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Archive for December 6th, 2010
Giant Alberta-bound oil-sands shipments stall in Idaho as opposition mounts
Posted by Oregonian: None Given on December 6th, 2010
Oregonian: Imperial Oil managers thought they'd discovered a new Northwest Passage when they decided to send more than 200 giant factory building blocks from South Korea to Canada via Idaho.
The largest of the massive modules, built as pieces of an $8 billion project in Alberta's oil sands, are wide as two-lane highways, taller than freeway overpasses and two-thirds the length of football fields. Imperial planned to ship the behemoths to Vancouver, barge them upriver and unload them in Lewiston, Idaho. ...
Posted in Water Conservation 
Comments Off on Giant Alberta-bound oil-sands shipments stall in Idaho as opposition mountsClimate change and the disappearing Himalayan glaciers
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 6th, 2010
Guardian: The Melt: climate change and the disappearing Himalayan glaciers
Glacial melt in the Himalayas will affect over 2 billion people unless we act now to cut emissions, say the Asia Society, who made this film
Climate change worsens Alaskan forest fires
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 6th, 2010
USA Today: Alaskans wildfires have worsened over the last three decades, forest experts report, due to global warming lengthening fire season and increasing the forest area affected by fires.
In the Nature journal study led by Merritt Turetsky of Canada's University of Guelph, a team looked at the depth of ground cover scorching at 178 sites from 31 Alaskan wildfire events from 1983 to 2005.
We show that the depth of burning increased as the fire season progressed when the annual area burned was small....
Climate Change: Adapt or Die?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 6th, 2010
Mother Jones: In the next decade, the effects of a rapidly warming climate could kill 5 million people--as many as live in Singapore or Finland. More than 99 percent of those deaths will likely occur in developing countries, and almost four-fifths are expected to happen in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. There could be as many as a million climate-related deaths each year by 2030 if nations don't significantly cut planet-warming emissions, according to a report released Friday.
Researchers at Dara, a humanitarian...
Colombian leader cancels climate conference trip after flooding
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 6th, 2010
CNN: Colombia's president says devastating flooding forced him to cancel his scheduled trip to the United Nations' climate change conference this week -- even though global warming itself could be causing the disaster his country faces.
"I canceled the trip I was taking to Cancun, [Mexico] ... to attend the international conference on climate change, which is what is affecting us, but I canceled this meeting," President Juan Manuel Santos said in a statement Sunday.
At least 170 people were killed...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Colombian leader cancels climate conference trip after floodingJane Goodall and David Attenborough: overpopulation must be addressed
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 6th, 2010
Mongabay: In a recent interview with The Telegraph world famous primatologist and conservationist, Jane Goodall, and wildlife documentarian Sir David Attenborough agreed that overpopulation must be addressed to protect the global environment.
"There are three times as many people on earth as when I first started making television programs all of whom require food and a place to live. And many of us, including me, take more than our fair share. And while the answer is unclear, one thing is obvious: where...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Jane Goodall and David Attenborough: overpopulation must be addressedClimate change threat to tropical forests ‘greater than suspected’
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 6th, 2010
Guardian: The chances of northern Europe facing a new ice age, or of catastrophic sea-level rises of almost four metres that swamp the planet over the next century, have been ruled out by leading scientists.
But the risk of tropical forests succumbing to drought brought on by climate change as well as the acceleration of methane emissions from melting permafrost, is greater, according to the Met Office Hadley Centre, in its latest climate change review.
The government-run climatology centre also suggests...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Climate change threat to tropical forests ‘greater than suspected’Northern wildfires threaten runaway climate change, study reveals
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 6th, 2010
ScienceDaily: Climate change is causing wildfires to burn more fiercely, pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a new study to be published in Nature Geoscience this week.
This is the first study to reveal that fires in the Alaskan interior -- an area spanning 18.5 million hectares -- have become more severe in the past 10 years, and have released much more carbon into the atmosphere than was stored by the region's forests over the same period.
"When most...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Northern wildfires threaten runaway climate change, study reveals