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Archive for March 5th, 2016
Bill Gates Calls For ‘Energy Miracle’ In 15 Years. Do Experts Agree?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 5th, 2016
National Public Radio: The annual letter from the Gates Foundation calls for an "energy miracle" - the creation of a cheap and clean source of energy to get power to the 1.2 billion people on the planet without electricity.
"We need to try lots of crazy-seeming ideas so we can find a few that help us solve the world's energy challenge," Bill Gates writes in the letter, urging today's high school students to take on this task.
We asked people who work on energy issues in the developing world: In your mind, what would...
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Estrogen in birth control pills has a negative impact on fish
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 5th, 2016
ScienceDaily: A new doctoral thesis from Lund University in Sweden shows that hormones found in birth control pills alter the genes in fish, which can cause changes in their behaviour. The thesis also shows that nurse midwives, who are the main prescribers in Sweden, lack information about the environmental impact of hormonal birth control methods, which may affect the advice they provide.
The hormone ethinyl-estradiol (EE2) is an active substance in many birth control pills which affects aquatic organisms...
Ethiopia Forgotten Drought
Posted by Nazret: John Campbell on March 5th, 2016
Nazret: El Niño was first discovered in the 1600s when fishermen noticed that in some years, water temperatures in the Pacific became warmer than usual. Hence, according to the National Ocean Service, El Niño today refers to “large-scale ocean-atmosphere climate interaction linked to a periodic warming in sea surface temperatures across the central and east-central Equatorial Pacific.” These anomalous weather patterns vary across regions, ranging from heavy rainfall and flooding to severe drought.
The...
Why This City of 21 Million People Is Sinking 3 Feet Every Year
Posted by EcoWatch: None Given on March 5th, 2016
EcoWatch: Mexico City is sinking. Home to 21 million people, who consume nearly 287 billion gallons of water each year, the city has sunk more than 32 feet in the last 60 years because 70 percent of the water people rely on is extracted from the aquifer below the city.
"There`s no fixing it," journalist Andrea Noel told producer Alan Sanchez in the video below from Fusion. "Once land is subsided, it`s subsided."
The water table is sinking at a rate of 1 meter (3.2 feet) per year. As the city population...
NASA: Drought in 1998-2012 in Mideast worst in 900 years
Posted by Associated Press: Daniella Cheslow on March 5th, 2016
Associated Press: A recent, 14-year dry spell in the Middle East was the worst drought in the past 900 years, according to a new NASA study released this week. NASA's researchers examined records of rings of trees in several Mediterranean countries to determine patterns of dry and wet years across a span of 900 years. They concluded that the years from 1998 to 2012 were drier than any other period, and that the drought was likely caused by humans. The study's lead author Ben Cook said the range of extreme weather...
How do we ditch dirty coal power without sending miners to unemployment line?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 5th, 2016
LA Times: The nation - in fact, the world - needs to wean itself from fossil fuels if it is to have any hope of managing climate change. Burning coal is particularly bad for the environment, pumping far higher quantities of global-warming compounds into the atmosphere than natural gas, oil or other carbon-based products do. So it's heartening that the U.S. has been using less coal to generate electricity in recent years. An unrelated drop in coal-fired steel production in China has also reduced the amount...
Divide grows in Southeast over offshore drilling plan
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 5th, 2016
New York Times: On a recent frigid night, anxious residents, many in "Protect Our Coast" sweatshirts, packed the town hall here, spilled onto the lawn, and then erupted in cheers as their town government gaveled in a resolution urging President Obama to block oil drilling off their shoreline. "Some things are just too precious to risk," Mayor Emilie Swearingen said.
That afternoon, 140 miles inland in Raleigh, the state capital, Obama administration officials and oil company representatives had outlined plans...
$1m for devising best way to map Indonesia’s peatlands
Posted by Mongabay: Philip Jacobson and Sapariah Saturi on March 5th, 2016
Mongabay: Want to make a million dollars? Find the most efficient way to map Indonesia’s peatlands. That’s the ticket to winning the Indonesian Peat Prize, announced by the cartographically challenged Southeast Asian country last month. The competition will establish a national standard for mapping peatland extent and thickness, a process deemed essential to stopping the annual forest and peat fires which grow more devastating by the year. Last dry season, they burned an area the size of Rwanda, afflicted...
A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah
Posted by City Lab: Laura Bliss on March 5th, 2016
City Lab: The Great Salt Lake is drying up, thanks to 150 years of human diversions from the rivers that feed it. That’s the takeaway of a white paper released by a team of Utah biologists and engineers. And if those diversions continue ramping up, as a bill working its way through the Utah legislature proposes, the waterbody may face a withering fate similar to other dried-up salt lakes around the world. The namesake of Utah’s capital city, the Great Salt Lake is the the state’s defining geographic feature...
The burning issue in climate change
Posted by Irish Times: None Given on March 5th, 2016
Irish Times: The idea of ethical investment has been around for several decades. High-profile campaigns saw charities withdraw their investments from the armaments and tobacco industries, for example, and from South Africa under the apartheid regime.
Ethical investment has had a new target in the past few years, as environmental campaigners have encouraged charities, universities and other public-interest organisations to exclude fossil-fuel industries from their investment portfolios. They see fossil-fuel...