Archive for May 15th, 2011

Mississippi floods threaten New Orleans

Guardian: Mississippi floodgate is opened to try and protect New Orleans. Residents in swampy areas of Louisiana's Cajun country are waiting for the rising waters of the Mississippi to engulf their homes, after army engineers opened a key floodgate in an attempt to save New Orleans from the river's worst flooding since 1927. Units of the US Army Corps of Engineers opened up the first gate on a structure known as the Morganza spillway, sending about 10,000 cubic feet of water per second into the Atchafalaya...

Liberia hopes to revive greener logging industry

Reuters: Forested nations used to fear tough rules on logging would hurt their valuable timber industries, but for Liberia they could be a way of reviving its sector -- by giving it privileged access to European markets. From 2012, any country that wants to export wood to the European Union will have to be able to prove it was not logged illegally, a regulation that has spurred a spate of deals with timber producing nations to better police their forests. The latest to enter into such so-called Voluntary...

Climate change is a major challenge faced by rain-fed areas

Hindu: B. Venkateswaralu, Director, Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture, speaking at a workshop in Coimbatore on Saturday. Climate change is a major challenge faced by rainfed areas through long spells of drought and followed by heavy rains causing floods, according to the Director of Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA), B. Venkateswaralu. Speaking at the two-day national workshop on "Dryland Development and Maximising Crop Productivity" at Tamil Nadu Agricultural...

Climate Change Affects Animal Distribution

Earthtimes: A report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims that 200 million years ago, mammals and reptiles lived in separate habitats on the supercontinent known as Pangaea, largely due to rainfall distribution. With few land barriers such as mountains, Pangaea was a huge land mass that allowed animals the freedom to roam wherever they choose. However, a team of scientists at Brown University have established that early mammals confined themselves to one area of the continent while...