Biology
Breach
October 26, 2013, from CBC
The federal review is intended to look at possible environmental impacts under federal jurisdiction, such as impacts on waterways or greenhouse gas emissions.
One concern that environmentalists have with the new rules is they won't require environmental reviews for a growing type of oilsands development.
In-situ oilsands developments -- projects where the oil is melted directly out of the ground rather than being mined and then processed later -- were not specifically addressed in the previous list of projects requiring federal environmental assessments, said Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaign coordinator and energy policy analyst for the environmental group Greenpeace. And now, they are not included in the new list of projects requiring them.
October 26, 2011, from Nature News
The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March released far more radiation than the Japanese government has claimed. So concludes a study1 that combines radioactivity data from across the globe to estimate the scale and fate of emissions from the shattered plant.
The study also suggests that, contrary to government claims, pools used to store spent nuclear fuel played a significant part in the release of the long-lived environmental contaminant caesium-137, which could have been prevented by prompt action.
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Climate
Chaos
October 26, 2012, from Wall Street Journal
Greater New York began preparing for Hurricane Sandy as an unusual confluence of weather patterns started taking shape that could produce what meteorologists dubbed a "Frankenstorm."
In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office warned in a news release of "heavy rain, high winds, flooding, tornadoes, coastal surges, and widespread power outages" as soon as Tuesday and said state agencies would be on alert. New Jersey officials said they had begun monitoring flood-prone areas that may have to be evacuated. In Connecticut, power companies were bracing for a test of a revamped storm-preparation system.
October 26, 2011, from BBC
The time children spend outdoors could be linked to a reduced risk of being short-sighted, research suggests.
An analysis of eight previous studies by University of Cambridge researchers found that for each additional hour spent outside per week, the risk of myopia reduced by 2 percent.
Exposure to natural light and time spent looking at distant objects could be key factors, they said.
October 26, 2011, from City College of New York via ScienceDaily
The Greenland ice sheet can experience extreme melting even when temperatures don't hit record highs, according to a new analysis by Dr. Marco Tedesco, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The City College of New York. His findings suggest that glaciers could undergo a self-amplifying cycle of melting and warming that would be difficult to halt.
October 26, 2011, from Reuters
Crop scientists in the United States, the world's largest food exporter, are pondering an odd question: could the danger of global warming really be the heat?... scientists now wonder if a more immediate issue is an unusual rise in day-time and, especially, night-time summer temperatures being seen in crop belts around the world.
Interviews with crop researchers at American universities paint the same picture: high temperatures have already shrunken output of many crops and vegetables.
October 26, 2011, from Agence France-Press
Iceland and France are looking into the possibility of taking French trees endangered by global warming and planting them in Iceland to safeguard them for the future, officials said.
"The main emphasis (in the collaboration) is on research and finding ways to ensure the protection and preservation of the DNA... of the trees in Iceland," Adalsteinn Sigurgeirsson of the Icelandic Forestry Service told AFP.
The service is working with France's Office National des Forets, and their collaboration is focusing on trees from the French Alps and Pyrenees, such as beech.
October 26, 2009, from London Independent
Lush tropical rainforest once covered almost all of Indonesia's 17,000 islands between the Indian and Pacific oceans. And just half a century ago, 80 per cent remained. But since then, rampant logging and burning has destroyed nearly half that cover, and made the country the world's third largest emitter of greenhouses gases after the US and China.
Indonesia still has one-tenth of the world's remaining rainforests, a treasure trove of rare plant and animal species, including critically endangered tigers, elephants and orang-utans. However, it is destroying its forests faster than any other country, according to the Guinness Book of Records, with an average two million hectares disappearing every year, double the annual loss in the 1980s.
October 26, 2009, from Associated Press
Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It's not true, according to several independent statisticians who analyzed temperature data for The Associated Press...Global warming skeptics base their claims on an unusually hot year in 1998. Since then, they say, temperatures have dropped — thus, a cooling trend. But it's not that simple.
Since 1998, temperatures have dipped, soared, fallen again and are now rising once more....The recent Internet chatter about cooling led NOAA's climate data center to re-examine its temperature data. It found no cooling trend.
"The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record," said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt.
October 26, 2009, from BBC
A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough regulations on greenhouse gases are put in place.
Scientists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen.
That will allow them to be reintroduced to the seas in the future if global temperatures can be stabilised.... At this meeting, politicians and scientists acknowledged that global emissions of carbon dioxide are rising so fast that we are losing the fight to save coral and the world must develop an alternative plan.
October 26, 2009, from University of California - Berkeley via ScienceDaily
When world leaders meet in Copenhagen in December to hash out a treaty limiting carbon dioxide emissions, they should begin planning a future summit to address other pollutants -- from soot to ozone -- that don't remain in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, but nevertheless are major contributors to global warming. That is the view of University of California, Berkeley, researcher Stacy C. Jackson, who presents her arguments in a policy piece appearing in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Science.... Pollutants like soot and ozone are well-known greenhouse pollutants, but scientists and policy makers have focused most of their attention on the gorillas in the room: carbon dioxide and, to a lesser extent, methane -- pollutants that have had the biggest historical impact on global warming.... Numerous recent studies, however, have found the impacts of global warming accelerating, with faster melting of glaciers and sea ice and higher temperatures than predicted by climate models.
October 26, 2009, from London Independent
At last, the wreck of the rainforests is being tackled. One of the key parts of the Copenhagen climate
agreement which the international community will try to construct in December is a comprehensive treaty aiming to reduce deforestation rates in the developing countries by at least 50 per cent by 2020.... as the threat of climate change has become more and more clear, there has been an growing perception that the biggest benefit of all that rainforests provide is their function as a carbon
store, and the biggest danger from their destruction is the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when they are cut down and burnt.
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Resource
Depletion
October 26, 2012, from Yahoo Finance
Natural gas giant Chesapeake Energy has been given permission to drill for natural gas via hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," one mile away from the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, according to multiple reports....
"We're not aware of any potential impacts and don't expect any," Jennifer Young said Monday. "We see no reason to be particularly concerned."...
"[T]here are no required setbacks specifically relating to a required distance between unconventional wells and nuclear facilities, just a blanket regulation requiring a 500-foot setback from any building to an unconventional well."
October 26, 2011, from New York Times
Towering over the Bohai Sea shoreline on this city's outskirts, the Beijiang Power and Desalination Plant is a 26-billion-renminbi technical marvel: an ultrahigh-temperature, coal-fired generator with state-of-the-art pollution controls, mated to advanced Israeli equipment that uses its leftover heat to distill seawater into fresh water. There is but one wrinkle in the $4 billion plant: The desalted water costs twice as much to produce as it sells for. Nevertheless, the owner of the complex, a government-run conglomerate called S.D.I.C., is moving to quadruple the plant's desalinating capacity, making it China's largest.
"Someone has to lose money," Guo Qigang, the plant's general manager, said in a recent interview. "We're a state-owned corporation, and it's our social responsibility."
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Recovery
October 26, 2009, from Mongabay
Indigenous natives in the Amazon are headed to the town of Salvacion in Peru with a plan to forcibly remove the Texas-based Hunt Oil company from their land as early as today. Peruvian police forces, numbering in the hundreds, are said to be waiting in the town... representatives of indigenous groups released a statement that said "the entry of Hunt Oil and Respol into the interior of the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve to execute seismic projects is not accepted..."
The crisis has risen over an area known as Lot 76, or the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve. The 400,000 hectare reserve was created in 2002 to protect the flora and fauna of the area, as well as to safeguard watersheds of particular importance to indigenous groups in the region.
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