Archive for October 11th, 2012

Saving the world’s species from oblivion will cost around $80 billion a year, but still a good deal

Mongabay: If the world is to conserve its wealth of life-species great and small, beautiful and terrible, beloved and unknown-it will cost from $3.41-4.76 billion annually in targeted conservation funds, according to a new study in Science. But that's not all, the cost of protecting and managing the world's conservation areas was estimated at an additional $76.1 billion a year. If these numbers seem daunting, the researchers write that in fact it's a wise investment. The total costs are only about 1-4 percent...

Cost of saving endangered species £50bn a year, say experts

Guardian: Spending on conservation projects must rise by "an order of magnitude" if governments are to meet their pledges to manage protected areas and halt the spectacular rate of extinctions caused by human activity. A stark assessment from an international collaboration of conservation groups and universities reveals the enormous shortfall in funds required to save species, and warns that costs are likely to increase, the longer action is delayed. To reduce the risk of extinction for all threatened...

Biodiversity data gaps ‘need bridging’ to meet global targets

SciDevNet: Global biodiversity targets are in danger of being missed because of inadequate capacity and tools to gather and assess data, an international conference has heard. The information "is still not there", Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), told a session on scientific approaches to biodiversity at the CBD's 11th Conference of Parties (COP 11) in Hyderabad, India, this week (9 October). The lack of data may affect the fourth Global...

Report calls for using ecosystems in disaster prevention

SciDevNet: More research is needed to understand how ecosystems can help reduce disaster risks around the world, according to a report launched in Brussels, Belgium, today. The World Risk Report 2012 says that human development activities have "massively raised the hazard potential". It cites the destruction of coral reefs and mangrove forests in South-East Asia -- which has reduced protection against flooding and tidal waves -- and increased deforestation, which has led to worsening soil erosion and the...

Run-off from Greenland may weaken carbon sink

New Scientist: More fresh water isn't always a good thing. The volume of fresh water gushing into the Atlantic from Greenland has increased in the past few decades. The water will interfere with Atlantic currents and may even reduce the ocean's ability to store carbon. "Greenland has been losing increasing amounts of mass," says Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol in the UK. What had been unclear was how much of that was due to losing water to the ocean, as opposed to factors like reduced snowfall....

Drought persists, hits wheat growers hard – report

Reuters: Drought conditions in the United States grew even worse over the last week as historic drought conditions crept north and threatened new winter wheat planting in several states. September was the driest in 118 years of U.S. record keeping for North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana and was the third-driest September for Nebraska and Oregon, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist with the University of Nebraska's National Drought Mitigation Center. Farmers trying to plant the nation's new winter...

Global warming causing Antarctic ice to expand

Associated Press: The ice goes on seemingly forever in a white pancake-flat landscape, stretching farther than ever before. And yet in this confounding region of the world, that spreading ice may be a cockeyed signal of man-made climate change, scientists say. This is Antarctica, the polar opposite of the Arctic. While the North Pole has been losing sea ice over the years, the water nearest the South Pole has been gaining it. Antarctic sea ice hit a record 7.51 million square miles in September. That happened just...

Oil sheen near Deepwater Horizon site from Macondo, U.S. says

Reuters: An oil sheen spotted on the Gulf of Mexico near the site of the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig matches samples from BP Plc's ill-fated Macondo well, the U.S. Coast Guard said. BP reported a sheen on September 16 in block 252 of the Mississippi Canyon, about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. Test samples indicate that "the sheen correlates to oil that originated from BP's Macondo Well", the Coast Guard said in a statement late on Wednesday. Swiss-based Transocean Ltd owned the Deepwater Horizon...

As US presidential election nears, a new debate over ‘clean coal’

StateImpact: Imag­ine a chart track­ing U.S. green­house gas emis­sions since 2005. Do you imag­ine a line head­ing up, or down? It’s down actu­ally. Emis­sions are decreas­ing, thanks to the weak econ­omy, more use of wind and solar power, and the sud­den influx of cleaner burn­ing nat­ural gas. So where does that leave Pennsylvania’s for­mer energy titan, king coal? If you’re watch­ing TV or rid­ing down the turn­pike, you’ll notice the coal indus­try is work­ing hard to pol­ish its reputation. The clean...

Global warming may shift summer weather patterns

Climate Central: By altering the heat balance between land and sea, manmade global warming may be altering summer weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, a new study found. The study, published on Sept. 30 in Nature Geoscience, shows that the sprawling high pressure areas that set up shop over the Western North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans during the summer months have become larger and stronger during the past 40 years, and these trends are likely to continue during the next several decades as temperatures...