RSS Feed
Archive for June 12th, 2012
Wildfires engulf forests and homes in the west
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 12th, 2012
New York Times: A fast-growing wildfire raged through dry forests and hillside subdivisions in northern Colorado on Monday, charring homes and forcing hundreds of families to evacuate in the latest out-of-control blaze to scorch the parched West. The fire was probably sparked by a lightning strike on Saturday, officials said, and it quickly exploded in size. By Monday, it had burned across nearly 60 square miles in the mountains about 15 miles west of Fort Collins, a college town, destroying more than 100 structures...
Posted in 
The clean-up begins on China’s dirty secret – soil pollution
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 12th, 2012
Guardian: Nowhere is the global push to restore degraded land likely to be more important, complex and expensive than in China, where vast swaths of the soil are contaminated by arsenic and heavy metals from mines and factories.
Scientists told the Guardian that this is likely to prove a bigger long-term problem than air and water pollution, with potentially dire consequences for food production and human health.
Zhou Jianmin, director of the China Soil Association, estimated that one-tenth of China's...
Drought drives Tanzanian herders into conflict with farmers
Posted by AlertNet: Kizito Makoye on June 12th, 2012
AlertNet: Deadly conflicts are erupting in Tanzania's southeastern Rufiji valley, as farmers clash with pastoralists who are being pushed into the area by drought, seeking land and water for their animals.
Hundreds of herdsmen from the nearby regions of Iringa and Morogoro are streaming towards the Pwani (Coast) Region's Rufiji Delta with thousands of their cattle, officials say.
This movement is causing tensions between the livestock keepers, who are desperately searching for new pasture, and local...
Rio+20 conference’s search for green solutions hampered by deep divisions
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 12th, 2012
Guardian: Twenty years after trying and failing to halt humanity's destruction of our planet, the governments of the world will gather again in Rio this month for a "once-in-a-generation" Earth Summit that will open with great fanfare but low expectations of success.
With a new United Nations study warning that the deterioration of the environment is accelerating, more than 130 national leaders will attend the Rio+20 conference from 20-22 June to try to thrash out a new blueprint for a "green economy" and...
Maine Dam Removal a Start to Restoring Spawning Grounds
Posted by New York Times: Murray Carpenter on June 12th, 2012
New York Times: Under a bright sky here, a convoy of heavy equipment rolled onto the bed of the Penobscot River on Monday to smash the Great Works Dam, a barrier that has blocked the river for nearly two centuries. Before the destruction began, a tribal elder from the Penobscot Indian Nation used an eagle wing to fan smoke from a smoldering smudge of sage, tobacco and sweet grass over the crowd that had gathered to watch. “Today signifies the most important conservation project in our 10,000-year history on this...
No change in climate talks
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 12th, 2012
Agence France-Presse: Twenty years ago, a burst of sunny optimism radiated from Rio de Janeiro as world leaders staged a meeting that would prove pivotal.
Amid post-Cold War euphoria and a desire to tackle the problems of the looming millennium, the UN's 1992 Earth Summit inscribed protection of the planet on the world's priority list. It set down a blueprint, Agenda 21, for sustaining nature rather than destroying it, and created UN mechanisms designed to brake the oncoming juggernauts of climate change, desertification...
As the Earth warms, forest floors add greenhouse gases to the air
Posted by Washington Post: Brian Vastag on June 12th, 2012
Washington Post: Huge amounts of carbon trapped in the soils of U.S. forests will be released into the air as the planet heats up, contributing to a "vicious cycle' that could accelerate climate change, a new study concluded.
"As the Earth warms, there will be more carbon released from soils, and that will make the Earth warm even faster,' said Eric Davidson, who studies soil carbon at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts but was not involved in the new study.
Forests are an important buffer against...
University at Buffalo Faces Scrutiny Over Gas Drilling Report
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 12th, 2012
New York Times: A report from a new institute at the State University at Buffalo asserting that state oversight has made natural gas drilling safer is causing tumult on campus and beyond, with critics arguing that the institute is biased toward industry and could undercut the university’s reputation. The study, issued on May 15, said that state regulation in Pennsylvania had made drilling there far safer and that New York rules were even more likely to ensure safety once drilling gets under way in the state. But...
Study: Climate change leaves American West especially vulnerable to wildfires
Posted by Colorado Independent: Troy Hooper on June 12th, 2012
Colorado Independent: Rising temperatures are projected to trigger more wildfires in most of North America and Europe, according to a new study, but climate change may have the opposite effect around the equator. The American West, where massive conflagrations are currently chewing up parts of Colorado and New Mexico, will be especially vulnerable to wildfires over the next three decades, according to scientists from the University of California-Berkeley and Texas Tech University. Their study, published today in the...
Oil sands firms test alternative way to tap bitumen
Posted by Globe and Mail: Carrie Tait on June 12th, 2012
Globe and Mail: When a group of Harris Corp. employees in Florida began working to develop new technologies for the oil sands industry, they got off to a shaky start. In their first brainstorming session, they pronounced bitumen, the tar-like substance in the oil sands that is transformed into crude, "by-TOO-men." Harris went on to form a consortium with Nexen Inc., Suncor Energy Inc., and privately held Laricina Energy Ltd. The group said Tuesday it has field-tested a new extraction method that holds the potential...