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Honey Bee Die-Off Caused By Multiple Factors Including Pesticides

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

billmoyers.com - By Therisa Riley - May. 19 (News) - A federal study released today attributes the massive die-off in American honey bee colonies to a combination of factors, including pesticides, poor diet, parasites and a lack of genetic diversity. Nearly a third of honey bee colonies in the United States have been wiped out since 2006. The estimated value of crops lost if bees were no longer able to pollinate fruits and vegetables is around $15 billion.

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Climate Warnings, Growing Louder

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By By THE EDITORIAL BOARD - May. 18 (Opinion) - Given new evidence on carbon pollution, President Obama should get moving on global warming.

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Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By By IAN AUSTEN - May. 18 (Special Report) - WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other s

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Population growth and climate change explained by Hans Rosling

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Claire Provost, Claudine Spera - May. 17 (News Report) - Han Rosling demonstrates the dynamics of population growth, child mortality and carbon dioxide emissionsClaire ProvostClaudine Spera

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World's tallest dam approved by Chinese environmental officials

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jonathan Kaiman - May. 17 (News Report) - Authorities push forward plans for 314 metre-high dam on Dadu river which would affect rare plants and fish Chinese environmental authorities have approved construction plans for what could become the world's tallest dam, while acknowledging that the project would affect endangered plants and rare fish species. The 314 metre-high dam (1,030ft) will serve the Shuangjiangkou hydropower project along the Dadu river in south-western Sichuan province, according to China's state news agency, Xinhua. A subsidiary of Guodian Group, one of China's five major state-owned power companies, will complete the project over a decade at an estimated cost of £2.9bn. The dam will be far taller than the 185 metre-high Three Gorges dam along the Yangtze river – the world's most powerful hydroelectric project – and slightly edge out the current record holder, the 300 metre-high Nurek dam in Tajikistan . The world's second-tallest dam, the 292 metre-high Xiaowan dam on the Lancang (Mekong) river, is also ...

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Obama administration issues draft fracking regulations

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Steven Mufson - May. 17 (News Report) - The Obama administration drew criticism from both environmental and oil industry groups on Thursday after issuing a new draft of regulations for fracking on federal and Indian lands. In its first update of hydraulic fracturing regulations in three decades, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management would require wider disclosure of chemicals used in drilling, techniques to assure wellbore integrity so fluids don’t leak into groundwater and ways to make sure companies have a water management plan for fluids that flow back to the surface. ...

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Survey finds 97% climate science papers agree warming is man-made

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - May. 16 (News) - Overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed papers taking a position on global warming say humans are causing it Our team of citizen science volunteers at Skeptical Science has published a new survey in the journal Environmental Research Letters of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers, as the Guardian reports today . This is the most comprehensive survey of its kind, and the inspiration of this blog's name: Climate Consensus – the 97%. The survey In 2004, Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of 928 peer-reviewed climate papers published between 1993 and 2003, finding none that rejected the human cause of global warming. We decided that it was time to expand upon Oreskes' work by performing a keyword search of peer-reviewed scientific journal publications for the terms 'global warming' and 'global climate change' between the years 1991 and 2011. Our team agreed upon definitions of categories to put the papers in: explicit or implicit endorsement of human-caused global warming, no ...

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12 Animals We Wish We Could De-Extinct

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By — By Maggie Severns, the Mother Jones news team - May. 15 (Comment) - Do you miss the mammoth? Dream of dodos? Long for Lycaena dispar dispar ? After centuries of driving species after species to extinction, we're now tantalizingly close to bringing some of them back. Using advances in genetic sequencing and molecular biology, s cientists across the world are mining extinct animal specimens for ancient DNA to try to resurrect disappeared species. The science is complicated— National Geographic has a great rundown—and so are the ethics involved. But who can resist dreaming up a de-extinction "wish list"? With more species nearing the extinction danger zone every dayâ€‹, there's no shortage of candidates, but some are more scientifically suited for resurrection than others. And even if we could bring a species back, should we? We looked to scientists to explain who they'd like to bring back, and which are best left in the past. T. rex , extinct for 65 million years Designed for "maximum bone-crushing action," Tyrannosaurus ...

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Climate change 'will make hundreds of millions homeless'

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Robin McKie - May. 12 (Comment) - Carbon dioxide levels indicate rise in temperatures that could lead agriculture to fail on entire continents It is increasingly likely that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homelands in the near future as a result of global warming. That is the stark warning of economist and climate change expert Lord Stern following the news last week that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere had reached a level of 400 parts per million (ppm). Massive movements of people are likely to occur over the rest of the century because global temperatures are likely to rise to by up to 5C because carbon dioxide levels have risen unabated for 50 years, said Stern, who is head of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change. "When temperatures rise to that level, we will have disrupted weather patterns and spreading deserts," he said. "Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will ...

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Climate change: swift political action can avert a carbon dioxide crisis

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - May. 12 (Editorial) - Carbon dioxide levels have reached an all-time high. But there is some hope if governments take the figures seriously The news that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere reached a level of 400 parts per million last week might not appear to have immediate significance. The level is only a couple of units higher than last year, after all. Yet the development has undoubted importance. With the realisation that carbon dioxide levels have achieved that symbolic 400ppm figure, it is now clear that two decades of warnings from scientists have fallen on deaf ears and that our leaders have failed completely to curtail rising outputs of greenhouse gases across the world. Indeed, they have allowed them to accelerate. In the 1960s, levels rose at 0.7ppm a year. Today, they rise at 2.1ppm, as more and more nations become industrialised and increase outputs from their factories and power plants. As a result, the most conservative of scientific calculations suggest Earth now faces a 50-50 ...

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This Crater in Siberia Reveals the Future of a Globally Warmed Planet

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Damian Carrington - May. 10 (News Report) - This story originally appeared in The Guardian . The future of a globally warmed world has been revealed in a remote meteorite crater in Siberia, where lake sediments recorded the strikingly balmy climate of the Arctic during the last period when greenhouse gas levels were as high as today. Unchecked burning of fossil fuels has driven carbon dioxide to levels not seen for 3 million years when, the sediments show, temperatures were 46 degrees higher than today, lush forests covered the tundra and sea levels were up to 40 meters higher than today. "It's like deja vu," said Prof Julie Brigham-Grette, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the new research analyzing a core of sediment to see what temperatures in the region were between 3.6 and 2.2 million years ago. "We have seen these warm periods before. Many people now agree this is where we are heading." Continue Reading ...

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The Most Controversial Chart in History, Explained

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - May. 09 (Opinion) - Back in 1998, a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers—thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent northern hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade"). The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD—and then, in 2001, the UN's ...

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Save the Wolves of Isle Royale National Park

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By By JOHN A. VUCETICH, MICHAEL P. NELSON, ROLF O. PETERSON - May. 09 (Opinion) - Moose first appeared on this Michigan island in the first decade of the 20th century, apparently by swimming from the mainland. With no predator to challenge them, the moose population surged (interspersed by two crashes, from starvation) and devastated

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Why Are These Turtles Turning Female?

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Nick Visser - May. 07 (News Analysis) - If you're a male painted turtle, global warming might sound great at first: A new study suggests it will mean more females to mate with and fewer male rivals to fend off. But, as usual with climate change, every silver lining has a cloud. In this case, too many females could render the species incapable of reproducing by century's end.

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Palisades Nuclear Power Plant Shut Down After Water Leaks Into Lake Michigan

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - May. 06 (News) - Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in southwestern Michigan was taken offline Sunday after operators discovered a leak from a water tank. Although the tank has leaked twice in less than a year, officials say there is no immediate risk. "There is no impact on

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Does Shale Gas Production Alter Climate Change?

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Forbes - By Ken Silverstein, Contributor - May. 05 (Opinion) - The shale gas industry has long thought that the Environmental Protection Agency may undercut its possibilities. But the regulator’s latest unveiling is now fueling the unconventional natural gas, noting that its heat-trapping emissions are much less than originally thought.

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Investigators sharpen focus on Boston bombing suspect’s widow

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Sari Horwitz - May. 04 (News Report) - Federal law enforcement officials are sharpening their focus on the widow of the dead suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings after finding al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and other radical Islamist material on her computer, according to law enforcement officials. ...

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How much does EPA’s objection to Keystone XL matter? A lot.

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - May. 03 (News) -

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ExxonMobil’s tar-sands pipeline leaks again

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By John Upton - May. 02 (News Report) - The very same pipeline that blackened Mayflower has leaked oil into a yard and killed plants in Doniphan, Mo., some 170 miles northeast of Mayflower.

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Mind-boggling infographic shows why sharks should be way more scared of you

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Jess Zimmerman - May. 02 (Special Report) - (see the graphic)

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China Is Plundering the Planet's Seas

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By - Gwynn Guilford - May. 01 (Special Report) - The average it told the UN Food and Agriculture Organization over the last decade was 368,000 tons each year. A recent European Parliament report puts that number at 4.6 million tons -- some 12.5 times more than what China reported

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EU debates biopiracy law to protect indigenous people

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - May. 01 (News Report) - Pharmaceutical firms would need to compensate indigenous people for using their knowhow in creating new medicines The European parliament is debating a draft biopiracy law requiring industry to compensate indigenous people if it makes commercial use of local knowledge such as plant-based medicines. Under the law – based on the international convention on access to biodiversity, the Nagoya protocol – the pharmaceuticals industry would need the written consent of local or indigenous people before exploring their region's genetic resources or making use of their traditional knowhow. Relevant authorities would have the power to sanction companies that fail to comply, protecting local interests from the predatory attitude of big European companies. German firm patents South African herb The draft report on access to genetic resources by Green MEP Sandrine Bélier cites as an example a German pharmaceutical company's dealings in South Africa. Pelargonium sidoides, a variety of ...

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Europe Restricts 3 Commonly Used Pesticides in Effort to Protect Honeybees

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - Apr. 29 (News) - No one is sure what is causing bee colonies to die off around the world, but pesticides called neonicotinoids may be part of the problem. Today, Europe’s health commissioner Tonio Borg said the European Commission would go ahead with a continent-wide pla

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Monsanto's Roundup Linked to Parkinson's, Infertility and Cancers

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Carey Gillam - Apr. 28 (News Report) - The peer-reviewed report, published last week in the scientific journal Entropy, said evidence indicates that residues of "glyphosate," the chief ingredient in Roundup weed killer, which is sprayed over millions of acres of crops, has been found in food.

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Insecticide firms in secret bid to stop ban that could save bees

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Apr. 28 (News) - Last-ditch lobbying to sway vote in Brussels to halt use of killer nerve agents Europe is on the brink of a landmark ban on the world's most widely used insecticides, which have increasingly been linked to serious declines in bee numbers. Despite intense secret lobbying by British ministers and chemical companies against the ban, revealed in documents obtained by the Observer , a vote in Brussels on Monday is expected to lead to the suspension of the nerve agents. Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed on disease, loss of habitat and, increasingly, the near ubiquitous use of neonicotinoid pesticides. The prospect of a ban has prompted a fierce behind-the-scenes campaign. In a letter released to the Observer under freedom of information rules, the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, told the chemicals company Syngenta last week that he was "extremely ...

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