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Archive for June 1st, 2011
Global food crisis: Changing diets could cause more problems than rising population
Posted by Guardian: Richard King on June 1st, 2011
Guardian: Why will nearly one in seven people go to bed hungry tonight? After all, the world currently produces enough food for everyone. Today's major problems in the food system are not fundamentally about supply keeping up with demand, but more about how food gets from fields and on to forks.
Hunger – along with obesity, obscene waste and appalling environmental degradation – is an outcome of our broken food system. And the challenge of producing enough food to meet demand looks set to increase. With...
Posted in Water Conservation 
Comments Off on Global food crisis: Changing diets could cause more problems than rising populationGlobal food crisis: The cost of soy – in pictures
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 1st, 2011
Guardian: X
Global food prices: How pension funds can leave poor people hungry – video
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 1st, 2011
Guardian: X
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Global food prices: How pension funds can leave poor people hungry – videoThe Cities Most Prepared For Climate Change
Posted by Fast Company: Ariel Schwartz on June 1st, 2011
Fast Company: Today More than half the people on Earth now live in cities, so they'll be where we have to face our changing weather patterns. The most prepared cities are finding ways to keep citizens safe--and make them money.
Even if you haven't been paying attention to the seemingly nonstop stream of wacky weather recently, chances are that your local government has. According to the first Global C40 Cities Report, a look at how 42 of the world's largest cities (including Jakarta, Berlin, Los Angeles, and...
Are tornadoes affected by climate change?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 1st, 2011
Guardian: A tornado in Attica, Kansas. Climate change may affect the distribution of tornadoes.
Tornadoes – also known as cyclones or twisters – are rotating columns of air that run between the ground and the clouds above. Weak, short-lived tornadoes can occur when there's a strong updraft within a thunderstorm, though the most powerful and devastating twisters found in a few areas of the world require very specific conditions: a "supercell" thunderstorm with a rotating area called a mesocyclone, and winds...
VIDEO: Blackpool earthquake halts shale drilling
Posted by BBC: Jonathan Blake on June 1st, 2011
BBC: A controversial drilling operation for natural shale gas has been suspended after a small earthquake near Blackpool.
Tests are now being carried out to see if it was the drilling that actually caused the tremor.
The operation - known as fracking - has already been banned in France and parts of America.
World food system needs an overhaul, Oxfam says
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 1st, 2011
Agence France-Presse: Africa's famine is the result of a 'perfect storm' triggered by drought, crop failure, war and the effects of climate change hitting all at once.
Oxfam called on Tuesday for an urgent overhaul of the world's food system, warning that in a couple of decades, millions more people would be gripped by hunger due to population growth and harvest affected by climate change.
A "broken food system" means that the price of some staples will more than double by 2030, battering the world's poorest people,...
Beaver brouhaha
Posted by BBC: Ella Davies on June 1st, 2011
BBC: Britain's beaver reintroduction stirs controversy
Nature Habitat manager or wildlife menace?
The fashion for looking, and smelling, like a beaver killed off their entire population in the UK. But now beavers are back, and not everybody is happy to have them.
Thick brown waterproof fur coupled with a medicinal musk made beaver-chic serious business in Britain until they were hunted to extinction in the 16th century.
In recent years, conservationists, perhaps remorseful for their ancestors'...
Pollution fears as UK blocks European ban on fuel from tar sands
Posted by Independent: Sarah Morrison on June 1st, 2011
Independent: The Coalition Government's claim to be the "greenest government ever" has come under fresh scrutiny from politicians and environmental groups who accuse Britain of undermining a Europe-wide forecourt ban on one of the most climate-polluting fuels.
Britain is one of just two major European nations opposing efforts to prohibit sales of petrol and diesel obtained from the Canadian tar sands.
It is estimated the sands hold about 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but the trapped crude is in...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Pollution fears as UK blocks European ban on fuel from tar sandsNew York Sues Over a Drilling Rules Plan
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on June 1st, 2011
New York Times: A top New York State official filed a lawsuit against the federal government on Tuesday to force an assessment of the environmental risks posed by drilling for natural gas in the Delaware River Basin, arguing that a regulatory commission should not issue final rules governing the drilling until a study is completed.
The suit, filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, involves the Delaware River Basin Commission, a regional regulatory...