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Archive for December, 2014
Thailand fails to clean lead-poisoned creek despite court order: HRW
Posted by Reuters: Thin Lei Win on December 16th, 2014
Reuters: Hundreds of families in western Thailand are suffering from lead poisoning near a polluted creek that the government has failed to clean up despite a court order two years ago, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday. In 1998, Lead Concentrates (Thailand) closed a mine in Klity Creek in Kanchanaburi province, but the 400 or so ethnic Karen subsistence farmers living in a nearby village struggle with health problems and continue to fight for a cleanup, the watchdog group said in a report. In what activists...
Posted in Water Conservation 
Comments Off on Thailand fails to clean lead-poisoned creek despite court order: HRWBelo Monte, Brazil: The tribes living in the shadow of megadam
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 16th, 2014
Guardian: By the Great Bend of the Xingu river in the depths of Amazonia, the Juruna tribe is being drowned by what seems at first sight to be a flood of TV game-show prizes. There’s a shiny new motorboat moored by the old canoe, the latest four-wheel drive parked beside a chicken coop, satellite dishes outside every home and wide-screen plasma TVs inside. But these are not the spoils of victory. They are the consolations for defeat in an existential battle against Brazil’s biggest engineering project, the...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Belo Monte, Brazil: The tribes living in the shadow of megadamMost carbon-dense ecosystem in Amazonia mapped first time
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 16th, 2014
PhysOrg: The highest concentration of carbon in parts of Amazonia is not stored in trees, but below the ground as peat, according to new University of Leeds research.
Mapping and quantifying carbon stored in the largest area of peatland forest in Amazonia, a geological basin almost the size of England, the researchers estimated that more than three billion tonnes of carbon is stored within this ecosystem.
While Amazonian forests are known to harbour large stores of carbon in their trees, the findings...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Most carbon-dense ecosystem in Amazonia mapped first timeTrees are fed up with our carbon, refuse to grow faster
Posted by Grist: Sam Bliss on December 16th, 2014
Grist: tists have long expected extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to boost tree growth - the climate-changing waste product of our fuel-burning ways is plant food, after all. But a new study suggests that trees in tropical rainforests around the world are not in fact growing any faster, even as CO2 levels in the air shoot past 400 parts per million.
This conclusion isn`t just bad news for trees, though. All species threatened by climate change - that`s you, humans - should be worried.
You see,...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Trees are fed up with our carbon, refuse to grow fasterChina’s Great Green Wall is Holding the Desert Back
Posted by Nature World: Brian Stallard on December 15th, 2014
Nature World: China's arid north is slowly being invaded by its own desert, which is the source of growing dust storms and nearly useless land. To fight it, they are planting whole forests - a living wall of hearty trees to keep the desert at bay... and it's working.
That's at least according to a study recently published in the journal Land Use Policy, which details how China's "Great Green Wall" has helped shelter the country from dust storms while simultaneously helping to reintroduce vegetation into the...
Greenland’s ‘Supraglacial’ Lakes Could Trigger Future Ice Loss
Posted by Nature World: Jenna Iacurci on December 15th, 2014
Nature World: Previous predictions of Greenland ice loss may have been greatly underestimated, as new research shows the region's "supraglacial" lakes could trigger faster ice melt in the future. Supraglacial lakes are bodies of water that form on the ice sheet surface from melted snow and ice. According to the new study, these lakes will migrate farther inland over the next 50 years, potentially causing drastic changes in Greenland's ice sheet flow and contributing to rising sea levels. "When you pour pancake...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Greenland’s ‘Supraglacial’ Lakes Could Trigger Future Ice LossCoal Ash in the Spotlight as EPA Deadline Approaches
Posted by EcoWatch: None Given on December 15th, 2014
EcoWatch: Coal ash is back in the spotlight. CBS just aired this blockbuster piece on 60 Minutes investigating the fallout from the coal ash spill into North Carolina’s Dan River, and this week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is due to release the first-ever national safeguards for disposal of this toxic industrial sludge, to meet a court-ordered deadline of Dec. 19.
We could see more and more ‘hot droughts’ like California’s
Posted by FiveThirtyEight: Christie Aschwanden on December 15th, 2014
FiveThirtyEight: Last week, California’s dry spell got a temporary reprieve thanks to an onslaught of Pacific storms. But the storms won’t be enough to turn back the state’s drought - one that, researchers say, is the region’s worst in the last 1,200 years.
California’s drought began in late 2011 and rapidly intensified. Reservoirs stand empty, and as of this month, the U.S. Drought Monitor has classified conditions in 79.7 percent of the state as being in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought.
To compare the...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on We could see more and more ‘hot droughts’ like California’sWhy America Should Invest in Renewables, Not Fracking
Posted by EcoWatch: None Given on December 15th, 2014
EcoWatch: Callie Roberts is a senior, studying cancer biology and environmental policy, at Duke University. She has been awarded the Teens for Planet Earth Award, Ashoka Youth Venture Award, President’s Gold Volunteer Service Award, and President’s Environmental Youth Award for her work with biofuels and environmental health. She is currently a student in Dr. Rebecca Vidra’s environmental science & policy class. We have all heard about America’s energy crisis, “peak oil,” and anthropogenic climate change....
Surreal Aerial Photos Show Impact From Fracking
Posted by EcoWatch: Anastasia Pantsios on December 15th, 2014
EcoWatch: Sometimes it takes a bird’s eye view to get a sense of the full scope of what’s being done to our land in pursuit of profit.
A few weeks ago we ran some photos by artist Mishka Henner who creates projects that make people think about how we interact with our environment. Those photos showed industrial-scale feed lots, factory farms where thousands of animals are raised, taken from the air. He discovered them while flying over the country working on another project: aerial photos of oil drilling...