PLANET IN PERIL

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

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.

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

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...

 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

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.

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

Nature Climate Change   The bushfires burning in Australia have led to widespread local and global calls for increased efforts to mitigate climate change. Details here.

BirdLife International Last summer, an oil spill of unknown origin hit Brazil’s northeast coast – just as migrating shorebirds arrived in the area. Our Partner SAVE Brasil has been campaigning for action and striving to measure the impact on birds - but more support is urgently needed.  More here.

Extraction of Earth's oil, gas and coal reserves is probably unleashing  vastly more methane (CH4) into the air than is currently being estimated. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and significant contributor to the dangerous heating of our planet.  by Larry Powell. Pump jacks extract crude oil from the Bakken field southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada. Are such operations releasing even more methane t han we once thought? A  PinP  photo. Using the largest ice drill in the world (below), the researchers “looked back in time” to the 17 hundreds, by drilling deep into the ice in Greenland and Antarctica.    The Blue Ice Drill, used to collect  the cores  used in this study.  Photo by B. Hmiel.                                                                        By analyzing air bubbles trapped, both in the ice cores and the snow , they were able to measure how much methane was escaping into the air at the time. Since this was the “pre-industrial era,” before major human expa

UPDATE: This company has now withdrawn its application for the mine. The Pembina Institute Canada is facing a decision on the biggest oil sands mine proposal in almost a decade. Alberta’s Frontier oil sands mine, proposed by Teck Resources, has gone through a lengthy regulatory process culminating in a recommended approval from a joint federal-provincial review panel and is now under consideration by the federal cabinet. A casual observer might assume that given the potent environmental and economic impacts, this process would have been comprehensive. Yet, the panel's report, which shares the reasoning behind the decision, is remarkably weak on its consideration of climate impacts .   More here.