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Archive for May 3rd, 2013
Brazil: Amazon Indians occupy controversial dam to demand a say
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on May 3rd, 2013
Reuters: Amazon Indians on Friday refused to end their occupation of a building site that has partially paralyzed work on the world's third largest hydroelectric dam for two days.
Some 200 people from various indigenous groups occupied one of three construction sites of the controversial Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River on Thursday, halting work by 3,000 of the 22,000 workers on the project.
They are demanding that the Brazilian government hold prior consultations with indigenous peoples before building...
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U.S. to protect endangered loggerhead sea turtle habitat
Posted by LA Times: Julie Cart on May 3rd, 2013
LA Times: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has two months to identify suitable in-water nesting and migratory habitat for endangered loggerhead sea turtles, according to a legal settlement filed this week.
The agreement -- between the wildlife service and the groups Center for Biological Diversity, Turtle Island Restoration Network and Oceana -- gives the government until July 1 to propose feeding, breeding and migratory habitat in the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans....
Unraveling The Mystery Of A Rice Revolution
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on May 3rd, 2013
National Public Radio: It's a captivating story: A global rice-growing revolution that started with a Jesuit priest in Madagascar, far from any recognized center of agricultural innovation. Every so often, it surfaces in the popular media — in The Guardian, which earlier this year described farmers in one corner of India hauling in gigantic rice harvests without resorting to pesticides or genetic modification. Their secret? A "," or SRI, that the priest, Henri de Laulanié, who was French, 30 years ago. It's now promoted...
Climate Change is Already Affecting the Amazon
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on May 3rd, 2013
Environmental News Network: Tribal groups in Earth's largest rainforest are already being affected by shifts wrought by climate change, reports a paper published last week in the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The paper, which is based on a collection of interviews conducted with indigenous leaders in the Brazilian Amazon, says that native populations are reporting shifts in precipitation patterns, humidity, river levels, temperature, and fire and agricultural cycles. These shifts, measured...
California wildfires strengthened by winds as hundreds are evacuated
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on May 3rd, 2013
Reuters: A fierce, wind-whipped brush fire spread on Friday along the California coast northwest of Los Angeles, threatening several thousand homes and a military base as more than 1,100 dwellings were ordered evacuated and a university campus was closed.
A force of more than 900 firefighters had managed by daybreak to carve containment lines around about 10% of the perimeter of the inferno, which has scorched some 10,000 acres of dry, dense brush and chaparral since erupting on Thursday morning.
Several...
Brazil: Tribesmen launch ‘occupy’ protest at dam site in the Amazon rainforest
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on May 3rd, 2013
Mongabay: On Thursday roughly 200 indigenous people launched an occupation of a key construction site for the controversial Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon. The protestors, who represent communities that will be affected by the massive dam, are demanding immediate suspension of all work on hydroelectric projects on the Xingu, Tapajós and Teles Pires rivers until they are properly consulted, according to a coalition of environmental groups opposing the projects.
The protestors include members of the...
NASA: Warming Climate Likely Means More Floods, Droughts
Posted by on May 3rd, 2013
National Public Radio: The Earth's wettest regions are likely to get wetter while the most arid will get drier due to warming of the atmosphere caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, according to a new NASA analysis of more than a dozen climate models.
Scientists ran simulations of 14 different models, starting with CO2 concentrations at about 280 parts per million, which is similar to preindustrial levels but well below the 400 parts per million today. The amount of carbon dioxide was then bumped up by 1 percent...
Climate change creates maddening ‘weather whiplash’
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on May 3rd, 2013
Discovery: The term "weather whiplash" is being invoked to describe the drought-flood cycles beginning to take over the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
The cause of the maddening weather extremes and their huge and varied consequences is none other than climate change, according to a new report by the climate science communication organization Climate Nexus, and backed by climate researchers.
"In some parts of the world, including the 1.2 million square miles comprising the Mississippi River Basin, climate...
On ‘Unburnable Carbon’ and the Specter of a ‘Carbon Bubble’
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on May 3rd, 2013
New York Times: A new buzz phrase in the push to limit greenhouse gas emissions is "unburnable carbon" - an effort to define and then wall off the portion of the world`s still-vast reserves of coal, oil or natural gas that might, if combusted, cause unacceptably costly or dangerous climate change. The effort builds, to a large extent, on studies aiming to create a "carbon budget" for the world`s nations - divvying up the amount of emissions (and thus fuels) below that threshold. The most notable paper, published...
Fracking Divide: Simulating Gas Development in Colorado’s Wild Wild West
Posted by EcoWatch: None Given on May 3rd, 2013
EcoWatch: Recently, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced they would temporarily suspend 25 oil and gas leases in the Thompson Divide, a wild swath of backcountry covering 221,500 acres of public land in western Colorado. Because the lease holders did not diligently develop these leases and are running out of time on their ten-year lease terms, they asked BLM for an extension. While this decision paused the clock on drilling for natural gas in this rugged portion of the White River National Forest,...