RSS Feed
Archive for December, 2011
The drought that keeps on taking
Posted by Marketplace: Eve Troeh on December 28th, 2011
Marketplace: Jeremy Hobson: Well here in this country, one of the biggest natural disasters of the year still hasn't come to an end. That would be the drought in Texas, which has devastated the state's farmers.
But the fallout from that drought extends far beyond the borders of the Lone Star State. From the Marketplace Sustainability Desk, Eve Troeh reports on how the rest of the country could feel the Texas heat.
Eve Troeh: If you take the 500-mile drive from Austin to Amarillo, every other tree is dead,...
Posted in 
Recall: Punishing drought just getting started in Texas
Posted by San Antonio Current: Greg Harman on December 28th, 2011
San Antonio Current: Natural weather cycles delivered the worst one-year drought in the historic record to Texas in 2011. Scientists examining tree rings had to go back as far as 1789 to find a worse one. It was global climate change, however, that supplied the added heat that further reduced precipitation and exacerbated an already ugly dryness into levels of record-breaking heat. When Texas state Rep. Doug Miller suggested that State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon had said climate change was not involved, the typically...
FINAL APPEAL! Please Help Ecological Internet to Continue Serving Earth and You
Posted by Water Conservation Blog on December 27th, 2011
** A final year-end funding appeal from Dr. Glen Barry to support Ecological Internet's ground-breaking, visionary and highly effective efforts to sustain Earth's ecology. Vital unmet needs remain unfunded. Please donate now at http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/donate/
Dear Earth Loving colleagues,
We are very pleased that our shortened year-end fund-raiser has provided nearly $15,000 in resources for Ecological Internet's unique brand of global grassroots biocentric advocacy, committed to sustaining global ecology. For the first time in years, Ecological Internet is on a sound financial footing. Please help us make further progress towards our 2011 funding goal - and meet our programming, computer, data input expenses - by donating what you can online or by check now at:
http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/donate/
Canada must protect North
Posted by Star Phoenix: None Given on December 27th, 2011
Star Phoenix: Canada captured the world's attention by becoming the first signatory to extricate itself from the flawed Kyoto protocol, but it won't be able to extricate itself from the already apparent impact of the climate change the deal was meant to address.
Environment Canada's recently released list of the top 10 weather events for 2011 is a reminder that weather patterns are changing and that the changes come with significant costs attached. Senior climatologist David Phillips, who has been putting out...
Confusing year of weather for Britain’s wildlife
Posted by Guardian: Steven Morris on December 27th, 2011
Guardian: It was an odd sort of year for weather: effectively two springs and not an awful lot of summer. But it proved an interesting one for Britain's flora and fauna.
The National Trust, which produces an annual end-of-year report on how the British weather has affected its creatures and plants, recorded a boom year for creatures ranging from the grey seal to the large blue butterfly.
A warm spring meant creatures such as mining bees, which nest in the ground, and their parasite, the bee fly, thrived...
Peru: No Time Left To Adapt To Melting Glaciers
Posted by Eurasia Review: Stephen Leahy on December 27th, 2011
Eurasia Review: The water supplied by the glaciers of the Cordillera Blanca, vital to a huge region of northwest Peru, is decreasing 20 years sooner than expected, according to a new study.
Water flows from the region`s melting glaciers have already peaked and are in decline, Michel Baraer, a glaciologist at Canada`s McGill University, told Tierramérica. This is happening 20 to 30 years earlier than forecasted.
"Our study reveals that the glaciers feeding the Río Santa watershed are now too small to maintain...
United Kingdom: The year of strange weather
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 27th, 2011
Independent: The topsy-turvy weather of 2011 had a roller-coaster effect on British wildlife, it has now become clear. The freezing winter, the hot spring, the cool summer and the near-record warm autumn of the year just past produced a mixture of striking but very different effects on birds, mammals, insects and plants, first devastating their populations, then allowing them to rebuild at record rates, and in cases such as butterflies, letting them linger on far longer than normal.
Small birds in particular...
Fish in Small Tanks Are Shown to Be Much More Aggressive
Posted by New York Times: Douglas Quenqua on December 27th, 2011
New York Times: Tropical fish hobbyists will tell you their tanks are a source of relaxation, but recent research suggests the fish might disagree. Nearly 13 million American households contain a fish tank, and the average tank size is less than 10 gallons. Yet a study comparing the behavior of common freshwater fish in a variety of habitats found that those kept in such small tanks were considerably more aggressive than those in larger ones — more likely to fight, flare their gills and guard whatever tiny alcoves...
A Strong Year for Spawning Salmon in Maine’s Rivers
Posted by New York Times: Murray Carpenter on December 27th, 2011
New York Times: Ernie Atkinson waded up Old Stream on a warm fall afternoon, peering through polarized sunglasses to scan the streambed. Before long, he pointed out a place where the bottom looked different. “You can see how the gravel is a lot cleaner right here — it kind of shines,” said Mr. Atkinson, a fishery biologist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources. “O.K., we’ve got one, two, four redds right here.” Redds are places where spawning salmon use their tails to dig holes in the gravel, deposit their...
Antarctica’s moss ‘forest’ drying out
Posted by Australia Network News: None Given on December 26th, 2011
Australia Network News: Antarctica's green moss, likened by scientists to Australia's lush Daintree rainforest, is dying.
Professor Sharon Robinson is at Australia's Casey station studying changes in the local moss beds.
"In places where there's meltwater in the summer, so lakes and streams, you get mosses growing," Professor Robinson said. "Around the Casey region we have some of the best moss of anywhere on the continent of Antarctica, and it comes out as lush green."
Moss dying
But some of the moss has dried...