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Archive for March 4th, 2014
Chevron wins US legal battle against Ecuadorian court’s $9bn ruling
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 4th, 2014
Associated Press: A federal judge on Tuesday blocked US courts from being used to collect a $9bn Ecuadorean judgment against Chevron for rainforest damage, saying lawyers poisoned an honorable quest with their illegal and wrongful conduct.
“Justice is not served by inflicting injustice. The ends do not justify the means,” US district judge Lewis A Kaplan wrote. The judge said it was a sad outcome to have to rule that the Ecuadorean court judgment “was obtained by corrupt means”, because it will likely never be...
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How France is disposing of its nuclear waste
Posted by BBC: Rob Broomby on March 4th, 2014
BBC: Half a kilometre below ground in the Champagne-Ardenne region of eastern France, near the village of Bure, a network of tunnels and galleries is being hacked out of the 160 million-year-old compacted clay rocks.
The dusty subterranean science laboratory built by the French nuclear waste agency Andra is designed to find out whether this could be the final resting place for most of France's highly radioactive waste, the deadly remains of more than half a century of nuclear energy.
Emerging from...
Drought-stricken state gets drenched, but not enough to ease historic shortfall
Posted by ClimateWire: Debra Kahn on March 4th, 2014
ClimateWire: California got some much-needed precipitation over the weekend, but not nearly enough to ameliorate the state's persistent drought, weather and water experts said.
Long-awaited storms in Northern and Southern California dumped several inches of snow and rain on parched mountains, fields and cities. Los Angeles saw its precipitation nearly quadruple over the past week. After receiving 4.24 inches of rain since Thursday, the city is now at 5.5 inches since July 2013 -- still just half its normal...
Climate change affecting deepest depths of Antarctic ocean, study finds
Posted by Blue and Green: Tom Revell on March 4th, 2014
Blue and Green: The impacts of climate change are being felt at even the deepest depths of the Antarctic ocean, a new study has found, in a discovery that may explain a 40 year old mystery.
In the mid-1970s, the first satellite images to be studied of Antarctica during the polar winter discovered a strange phenomenon. In the Weddell Sea, researchers noticed a huge ice-free region – known as a polynia – that remained open for three winters.
Scientists found that the polynia was kept open by warm waters that...
Drought-plagued California tries drink ocean (hold the salt)
Posted by Grist: None Given on March 4th, 2014
Grist: Despite the pugnacious storms that had California on the ropes this past weekend, the state is still in the middle of a record-making drought. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains is well under half its usual level for this time of year, and there’s almost certainly no way to catch up this late in the season.
Enter the ongoing construction of 17 desalination plants across the state. A $1 billion plant being built in Carlsbad, Calif., expected to be ready by 2016, will pump 50 million gallons...
Democratic Republic of Congo: Soco International’s oil activity in world heritage park raises tricky questions for investors
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 4th, 2014
Guardian: A war of words between WWF and UK-listed oil company Soco International about its plans to explore for oil in a world heritage site in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has come to a head after a ruling by an international tribunal.
Soco, whose preliminary results for 2013 are published tomorrow, has a permit to explore in part of the Virunga National Park, Africa's oldest national park and home to the critically endangered mountain gorillas made famous by the film Gorillas in the Mist. ...
Amazon Canopy Study Can Predict Responses To Climate Change And Human Activity
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 4th, 2014
RedOrbit: By studying thousands of canopy tree species in the western Amazon, researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology have uncovered geographically nested patterns of chemical traits they say will help determine how the ecosystem will respond to changes in land use and climate.
Writing in the March 3 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study authors set out to determine how much variation there is in the chemicals generated...
Burmese villagers exiled from ancestral home as fate of dam remains unclear
Posted by Guardian: Peter Hadfield on March 4th, 2014
Guardian: Lapai Zoong kicks the red dirt outside his house and complains that nothing will grow. "The situation here is hopeless," he says. "In the old village we used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. We were happy. Here they bulldozed the land and there's no soil. Everyone wants to go back to our old village."
But 70-year-old Lapai is not allowed back to his ancestral home just 12 miles to the north, even though the massive dam that was going to flood the village is now in limbo.
The Myitsone dam...
Reliance on fewer crops increase climate change food security threat
Posted by Blue and Green: Tom Revell on March 4th, 2014
Blue and Green: As people from all corners of the world are living off an increasingly similar diet, decreasing crop diversity is making the global food system more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, a new study has warned.
The study, which is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, claims to be the first to quantify the effects of a trend towards a unified international diet over the last 50 years.
"Over the past 50 years, we are...
Boosting Green Transition Will Improve Food Security, UN Says On Africa Environment Day
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 4th, 2014
AllAfrica: Ensuring food security is one of the most pressing challenges in Africa, which is increasingly losing ground as a result of challenges from climate change to land degradation, the top United Nations environment official today said, urging a stronger emphasis on the continent's transition to a 'green economy.' "From plugging into solar power in Algeria and Tunisia to investing in green funds in South Africa, diverse pathways to greener and more-inclusive economies are being pursued across the continent,"...