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Showing posts from March, 2020

Record number of fires rage around Amazon farms that supply the world's biggest butchers

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism The summer’s Amazon fires were three times more common in the areas supplying cattle to abattoirs than elsewhere in the rainforest. Details here.

Coronavirus latest: pandemic could have killed 40 million without any action

nature Updates on the respiratory illness that has infected hundreds of thousands of people and killed several thousand. Story here.

Is factory farming to blame for coronavirus?

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The Guardian Scientists are tracing the path of Sars-CoV-2 from a wild animal host – but we need to look at the part played in the outbreak by industrial food production. Story here.

Cambodia halts Mekong dams

SCIENCE MAGAZINE - BIODIVERSITY Edited by Jeffrey Brainard In a victory for conservation, the Cambodian government announced on 18 March that it is suspending for 10 years plans to build two hydropower dams on the Mekong River. The move helps preserve a freshwater ecosystem that, after the Amazon, is the world’s most biologically diverse. It also supports a vast fishing industry. Cambodia now relies on hydropower for nearly 50% of its electricity, but will turn to coal, natural gas, and solar energy to meet its future power needs. The Mekong begins on the Tibetan Plateau and flows through several countries, including Cambodia and Vietnam, before emptying into the South China Sea. It has been under increasing pressure from development, pollution, and climate change; drought and upstream dams in China have exacerbated recent low water levels in the lower Mekong. Adding to the river system’s woes, Laos opened two hydropower dams on the Mekong’s main branch in the past 6 months, an

Canadian doctors link fracked natural gas to cancer and birth defects

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straight A protest sign in a window in Halifax. Photo by Tony Webster. MDs also call attention to fracking-associated links to pollution and global warming.   Story here. RELATED: Is the "Dubious Duo" of Fracking & Earthquakes More Common in Canada Than we Know? Planet In Peril Wonders...

The hand of man shows through once again in a major weather catastrophe.

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 by Larry Powell The Green Wattle Creek bushfire moves  toward the Southern Highlands township of  Yanderra, Australia as police evacuate. Dec. 2019. Photo by Helitak 430. A new study finds,  manmade climate change did, indeed, worsen the bushfires which ravaged much of southeastern Australia late last year and early this year. An international team of seventeen scientists has just concluded, the probability of conditions developing like the ones which kindled the catastrophic blazes “has increased by at least 30% since 1900 as a result of anthropogenic climate change.”   And that figure could be much higher considering that extreme heat, one of the main factors behind this increase, is underestimated in the models used.  The heating of the planet, largely due to human extraction and burning of fossil fuels, has, for some time been shown to be the main factor behind the development of storms that are more intense and frequent than before. Looking to the future, t

NASA images show fall in China pollution over virus shutdown

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PHYS.ORG Nitrous oxide levels over China. Jan. 1st, 2020 (l.). Feb. 25th, 2020. Nasa images. NASA satellite images show a dramatic fall in pollution over China that is "partly related" to the economic slowdown due to the coronavirus outbreak, the space agency said. Story here.

Climate Change: Life’s a beach - a disappearing one!

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natureresearch A Pexels photo. Half of the world's beaches, many of which are in densely populated areas, could disappear by the end of the century under current trends of climate change and sea level rise, suggests a paper published in  Nature Climate Change .  Sandy beaches occupy more than one third of the global coastline and have high socio-economic value. Beaches also provide natural coastal protection from marine storms and cyclones. However, erosion, rising sea levels and changing weather patterns threaten the shoreline, its infrastructure and populations. Michalis Vousdoukas and colleagues analysed a database of satellite images showing shoreline change from 1984 to 2015. The authors extrapolated historical trends to predict future shoreline dynamics under two different climate change scenarios. They determined the ambient shoreline change, driven by physical factors (geological or anthropogenic) and shoreline retreat due to sea level rise. They als