Posts Tagged ‘enviroment’

As freak weather becomes the norm, we need to adapt

IT HAS been yet another week of extraordinary weather. Torrential rainfall caused chaos across the UK. A record-breaking heatwave drifted across the US, broken by freak thunderstorms that left a trail of destruction from Chicago to Washington DC. Meanwhile, in India and Bangladesh more than 100 people were killed and half a million fled when […]

Worst and wildest: Five off-the-charts weather events

Worst and wildest: Five off-the-charts weather events 10:32 10 July 2012 Even in a stable climate, wild, extreme weather will occur from time to time. As the planet warms, though, once-unprecedented events will start to become commonplace. Here are five off-the-charts events the likes of which could become more familiar in the future. Michael Le […]

Climate change boosted odds of Texas drought

Some things you really can pin on climate change – the heatwave that struck Texas last year, for instance. A long-term rise in temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions made the hot weather 20 times more likely, modelling suggests. The same study found that four other extreme weather events last year can be linked to […]

Tree rings suggest Roman world was warmer than thought

How did the Romans manage to grow grapes in northern England when most climate studies suggest the weather was much cooler then? We may now have an answer: it wasn’t that cold at all. Long-term temperature reconstructions often rely on the width of tree rings: they assume that warmer summers make for wider rings. Using […]

Can fracking contaminate drinking water?

The salt of the Earth may hint at trouble for the fracking industry’s safety claims, according to a new geological study – although other researchers disagree. Hydraulic fracturing uses pressurised fluid to crack open deep shale rocks to release the methane trapped within them. Geologists say this potentially harmful fluid is unlikely to percolate up […]

Earth’s past warmth is no get-out clause

CLIMATE scientists have long held that the past 2000 years were almost uniformly cool. Now it seems they were wrong. The 1st century AD looks to have been as warm as today, and the world gradually cooled from then on, right up until the industrial era (see “Tree rings suggest Roman world was warmer than […]

Endangered species rewarded with meagre territory

IT’S a case of habitat well and truly lost for South Florida’s Cape Sable seaside sparrow. It can enjoy only a fraction of the homeland it was promised. The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, has found that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) systematically ignored recommendations to increase habitats for endangered species […]

Genetic detectives hunt the global amphibian killer

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Growth of Earth’s core may hint at magnetic reversal

Lopsided growth of the Earth’s core could explain why its magnetic field reverses direction every few thousand years. If it happened now, we would be exposed to solar winds capable of knocking out global communications and power grids. One side of Earth’s solid inner core grows slightly while the other half melts. Peter Olson and […]

Geoengineering with iron might work after all

Editorial: “We can’t afford to neglect ways to halt global warming” IF YOU want to help stop climate change, try tipping some iron into the sea. For years, this geoengineering idea has been considered a busted flush, but new results suggest it really can work. Tiny floating algae called phytoplankton pull carbon dioxide out of […]

We can’t afford to neglect ways to halt global warming

If we must research climate engineering, sucking carbon dioxide out of the air ought to be higher up our list of priorities CLIMATE engineering experiments have an unfortunate habit of going wrong before they get going. Earlier this year, a project to test the feasibility of pumping sun-blocking particles into the stratosphere was cancelled after […]

No charges to be brought over climategate hack

It created a media feeding frenzy and unfairly dragged climate scientists’ reputations through the mud, but nobody will be prosecuted for the “climategate” email hack. The UK police has closed its two-and-a-half-year investigation into the crime, as there is no prospect of bringing charges. Thousands of emails were stolen from the servers of the Climatic […]

Sumatran zig-zag earthquake answers seismology puzzle

On 11 April, seismic sensors picked up evidence of a massive 8.6-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Indonesia. Tsunami alerts sounded and evacuations began across the region – but the destructive wave never came. A new analysis helps to explain why – and in doing so suggests some oceanic regions may be more vulnerable to […]

Nuclear fuel rods removed from Japan’s Fukushima plant

Operations commenced this week to remove nuclear fuel rods from a storage pool at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, some 16 months after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl occurred at the Japanese site. Plant operator TEPCO requested media outlets to refrain from filming the delicate and dangerous operations, but aerial images aired on […]

Belch of laughing gas could heat up our planet

HERE’S one less-than-funny warm-up act. The last ice age may have ended partly because of the release of vast quantities of laughing gas, or nitrous oxide. A similar release could be on the cards later this century, although we cannot predict how much Earth will warm as a result. Europe warmed by 5 °C about […]

Harvey Norman / Domayne not very australian

Harvey Norman quoted as saying, he is an enviromentalist. A campaign to protect Australia’s native forests has Harvey Norman in its sights, accusing the furniture giant of profiteering from the destruction of Australia’s declining forests. In its latest bid to stop the logging and processing of native timber, a group calling itself Markets for Change […]

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