HANOI (AFP) – Polluted, crossed by busy shipping lanes, and disputed by many countries, the South China Sea has taken an environmental battering that threatens future food supplies, marine scientists have warned. In a decade the sea — at the heart of a densely populated and rapidly industrialising region — has lost 16 percent of its coral reefs and coastal mangroves and 30 percent of its sea grass, says the United Nations. Read More / Watch Video »
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PARIS (AFP) – A top British climate change official backed an embattled European Union scheme Friday to tax industrial carbon emissions, but also allowed for exceptions in highly competitive sectors.
Adair Turner, the newly-appointed head of Britain’s Climate Change Committee, also expressed skepticism toward the reliance on industry-wide agreements and new technology favoured by the United States for reducing the greenhouse gases that drive global warning. Read More / Watch Video »
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NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Organizers hope a gathering of governors this week will be as effective in addressing climate change as a similar event that launched the conservation movement a century ago. As many as 10 governors and leading experts on global warming plan to attend the conference Thursday and Friday at Yale University, and review state programs and develop a strategy to combat global climate change. Read More / Watch Video »
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HANOI (AFP) – The future food security of millions of people is at risk because over-fishing, climate change and pollution are inflicting massive damage on the world’s oceans, marine scientists warned this week.
The two-thirds of the planet covered by seas provide one fifth of the world’s protein — but 75 percent of fish stocks are now fully exploited or depleted, a Hanoi conference that ended Friday was told. Read More / Watch Video »
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In the recent documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, Senator Al Gore pointed out that the Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than anyone ever expected. More than this, once it has gone sea levels could rise by up to twenty feet. This would submerge Shanghai and displace about 40 million people crippling China’s economy.
The United States is also in line for catastrophic climate events. According to the Global Meltdown Domino Effect predictions, the eastern seaboard of the United States will be hit by a mega tsunami created by the eruption of Cumbre Vieja in the Canaries, and also will be subjected to a three feet deep blanket of ash caused by the eruption of Yellowstone. Read More / Watch Video »
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In the UK we often have the perception that natural disasters always seem to happen elsewhere in the world. The closest we seem to get is remote viewing of these events through our TV sets and after a while we may even become hardened to the disturbing images we see.
Take the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, it could never happen here… Or could it?
We believe that it will happen here and that it will be the first major disaster that the UK has to deal with as a result of global warming.
So how could it happen here? Read More / Watch Video »
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Freshwater pouring into northern oceans is slowly turning high-latitude waters less salty.
Shrinking ice sheets and melting glaciers are partly responsible for the freshening effect and if salinity levels continue to drop, this could pose a threat to shipping particularly cargo vessels.
Fluctuating salinity could potentially result from a normal periodical weather pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation index. If this index is high, seas in the north are less salty than average. Read More / Watch Video »
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Air pollution hugely increases the size of hail, and thus the amount of damage it can cause to crops and property, according to a study presented at the European Conference on Severe Storms.
The interaction of man-made particles with airborne ice could also interfere with the way heat is distributed in the earth·s atmosphere, with possible consequences for climate change, one of the study·s authors told AFP.
Like tornados, hail is generated by small-scale storms that are difficult to track, and thus almost impossible to forecast. While they rarely last more than a few minutes, they can be devastating. Read More / Watch Video »
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A report released earlier this year by the United Nations Environment Protection agency (UNEP) predicts that the river Euphrates could dry up by 2025.
The report indicated that due to global warming, lower rainfall and increased temperatures could cause the river to fail.
This is a step further on from a Japanese survey last year which concluded that the Euphrates could lose 41% of its flow volume due to reduced rainfall. Read More / Watch Video »
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A Toxic Red Tide algae bloom in Southern California coastal waters has produced record levels of a toxic acid, scientists have reported.
The chemical has been blamed in the deaths of numerous marine mammals and seabirds in recent months. Measurements from four coastal stations last month found the highest domoic acid concentrations at 27 micrograms per liter, said David Caron of the University of Southern California.
“I have never seen these kind of numbers before,” Caron said. Read More / Watch Video »
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A huge toxic “red tide” has spread out across the waters off southern China, contaminating seafood and posing a health risk for swimmers, state media reported Thursday. The algae bloom, which sucks the oxygen out of the water and kills marine life, has struck near Shenzhen, a booming city just across the border from Hong Kong, the China Daily newspaper said.
“This is the biggest red tide that has ever appeared off the city’s coast,” said Zhou Kai, a marine expert with Shenzhen·s municipal sea fishery environment monitoring station. “We strongly urge the public to stay away from the polluted sea areas and not eat sea products from there.” Read More / Watch Video »
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Over 10 percent of China’s farm land is contaminated, threatening the ability of the world’s most populous nation to feed itself, the official Xinhua news agency has said. Excessive fertilizer use, dirty water and solid waste were among the main pollutants, with heavy metals alone poisoning around 12 million tonnes of grain a year, the report said, quoting the Ministry of Land and Resources.
That pollution caused 20 billion yuan (US$2.59 billion) of annual losses.
In total, around 12.3 million hectares have been damaged, and the country is also losing large amounts of arable land to development as its cities expand, posing a “severe threat” to national food security, Xinhua quoted an unnamed ministry official saying.
China had already announced that agricultural land had shrunk by 306,800 hectares in the first 10 months of last year alone, to a total 121.8 million hectares. Read More / Watch Video »
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JERUSALEM – The Bible tells of earthquakes splitting open the hills of this holy city with apocalyptic fury, adding to the mayhem of battles and punctuating Jesus· crucifixion.
Now, a geological survey says the heart of biblical narrative, Jerusalem·s walled Old City, would be among the worst hit parts of the city in the event of another earthquake because it rests on layers of debris, not solid rock.
A natural disaster in the Old City could also bring devastating political aftershocks because it is the fiery heart of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Read More / Watch Video »
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The Patzael region in the Jordan Valley, just 20 kilometers north of Jericho, was touched by a small earthquake on Saturday night, registering 3.0 on the Richter scale, the second in two months.
On Sunday morning, researchers at Tel Aviv University presented a new study on the timeline of earthquakes throughout history.
No precise future earthquake dates can be extrapolated from the data, of course, but the researchers say one is on the way – as no major quake has hit the danger area between the Dead Sea and the Kineret in centuries. Read More / Watch Video »
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