Biology
Breach
November 28, 2012, from London Guardian
...All over the former Soviet Union, nearly 250,000 tonnes of pesticides and farm chemicals have been stored in ramshackle warehouses, land-filled or dumped. After the USSR splintered the authorities lost the thread, so no one knows exactly where this toxic waste is ... such dumps may be a bigger hazard than even nuclear waste because of the confusion surrounding them.
November 28, 2011, from Environmental Health News
Women who drink water contaminated with low levels of the weed-killer atrazine may be more likely to have irregular menstrual cycles and low estrogen levels, scientists concluded in a new study.
The most widely used herbicide in the United States, atrazine is frequently detected in surface and ground water, particularly in agricultural areas of the Midwest. Approximately 75 percent of all U.S. cornfields are treated with atrazine each year.
The newest research, which compared women in Illinois to women in Vermont, adds to the growing scientific evidence linking atrazine to altered hormones....use of the herbicide continues to rise. In the first half of 2011 alone, Syngenta reported double-digit growth in sales, with atrazine as a high performer.
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Climate
Chaos
November 28, 2012, from NUVO
...Every day, we get better at connecting the dots of climate change and extreme weather. As NASA's James Hansen said in August: "The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change."
The 2012 drought that hit Indiana will very likely be connected to climate change as well, but scientists, who are conservative by nature, are still totaling up their data.
Who better than your local, trusted weathercaster to walk you through how climate change influences weather?
November 28, 2012, from Sydney Morning Herald
THE world is on the cusp of a "tipping point" into dangerous climate change, according to new data gathered by scientists measuring methane leaking from the Arctic permafrost and a report presented to the United Nations on Tuesday.
"The permafrost carbon feedback is irreversible on human time scales," says the report, Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost. "Overall, these observations indicate that large-scale thawing of permafrost may already have started."
November 28, 2012, from Live Science
New satellite measurements suggest that global sea levels are rising faster than the most recent projections by the United Nations' climate change panel.
The new report found that sea levels are rising at an annual rate of 0.12 inches (3.2 millimeters) -- 60 percent faster than the best estimate of 0.08 inches (2 millimeters) per year, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated in 2007.
November 28, 2012, from Associated Press
An area of Arctic sea ice bigger than the United States melted this year, according the U.N. weather agency, which said the dramatic decline illustrates that climate change is happening "before our eyes." In a report released at U.N. climate talks in the Qatari capital of Doha, the World Meteorological Organization said the Arctic ice melt was one of a myriad of extreme and record-breaking weather events to hit the planet in 2012. Droughts devastated nearly two-thirds of the United States as well western Russia and southern Europe. Floods swamped west Africa and heat waves left much of the Northern Hemisphere sweltering.
November 28, 2011, from New York Times
With intensifying climate disasters and global economic turmoil as the backdrop, delegates from 194 nations gather in Durban, South Africa, this week to try to advance, if only incrementally, the world's response to dangerous climate change. To those who have followed the negotiations of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change over their nearly 20-year history, the conflicts and controversies to be taken up in Durban are monotonously familiar -- the differing obligations of industrialized and developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests, the need to develop and deploy clean energy technology rapidly.
November 28, 2009, from London Daily Telegraph
...East Anglia is now ground zero in a controversy which just might influence the entire future of our planet. A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails written by scientists working at the CRU were obtained by a hacker and posted on the internet, some of which appeared to show that researchers had deliberately faked evidence of global warming by manipulating statistics.... Phil Jones, the 57-year-old director of the CRU, is the man who has suddenly found himself the number one target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the emails exposed by the anonymous hacker.
In one message, dated November 1999, he wrote: "I've just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline."
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Resource
Depletion
November 28, 2011, from Associated Press
The United Nations has completed the first-ever global assessment of the state of the planet's land resources, finding in a report today that a quarter of all farmland is highly degraded and warning the trend must be reversed if the world's growing population is to be fed.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that farmers will have to produce 70 per cent more food by 2050 to meet the needs of the world's expected nine billion-strong population.
That amounts to 1 billion tonnes more wheat, rice and other cereals and 200 million more tons of cow and other livestock.
But as it is, most available farmland is already being farmed, and in ways that actually decrease its productivity through practices that lead to soil erosion and wasting of water.
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Recovery
November 28, 2012, from Reuters
Major tobacco companies that spent decades denying they lied to the U.S. public about the dangers of cigarettes must spend their own money on a public advertising campaign saying they did lie, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
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