Regulations on pesticides have failed to prevent poisoning of almost all habitats, international team of scientists concludes
The world’s most widely used insecticides have contaminated the environment across the planet so pervasively that global food production is at risk, according to a comprehensive scientific assessment of the chemicals’ impacts.
The researchers compare their impact with that reported in Silent Spring, the landmark 1962 book by Rachel Carson that revealed the decimation of birds and insects by the blanket use of DDT and other pesticides and led to the modern environmental movement.
The two biggest melts for Greenland were in 1889 and 2012. We didn't know why the entire surface of Greenland turned to slush in a 96 hour period back when it happened, but now we know it was warm, ash laden air and that a similar event happened in 1889. This is double the normal maximum summer melt area.
Greenland melting is an issue on a scale of centuries to maybe a whole millennium, but there are other icy places that are much closer to fires. The Himalayas, which translates into The Abode of Snow, are commonly called Asia’s water tower. I have already mentioned the Kashmir Conflict, which affects the headwater’s of the Indus river valley at the far western end of the range. The Ganges and the Brahmaputra also originate in the Himalayas and well over a billion people depend on the mountain glaciers as a buffer for precipitation.
Over the last seven years I have become interested in the following topics in roughly chronological order: peak oil, renewable energy with a focus on wind, renewable ammonia, food security, and water security. More and more I am starting to see that global wildfire patterns are also important. The video seen here was originally posted at NASA’s Earth Observatory
Fire is a natural part of all but the wettest ecosystems. Everywhere west of the Mississippi except the coastal Pacific Northwest used to burn in a fairly regular fashion. Some plant species need fire as part of their natural cycle. Humans have been exhuming fossil carbon for two hundred years and when World War II flying boats like the PBY Catalina came out of service they were repurposed into water bombers and we suppressed fire everywhere. This worked until critical masses of dead growth fueled fires of previously unseen scope and intensity. We grudgingly began to permit fire to do its work in ecosystems.
This April was the 350th month of above average temperatures. My next big birthday is fifty, the last time we had a normal month I was still a minor. This is a ‘fire tornado’, with thousand degree temperatures and category five hurricane force winds feeding into it. These are a normal event in hilly, windy country, but there are many, many more of them in California this year thanks to a record fire season. This is the hottest May for California since record keeping started in 1896, the state has a record drought, and the fires came sixty days early and at triple the normal rate.
If you have been reading SR for some time you know I predicted this in the late 90s. Eventually a wide range of industries are going to be opposed to the carbon energy interests. This is an important trend, and one to watch closely.
Being a big business, the insurance industry is a strong backer of free enterprise and its laissez-faire leaders. But a rift could be developing now that some major carriers are staking claims in the climate change cause while many of their congressional backers have remained skeptical of the science.
For insurers, it’s not about the political machinations but rather, it’s about the potential economic losses. If even part of the predictions hold – the ones released by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change that ascribe temperature change to humans with 95 percent certainty – then the rate of extreme weather events will only increase and the effects would be more severe. That, in turn, would lead to greater damages and more payouts.
The ongoing disinformation campaign financed by carbon interests such as the Koch brothers, combined with the corruption of every branch of our government, has left us in this condition.
In the age of the Iraq war and Obamacare, the government is hardly a trustworthy body.
The 841-page National Climate Assessment released by the US government this week has been described as ‘sobering”, but Americans do not appear sobered. The report goes into astonishing detail about what severe climate change would mean – and what it means already to specific villages, mountains and beaches.
KBR and Halliburton – two major U.S. military contractors – can be sued for the health impacts of trash incineration on U.S. soldiers who served in the war in Iraq, according to a new court decision that allows a series of 57 lawsuits against the companies to go forward.
A new reports finds the killings of environmental and land rights activists worldwide has tripled over the past decade. The group Global Witness documented 147 activists who were killed in 2012, compared to 51 in 2002. The death rate is now an average of two per week. Almost none of the killers have faced charges. We air interviews with some of the late activists featured in the report, including José da Silva, a Brazilian conservationist and environmentalist who campaigned against logging and clearcutting of trees in the Amazon rainforest. In 2011, José and his wife, Maria, were murdered by masked gunmen. “This could be the tip of the iceberg in terms of the scale of the real problem,” says Global Witness campaigner Oliver Courtney, who says details about the murders were nearly impossible to locate.
