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Archive for February, 2015
Is there a cancer cluster around the Alberta Tar Sands
Posted by Vox: None Given on February 26th, 2015
Vox: In 2006, Canadian doctor John O’Connor made a startling realization. Specialists had diagnosed three of his patients in the northern Alberta village of Fort Chipewyan with cholangiocarcinoma -- a deadly cancer of the bile duct. The same cancer had killed his own father years earlier in Ireland.
Only about one in 100,000 Canadians contracts this type of cancer, so the likelihood of three cases in a town of about 950 was minuscule. O’Connor suspected pollution from Alberta’s tar sands, 100 miles...
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Drought Called Threat to Public Health
Posted by Courthouse News: Nick Cahill on February 26th, 2015
Courthouse News: California's drought and warming climate could have disastrous effects on public health and infectious diseases, without drought-adaptation planning, state officials said Wednesday.
Rising food costs and diabetes rates, increased respiratory disease and loss of drinking water in rural communities are being exacerbated by California's drought, and a statewide social media campaign is needed, said Linda Rudolph, co-director of the Climate Change and Public Health Project.
In this year's first...
UN: world must address water challenge or risk conflict
Posted by Blue and Green: Charlotte Malone on February 25th, 2015
Blue and Green: Without large new water-related investments many societies will soon confront “rising desperation and conflicts over life’s most essential resource”, according to a new report published by the UN. Population increases and climate change are expected to put more people at risk of extreme water scarcity in the coming decades. One study suggested that without climate change mitigation policies, half of the world could be faced with extreme water scarcity by the end of the century. The latest UN report...
US tells Canada its climate goal may play Keystone role
Posted by Bloomberg: Jim Snyder and Jonathan Allen on February 25th, 2015
Bloomberg: U.S. climate negotiators have told their Canadian counterparts that Canada’s plan to cut carbon emissions could be one of the factors that President Barack Obama weighs as he considers whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, a U.S. official said.
The U.S. hasn’t suggested it might approve the $8 billion proposed project in exchange for climate commitments, the official said. Canada is developing a proposal as part of United Nations-sponsored talks aimed at cutting carbon emissions that governments...
Leak Is Disclosed at Nuclear Plant
Posted by New York Times: Martin Fackler on February 25th, 2015
New York Times: The operator of the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant said Tuesday that it had neglected to stop a leak of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean since last May. The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said it had first detected the flow of contaminated rainwater nine months ago, but did not explain why it had been so slow in responding. The company, known as Tepco, said it would place sandbags to block the leak of water, which it said was too small to change radiation levels in the...
Lester Brown: ‘World is overusing resources on a scale that’s dangerous’
Posted by Guardian: Laurence Mathieu-Léger on February 25th, 2015
Guardian: Laurence Mathieu-Léger
The remote Alaskan village that needs to be relocated due to climate change
Posted by Washington Post: Chris Mooney on February 25th, 2015
Washington Post: This tiny and isolated town of 400 cannot be reached by road. It lies on a fragile barrier island along the Chukchi Sea, 83 miles above the Arctic circle. And for generations, the Iñupiat people of the region have hunted gigantic bowhead whales from camps atop the sea ice that stretches out from the town’s icy shores.
But in recent years, climate change has thinned the ice so much that it has become too dangerous to hunt the whales. Soon, the U.S. government says, it may be too dangerous to live...
Climate Change Will Hit America in Breadbasket, Scientists Say
Posted by NBC: None Given on February 25th, 2015
NBC: Climate experts have seen the future of America's breadbasket — and from their perspective, it doesn't look pretty.
"I don't want to be a wheat farmer in Kansas in the future," said Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.
Brooks isn't a wheat farmer. He's a researcher who has analyzed how climate change could affect the weather in America's midsection, based on historical data and computer modeling. Last year, he and his colleagues found...
‘Invest more’ in protected areas
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on February 24th, 2015
BBC: The world's national parks and nature reserves receive eight billion tourist visits a year, generating around $600bn of spending, according to research.
The tourism income vastly outweighs the $10bn a year spent safeguarding them, says a Cambridge University team.
The study, published in PLOS Biology, highlights the need for more investment in protected areas, they say.
The idea of natural capital, the worth of natural assets, is increasingly being used in policy making.
It is based on...
Obama’s Keystone XL Veto Not a Death Blow to Pipeline
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on February 24th, 2015
Climate Central: President Obama on Tuesday vetoed the bill Congress passed this month forcing approval of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. But the project isn't dead yet, and the U.S. State Department's long approval process for the Keystone XL continues.
The bill, an effort by Congress to override the State Department's protracted environmental review of the pipeline, would have authorized TransCanada to build the $8 billion Keystone XL along 875 miles of U.S. soil from the Canadian border in Montana to Steele...