Archive for June 17th, 2012

European Arctic forests expansion could result in carbon dioxide release: study

Phys.Org: Carbon stored in Arctic tundra could be released into the atmosphere by new trees growing in the warmer region, exacerbating climate change, scientists have revealed. The Arctic is getting greener as plant growth increases in response to a warmer climate. This greater plant growth means more carbon is stored in the increasing biomass, so it was previously thought the greening would result in more carbon dioxide being taken up from the atmosphere, thus helping to reduce the rate of global warming....

Deformed Fish Found Downstream of Tar Sands Mines

Earth Island Institute: Chief Allan Adam, the head of the Fort Chipewyan community in the far north of Alberta, has been fishing in Lake Athabasca for all of his life. His father, now 76 years old, has been fishing there even longer. And neither of them has seen anything like what they pulled from the lake on May 30: two grotesquely deformed, lesion-covered fish. When they caught the sickly fish, each taken from a different part of the lake, the two Indigenous men immediately figured that it had something to do with...

Colorado wildfire weeks away from containment as conditions worsen

Guardian: Wildfires continued to rage through northern Colorado on Sunday, having already destroyed the most homes of any wildfire in the state's history. Authorities brought in additional crews over the weekend to battle flames that have scorched about 85 square miles and destroyed at least 181 properties More than 1,630 personnel are working on the Fort Collins-area fire, officials said in a news release Saturday night. The figure represents a more than doubling of on-duty firefighters from a day earlier....

United States: Schneiderman crushes Koch Brothers in climate-change lawsuit

NY Alt News: New York Attorney General`s office recently won an important decision in Albany County State Supreme Court dismissing a lawsuit by a Koch Brothers`-backed political organization that attempted to stop New York`s involvement in a multi-state campaign to cut climate changing emissions. Last week, the AG`s office defended the climate-change moderation effort, known as the "Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative,” against a suit backed by Americans for Prosperity, the Virginia-based conservative advocacy...

Inaction on economic, climate and resource threats raising anxieties at Rio+20

AlertNet: Brazil's Amazon region this year saw its worst flooding in over 100 years of record-keeping, just seven years after it suffered its worst recorded drought. "We are seeing the cycle of climate extremes has changed totally,' observed Eduardo Braga, a former governor of Amazonas state and now chair of Brazil's Senate. "What was a climate extreme that came every 30 or 50 or 100 years is now much more frequent.' "In our opinion this is one of the alerts humanity needs to understand,' he warned Saturday...

Canada: First Nations woman navigates anti-oilsands charge

Edmonton Journal: Eriel Deranger was 12 when her father took her north of Fort McMurray, within sight of the Syncrude and Suncor oilsands facilities, to teach her about traditional hunting, trapping and fishing. “My mom and dad were very political people,” says Deranger, who is now a mother. “My dad sort of told us that we have to stop these projects.” Now 33, Deranger has become something of an official face for her community’s opposition to ramped-up oilsands development in the face of lingering questions...