Understanding extinction — humanity has destroyed half the life on Earth
CBC Radio A PinP photo. There's less life overall, and much of it is domesticated plants and animals instead of wildlife. More here.
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Much of the Earth is still wild, but threatened by fragmentation
PHYS ORG Seismic lines dissect northern Alberta, Canada. Photo by Roland Roesler Half of the Earth's land surface not covered with ice remains relatively wild—but many of these "low human-impact" areas are broken into small, isolated pieces, threatening their future. Story here. RELATED: The more we carve up natural landscapes with roads and fields, the closer we’re pushing large predators like lions and wolves, toward extinction. by Larry Powell
Ban oil, gas, bottom trawling in CANADA'S marine protected areas, panel urges
THE STAR Image by NOAA. --> A panel that has spent the year studying marine protected areas (MPAs) in Canada says no oil and gas development, seabed mining, or bottom-trawling fishing should be allowed within their boundaries. More here. RELATED: New research finds that “marine reserves” – tracts of ocean where fishing is banned – are protecting fish, the coral reefs where they live and vast undersea "gardens," a lot more than once thought. By Larry Powell.
Powerful storms may be causing offshore ‘stormquakes’
ScienceNews Ocean waves by Fir0002 Strong ocean swells hammer ridges in the seafloor and produce the earthquake-like shaking. More here.
Amazon Watch: What Happens When the Forest Disappears?
YaleEnvironment360 Amazon fires, August 2019, some deliberately set to make way for agriculture. Satellite image taken by MODIS. At a remote site where the world’s largest rainforest abuts land cleared for big agriculture, Brazilian and American scientists are keeping watch for a critical tipping point – the time when the Amazon ceases to be a carbon sink and turns into a source of carbon emissions. Story here.
Busting more carbon tax myths. A letter-to-the-editor.
by Dan Soprovich. Conservative politicians lie about the carbon tax. Jason Kenny, Doug Ford, Andrew Scheer … you know who the rest are. And Conservative politicians have been lying about the carbon tax for more than a decade. When the Stephane Dion Liberals proposed a carbon tax in 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper lied about it. At the time, my dear departed Uncle Jack, who made millions of dollars from the oil industry, sent me an Internet article indicating that a poor retired couple in New Brunswick would be terribly impacted by the Liberal’s proposed carbon tax. However, that was simply not true. The proposed carbon tax included a rebate so that folks at the lower end of the economic spectrum would not be hurt (very similar to the carbon tax implemented by the Trudeau Liberal government). The Stephane Dion Liberals also provided an online calculator at the time. When I applied the circumstances of the retired couple within the calculator, the inconvenient truth was that the coup