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Archive for July 12th, 2012
Climate change will unleash buried toxics
Posted by East Bay Express: None Given on July 12th, 2012
East Bay Express: Toxic sites ringing the San Francisco Bay tell the story of its recent past. Smelting plants, hazardous waste dumps, landfills, shipyards, fuel depots, and military bases recall an era when the bay was prized more for its tactical and commercial values than for its ecology. Most have been closed or removed, but their toxic legacy often remains intact, hidden just beneath the surface; long-buried chemicals, heavy metals, and hazardous waste still seep into the bay on a daily basis.
The problem...
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The Dead Sea is Dying: Can A Controversial Plan Save It?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on July 12th, 2012
Yale Environment 360: On a quiet stretch of coastline along the western shore of the Dead Sea, a sinkhole had swallowed a piece of a road, pulling in concrete and rusted fence posts. The sea lay a short distance beyond, its turquoise-colored waters dropping at the rate of more than one meter a year.
The sinkholes are among the most visible effects of the continuing slow “death” of the Dead Sea, which borders Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank. Thousands of sinkholes have opened up around the Dead Sea’s coastal plain,...
Climate change scepticism could wipe out rural towns
Posted by Yahoo!7 News: Tom Nightingale on July 12th, 2012
Yahoo!7 News: A new report is warning hundreds of inland Australian towns could cease to exist by 2050 if locals do not adapt to climate change.
The report studied 1,600 bush towns and found the ones with low education rates are least likely to make the decisions needed to adapt to a hotter future.
But in many regional areas there is resistance to change because of lingering scepticism about climate change.
The same scepticism means the research may not have much impact on the areas it targets.
The...
Ecosystem services: Pricing nature’s freebies
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on July 12th, 2012
Economist: FREE lunches, economists insist, are rare. In one sense--related to the opportunity cost of sitting down to eat when you could be doing something more productive--they are right. In another, though, complimentary feasts are rather common. As are free clean water, fuel, air-conditioning, pest control and pretty views. All these are “ecosystem services”, provided by nature to mankind at no cost.
Push nature too hard, though, and this generosity may end. A new paper by John Dearing, of the University...
In Iowa, hope fades as relentless drought devastates crops
Posted by Reuters: Carey Gillam on July 12th, 2012
Reuters: Bob Bowman runs his hand over a slender green corn leaf here on his Iowa farm, and sighs.
"This corn should be as high as my head right now, and it is only waist high," he says, as a cool morning breeze belies the 90-degree Fahrenheit temperatures forecast to descend by afternoon in Welton, Iowa.
"If we get rain real quick here, we might be down 25 percent," said Bowman of prospective losses from the persistent dryness. "If we don't get rain in the next two weeks, it will be a lot more serious."...
Some like it hot? People know climate change, but politicians chill
Posted by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: None Given on July 12th, 2012
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: This should be the summer of our discontent, with heat waves, drought and other troublesome weather affecting large parts of the nation. Instead, Americans are hot but apparently not bothered about what it all might mean.
According to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll, just 18 percent of Americans interviewed named climate change as the world's top environmental problem. In 2007, when Al Gore's warning documentary and a United Nations report were making headlines, 33 percent called...
War and climate change
Posted by Newsday: Robert C. Koehler on July 12th, 2012
Newsday: The heat backs up across the country, causing drought, wildfires, a mega-storm on the East Coast. More than 4,000 "hottest day" records have been shattered in the U.S. in the past month. "The ecological ego matures," Theodore Roszak wrote 20 years ago in "The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology," "toward a sense of ethical responsibility to the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric...