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Archive for August, 2012
Climate-Battered South Asia Looks to Rio+20 Formula
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 3rd, 2012
Inter Press Service: Far-flung South Asian communities, from the high Himalayan slopes to the Indian Ocean coasts, united in the face of extreme and uncertain weather, continue to hold out hope that the Rio+20 focus on disaster risk reduction (DRR) will positively influence national policies.
"There is hope in India, the biggest country in the region, that the final statement at the Rio+20 summit titled "˜The Future We Want' gets translated into national policy before it is too late," Vinod Chandra Menon, former...
NASA Study Quantifies Vast Amount of Dust Reaching North America
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 3rd, 2012
Yale Environment 360: A new NASA study calculates that nearly 64 million tons of dust, pollution, and other tiny particles enter the atmosphere above North America from other continents each year, nearly as much as the 69 million tons of aerosols produced domestically through natural processes and human activities. The vast majority of the particles entering the atmosphere, scientists say, consist of natural dust and not pollutants. In a first-of-its-kind study, NASA researchers used satellite data and wind speed estimates...
Posted in Water Conservation 
Comments Off on NASA Study Quantifies Vast Amount of Dust Reaching North AmericaFirst U.N. climate fund board meeting set for August 23
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 3rd, 2012
Reuters: The first board meeting of the United Nations' Green Climate Fund will be held on August 23 to 25, an official at the fund's interim secretariat confirmed on Thursday, five months later than it was originally planned.
The fund is designed to help channel up to $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020 to help developing countries adapt to climate change.
However, the fund is an empty shell after last year's U.N. climate talks failed to make solid progress on sources of finance and the...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on First U.N. climate fund board meeting set for August 23More than 100 sickened in Peru toxic mining spill
Posted by Associated Press: Carla Salazar on August 3rd, 2012
Associated Press: More than 100 rural Peruvians have been sickened by the spill of a toxic copper concentrate produced at one of the Andean country’s biggest mines, authorities said Friday.
The Ancash state regional health office said 140 people were treated for ‘‘irritative symptoms caused by the inhalation of toxins’’ after a pipeline carrying the concentrate under high pressure burst open in their community.
Most of the injured had joined in efforts to prevent liquid copper slurry from reaching a nearby river...
Australian renewables to be cheaper than coal by mid-2030s
Posted by BusinessGreen: James Murray on August 2nd, 2012
BusinessGreen: Australia, one of the world's most coal-dependent economies, will rapidly transition towards cleaner and more cost-effective sources of energy over the next two decades, according to a major new report.
Released earlier this week, the Australian Energy Technology Assessment (AETA) report from the government's Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics analyses 40 different energy technologies and concludes solar and wind energy will provide the lowest levelised costs for electricity generation by...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Australian renewables to be cheaper than coal by mid-2030sDrought Intensifies and May Last Through October
Posted by Climate Central: Andrew Freedman on August 2nd, 2012
Climate Central: Drought conditions intensified in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains during the week ending on July 31, and a new forecast calls for the drought to persist straight on through until October. Beneficial rainfall did trim the edges of the drought area slightly during the past week, and may alleviate the drought in some spots during the next several months, according to the new edition of the U.S. Drought Monitor and Seasonal Drought Outlook, both of which were released Thursday morning.
As of...
Greenland ice said more robust than feared
Posted by NBC News: None Given on August 2nd, 2012
NBC News: Greenland's ice seems less vulnerable than feared to a runaway melt that would drive up world sea levels, according to a study showing that a surge of ice loss had petered out.
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Greenland loses ice in fits and starts
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 2nd, 2012
New Scientist: The surge of ice loss from Greenland between 2005 and 2010, which drove up sea levels around the world, was not unprecedented. A similar spurt happened in the late 1980s, and possibly decades earlier as well.
While such surges will be tricky to predict, better models of the ice sheet mean that we can make more confident long-term predictions of its behaviour - predictions that suggest Greenland's effects on global sea levels may not be as bad as feared.
In 2005, the Greenland ice sheet suddenly...
Greenland’s ice ‘melts in spurts’
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 2nd, 2012
BBC: Ice loss from Greenland's vast sheet may happen mainly in short bursts, research by Danish scientists suggests.
They used aerial photos dating back to the 1980s to plot shrinking of glaciers around the island's northwest coast.
In the journal Science, they show that most of the ice loss happened in two periods - 1985-1993 and 2005-10 - with relative stability in between.
They say it will be hard to project sea level changes from Greenland ice melt until these patterns are deciphered.
A...
Chevron says Ecuador arbitration to stretch into 2014
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 2nd, 2012
Reuters: An international tribunal that will weigh in on Chevron Corp's two-decade dispute over pollution in Ecuador has set a timeline that runs into 2014, according to a Chevron regulatory filing on Thursday.
The panel, formed via The Hague's Permanent Court of Arbitration under the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, is hearing a dispute over whether Ecuador violated a treaty with the United States requiring it to guarantee Chevron a fair trial.
An Ecuador court ruled against Chevron...