced flooding in their local area are more concerned about climate change, researchers said today.
Members of the public who have had floods, such as those in summer 2007 which hit swathes of the UK, in their area are more likely to think they are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and believe that global warming is a problem.
They are also more likely to think they can tackle climate change and are more prepared to take steps such as saving energy, the researchers...
“Hydro-diplomacy” needed to avert Arab water wars
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 20th, 2011
Reuters: The United Nations should promote "hydro-diplomacy" to defuse any tensions over water in regions like the Middle East and North Africa where scarce supplies have the potential to spark future conflicts, experts said on Sunday. They said the U.N. Security Council should work out ways to bolster cooperation over water in shared lakes or rivers, from the Mekong to the Nile, that are likely to come under pressure from a rising world population and climate change. The Middle East and North Africa are...
Australia: Climate change brings more extreme weather to Queensland, say scientists
Posted by Courier-Mail: Brian Williams on March 20th, 2011
Courier-Mail: QUEENSLANDERS might be sick of severe weather patterns but it's only going to get worse.
Scientists say that over the next four decades, climate change will see the wet tropics get wetter and the dry interior get drier.
With floods and droughts worsening, rivers will buckle under the twin threats of climate change and dams.
Richard Kingsford, Australian Wetlands and Rivers Centre director and one of 10 authors of a series of papers on the issue in the CSIRO scientific journal Marine and...
Uganda facing food crisis
Posted by Sunday Vision: Gerald Tenywa on March 20th, 2011
Sunday Vision: UGANDA may be unable to feed its people in the coming years because the population growth is not being matched by an increase in cultivated land.
“As the population rises, there is need for more family labour to open up land,” said Dr. John Jagwe of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.
Jagwe, however, said the cultivated land started declining in 2008 because labour was being diverted to other sectors like bodaboda riding, leaving agriculture in the hands of women and aged people....
Size of Chernobyl’s deadly legacy hard to measure
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 20th, 2011
Associated Press: The ruins of a city call up questions in the mind, and this high-rise ghost town where the Chernobyl nuclear power plant workers once lived raises a daunting number of them.
How many people have died, or may die in the future, because of the April 26, 1986, reactor explosion that spewed radioactive fallout across much of the Northern Hemisphere? The only clear answer is "too many" -- the number is still hotly debated.
Will the effects of the world's worst nuclear accident ever go away? In time,...
Spent fuel has a toxic legacy
Posted by Courier-Journal: Eugene Robinson on March 20th, 2011
Courier-Journal: The most urgent focus of Japan's worsening nuclear crisis is the threat from radioactive fuel that has already been used in the Fukushima Daiichi reactors and awaits disposal. In the United States, the nuclear industry has amassed 70,000 tons of such potentially deadly waste material -- with nowhere to put it.
U.S. officials' increasingly dire assessment of the situation in Japan stems largely from the fact that spent fuel rods -- which were stored in pools of water to keep them cool -- have apparently...
Canada: Climate change blamed as endangered snails at hot spring die
Posted by Montreal Gazette: Kelly Cryderman on March 20th, 2011
Montreal Gazette: A month ago, more than 500 endangered Banff springs snails flourished in the Kidney hot spring on the side of Sulphur Mountain.
But this week the spring dried up and hundreds of tiny snails --_each the size of a grain of barley --_sit motionless.
Biologist Dwayne Lepitzki scans the remaining muddy patches any survivors.
“It looks like they just hunkered down and the water level slowly sank,” Lepitzki says. “They may have congregated in the areas which still had a little bit of water.”
The...