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Archive for August 1st, 2012
Like Ozone Layer, Holes in Study on Thunderstorms
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 1st, 2012
Climate Central: Scientists know plenty about how Earth's climate works, and greenhouse-gas pollution is messing with sea level, weather patterns, and more. There's also plenty they don't know yet -- how global warming might affect tornadoes, for example, or how quickly the massive ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica could slide into the oceans.
But there are also plenty of unknown unknowns, as ex-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously put it -- climate disasters nobody has even thought of yet. Last week,...
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United Kingdom: Blackberries fruiting at record late time of the year
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 1st, 2012
Guardian: The devil is set to get into the blackberries later than ever before this century, according to early reports from the UK's annual survey of wild trees and shrubs' fruiting season.
The traditional phrase for the fruit over-ripening and losing its crisp taste is unlikely to be bandied around until mid or late August, if first reports from the mass exercise prove to be a consistent pattern.
Early indications from the army of amateur naturalists – or "citizen scientists" as they are now called...
Extreme weather events reflect climate change
Posted by Korea Herald: Jeffrey D. Sachs on August 1st, 2012
Korea Herald: For years, climate scientists have been warning the world that the heavy use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) threatens the world with human-induced climate change. The rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, would warm the planet and change rainfall and storm patterns and raise sea levels. Now those changes are hitting in every direction, even as powerful corporate lobbies and media propagandists like Rupert Murdoch try to deny the truth....
Troubled northern Kenya seeks peace through conserving resources
Posted by AlertNet: Kagondu Njagi on August 1st, 2012
AlertNet: One of the most effective ways to deal with growing conflict in northern Kenya may be to address the environmental failings that help drive it, says a pastoralist development expert.
Conflict is nothing new in communities in northern Kenya, but the struggle to earn a livelihood in a difficult environment has become even more difficult as a result of poor land management and the effects of climate change, said Steven Ali, who heads the Pastoralist Community Development Organisation, a lobby group...
Drought deepens worries about food supplies, prices
Posted by Reuters: Bob Burgdorfer on August 1st, 2012
Reuters: Alarm grew over the unrelenting Midwest drought on Tuesday, as one of the top corporate leaders in agriculture warned that the government must act quickly to reduce the amount of corn going to ethanol to prevent a sharp spike in food prices.
Worries about the worst drought in more than half a century afflicting the world's largest grain exporter also deepened overseas, where buyers in China and other hungry nations fret that the expected sharp drop in U.S. harvests will cause shortages and price...
India Drowning in Waste, Experts Warn
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 1st, 2012
Inter Press Service: Almitra Patel, a civil engineer by qualification, says she was first alerted to India's huge problem of inadequate waste disposal when she noticed that the frogs in the marshlands near her farmhouse, on the city's outskirts, had stopped croaking.
Seeing that the frogs had died from sewage and garbage being dumped in the wetlands, she petitioned the Supreme Court in 1996 to intervene and get the city fathers to take responsibility for safe waste handling.
Investigations showed that less than...
Canada: Let’s stop catering to Big Oil
Posted by Globe and Mail: Tzeporah Berman on August 1st, 2012
Globe and Mail: Big Oil must love Canada. Our Prime Minister has become an unapologetic hustler for multinational oil companies (as if the most profitable corporations in history really needed the help). Now the two westernmost premiers are going all High Noon to maximize their cut from oil-sands pipelines.
This year's premiers' summit turned into such a bitumen babblefest that it was shockingly refreshing to hear Quebec's Jean Charest make the obvious point that "you cannot disassociate the issues of energy...
U.S. ethanol waiver would roil grains market: traders
Posted by Reuters: Colin Packham on August 1st, 2012
Reuters: The U.S. government is unlikely to bow to pressure for a waiver on quotas requiring a proportion of corn is used to make ethanol before November, at the earliest, traders said, despite the expected slump in global corn production due to severe drought.
And any change in the Renewable Fuels Standard, requiring that over a third of the corn crop is made into fuel ethanol, could cause market chaos after dwindling corn stocks had already been priced in, traders at an Australian grains conference said....
Drought pits farmers against frackers
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 1st, 2012
Mongabay: Drought has created a standoff over water supplies in the U.S. Midwest between energy producers and farmers, reports Bloomberg. Natural gas and oil producers have been forced to seek new water sources as they mull calls from farmers and activists to recycle their water, a practice that would make 'fracking' more expensive.
Already hugely controversial, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as its become known, exploits fossil fuel deposits by busting up shale rock using a potent combination of water,...