Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Can the Internet save the environment?
Could a constant search of the Internet help protect the environment by picking up early hints about pollution or signs of climate change such as desertification, droughts or heatwaves?
A study issued on Thursday hints that it could.
A scuba diver in the South China Sea off Malaysia (above, picture by David Loh of Reuters News) might write a blog if corals looked damaged by ‘bleaching’ – algae that give reefs their colours can start to die off because of higher sea temperatures. It might just turn out that divers far away in Australia, the Caribbean or elsewhere were starting to notice the same thing — perhaps setting off alarm bells about global warming.
“The Internet has the possibility to link up anecdotes to see if there’s a pattern,” said Tim Daw of the University of East Anglia who was among the authors. All that would be needed is an automated trawl of the Internet to pick up the information.
Daw told me, for instance, that he’s from Scotland where villages in the northwest had suffered a population explosion of millipedes. ”People have had their houses overrun,” he said. No one knew why.
High and dry on the California farm
At lunchtime in California’s San Joaquin Valley, farmers meet up at Jack’s Prime Time Restaurant, where they can get a good, honest meal … just what one expects from an establishment smack dab in the middle of the most productive farming region in the world.
But the mood at Jack’s is decidely somber. A few days earlier, the farmers in these parts were told not to expect any federally supplied water this year due to a third year of drought and low levels in the reservoirs. Without water, they can’t plant their lettuce and tomatoes, and they may lose parts of their precious almond and pistachio orchards. All this land flourished with water brought from hundreds of miles away, snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada.
Is the U.S. West going the way of parched Australia?
The drought-induced infernos which ravaged parts of Australia earlier this year may be a harbinger of the water challenges coming to the American West.
”Think of that (Australia) as California’s future,” water researcher Heather Cooley of California’s Pacific Institute told my colleague Peter Henderson. You can see his report, part one of our series on water scarcity in the U.S. West, here.
Wall Street Journal of Atmospheric Sciences: Reply to Jenkins
Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”; this is a reply to a blog by Holman Jenkins, a Wall Street Journal columnist and member of the WSJ editorial board. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.
Mr. Jenkins replies that the clarification of his perplexing column is reiteration of his original sentence “…We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability…”
from UK News:
UK minister in a spin over climate change doubters
As a top-flight racing driver, Britain's Science Minister Paul Drayson may seem an unlikely critic of the auto industry.
The self-confessed "car nut" owns a motor racing team and competes in a 200mph Aston Martin in competitions around the world.
In Peru, the hills come tumbling down
It’s summer in Peru and the mudslides are back, eroding barren hillsides on the western slopes of the Andes. The huaicos, as they are known in Peru, create rivers of mud and carry giant boulders with them that knock down everything in their path, from houses to bridges.
On Sunday, on the eastern fringe of Lima, Peru’s capital, three mudslides tore through the towns of Chosica and Chaclacayo. A 15-year-old teenager, Johani Lucero Vasquez, dared to wade across a slide and was swept away. Her body was found 9 kilometers downstream. Debris washed onto the country’s main highway that crosses the Andes, shutting it for six hours in both directions.
Climate change making U.S. forests quieter?
Add quieter U.S. forests, woods, and backyards to the list of changes our lives could face from climate change. A piece by my colleague Deborah Zabarenko explores the movement of American birds northward, sometimes hundreds of miles into Canada.
An Audubon Society study of citizen observations that took place over 40 years found that 58 percent of 305 bird species found on the continental U.S. shifted significantly to the north as temperatures warmed. Forest and feeders birds, like finches and chickadees, moved deep into the Canadian Boreal Forest.
California climate chief has global warming plan
California looks ready to get the go-ahead to regulate greenhouse gases from cars, after President Obama on Monday told the EPA to reconsider a Bush administration refusal. California’s top climate official, California Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols, last week predicted the okay would be ready to go by May. In the attached video, from the interview last week, she talks about California’s grand plans, which are the most aggressive in the United States.
For Reuters full environment coverage, check our stories here.
Will Obama see the forest for the trees?
A Chinese campaigner has urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to prove his green credentials, asking him to offset the emissions generated by his inauguration by funding a forest in China.
A carbon fund named “Obama, future” could invest in increased forest coverage in another country and Obama himself could plant a tree there, Lin Hui said in an open letter, published on www.ditan360.com. Lin hopes that country will be China.
How much electricity do you use in a year?
It was a disarmingly simple question but, embarrassingly, I didn’t have a clue when first asked that 18 months ago. Even though I’d have to describe myself as a genuine tightwad when it comes to expenditures, I simply had no idea, strangely enough, about how much money my four-person household was spending on electricity — nor how much carbon dioxide was being produced.
Now, after a year of carefully tracking the daily use of electricity, I’ve discovered a bit about when and where power is being used and, in theory, saved — without much pain. It seemed like a no-brainer and it honestly was not hard to cut our consumption by 1,000 kilowatt hours in 2008 to 5,000 kWh — saving about 200 euros and 500 kg of CO2 in the process. There were only minor sacrifices: rigidly turning off “standby” switches and unused lights, pulling plugs on little-used appliances, putting in energy-efficient lightbulbs, using the washing machine sparingly and the dryer only rarely, and replacing an inefficient dishwasher with a low-energy model.
