Nanoscavengers could usher in next generation water purification

Andrew Myers in Stanford Engineering News: Among its many talents, silver is an antibiotic. Titanium dioxide is known to glom on to certain heavy metals and pollutants. Other materials do the same for salt. In recent years, environmental engineers have sought to disinfect, depollute, and desalinate contaminated water using nanoscale particles of these active materials. Engineers call them nanoscavengers. The hitch from a technical standpoint is that it is nearly impossible to reclaim the nanoscavengers once in the water.

In a paper published online May 14 in the journal Nature Communications, an interdisciplinary team of engineers at Stanford University announces it has developed a new type of nanoscavenger with a synthetic core that is ultraresponsive to magnetism, allowing the easy and efficient recovery of virtually every one of the nanoscale purifiers.

“In contaminated water, nanoscavengers float around, randomly bumping into and killing bacteria or attaching themselves to the molecular pollutants they are after,” said Shan Wang, the study’s senior author and a professor of material science and engineering and jointly of electrical engineering. “When the contaminants are either stuck to the nanoscavenger or dead, the magnet is turned on and the particles vanish.”

...In their natural state, the new nanoscavengers are not magnetic and would not be attracted to another magnetic material. When the composite discs are exposed to a strong magnetic field, however, the magnetism of the two opposing fields turn into alignment, not just becoming magnetic but compounding the magnetic effect.

In doing so, the nanoscavengers become ultraresponsive to magnetism, far more so than the base iron oxide used in today’s technologies. The Stanford team has dubbed its advance with the oxymoronic name: “synthetic antiferromagnetic cores.” The prefix anti- in this case means in opposite direction, not non-magnetic....

The disc-like synthetic nanoscavengers collected magnetically. (Image: Mingliang Zhang, Stanford School of Engineering.)

Mount Everest's glaciers shrinking at increasing rate, say researchers

Jason Burke in the Guardian (UK): Global warming is melting snow and ice on the world's highest mountain at an accelerating rate, researchers have claimed.

A study by a team led by a Nepali scientist at the University of Milan has found that glaciers on or around Mount Everest have shrunk by 13% in the last 50 years with the snow line 180 metres higher than it was 50 years ago. The glaciers are disappearing faster every year, it says.

The 60th anniversary of the first ascent of the 8,848 metre (29,028ft) peak by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay will be celebrated next week.

The researchers say they suspect that the decline of snow and ice in the Everest region is a result of changes in global climate caused by human-generated greenhouse gases. However, they have not yet established a firm connection, Sudeep Thakuri, who led the team, said.

The landscape around Mount Everest has changed dramatically since the world's highest mountain was first climbed. Mountaineers now report more rock and less snow and ice on well known routes. The ends of glaciers around the peak have also retreated by an average of 400 meters since 1962, the new research found, and some smaller glaciers were now nearly half the size they were in the 1960s.

The researchers used satellite imagery of the peak and the 713-square-mile Sagarmatha national park around the mountain as well as long-term meteorological data....

The Drang-drung glacier in Ladakh, shot by Wildchild826, public domain

NOAA predicts active 2013 Atlantic hurricane season

NOAA: In its 2013 Atlantic hurricane season outlook issued today, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is forecasting an active or extremely active season this year. For the six-month hurricane season, which begins June 1, NOAA’s Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook says there is a 70 percent likelihood of 13 to 20 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher), of which 7 to 11 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 3 to 6 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of 111 mph or higher).

These ranges are well above the seasonal average of 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes.

“With the devastation of Sandy fresh in our minds, and another active season predicted, everyone at NOAA is committed to providing life-saving forecasts in the face of these storms and ensuring that Americans are prepared and ready ahead of time.” said Kathryn Sullivan, Ph.D., NOAA acting administrator. “As we saw first-hand with Sandy, it’s important to remember that tropical storm and hurricane impacts are not limited to the coastline. Strong winds, torrential rain, flooding, and tornadoes often threaten inland areas far from where the storm first makes landfall.”

Three climate factors that strongly control Atlantic hurricane activity are expected to come together to produce an active or extremely active 2013 hurricane season. These are:

• A continuation of the atmospheric climate pattern, which includes a strong west African monsoon, that is responsible for the ongoing era of high activity for Atlantic hurricanes that began in 1995;
• Warmer-than-average water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea; and
• El Niño is not expected to develop and suppress hurricane formation.

Hurricane Sandy, October 28, 2012

Calls mount for disaster risk management for businesses

Rendi A. Witular in the Jakarta Post: Disasters are having a growing impact on businesses.  The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the Chao Phraya River floods in Thailand have focused attention on the growing impact of disasters on the private sector.

Businesses suffer direct losses when they have invested in locating factories, offices, plants, warehouses and other facilities in locations exposed to hazards such as floods, cyclones, earthquakes or tsunamis, without adequately investing to reduce the risks.

Aimed at making the world a safer place, policy makers and business leaders from around the world gathered in Geneva from May 19 to 23 for the Fourth Session of the Global Platform conference on disaster risk reduction held by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR).

Attended by around 4,000 representatives of governments, businesses, NGOs, scientists and academics, the forum is expected to mobilize resources to create awareness and ways to reduce risks stemming from disasters.

“This gathering shows the cross-cutting nature of disaster risk reduction. The representatives are the keys to building resilience to disasters and making our communities safer. This is our collective and shared responsibility,” said United Nations deputy secretary-general Jan Eliasson on Tuesday. Eliasson explained that no country had a leading model of disaster risk reduction....

A 1916 train derailment in France

African soil diversity mapped for the first time

Bernard Appiah in SciDev.net: A team of international experts has drawn up the Soil Atlas of Africa — the first such book mapping this key natural resource — to help farmers, land managers and policymakers understand the diversity and importance of soil and the need to manage it through sustainable use.

They say that despite soil's importance, most people in Africa lack knowledge about it, partly because information about it tends to be confined to academic publications read only by scientists. "There was an existing database on soil that had not been updated by soil science experts from Africa, so we asked them to provide us with new information, which we translated into a form understandable to key stakeholders," says Arwyn Jones, a member of the soil team at the Land Resource Management Unit of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, which produced the atlas.

The project began four years ago, and involved experts from the European Commission, the African Union and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The atlas was released at the meeting of the African Union and European Union commissions in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, last month (25–26 April).

Robert Zougmoré, regional programme manager for West Africa at the CGIAR research programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, says the atlas displays the diversity of African soil for both agricultural and non-agricultural purposes. "We documented all the different types of soils and mapped them so that our decision-makers at national and regional levels can use the maps to decide where to invest in terms of food production and urbanisation," he says....

Image from http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/library/maps/africa_atlas/index.html

Prepare now or face flooding, report warns Jersey Shore

Kirk Moore in USA Today via the Asbury Park Press: ...The economic fallout from Hurricane Sandy will be the future of the Barnegat Bay region for decades to come unless communities do more to prepare for sea-level rise, say Rutgers University researchers whose new report focuses intently on the economic risks from climate change for New Jersey's Ocean County.

For communities like Beach Haven West, it's an ominous warning that former marshlands converted to resort housing in the 1960s — and now, year-round homes — will be hit again and again without new investments to keep neighborhoods safer from high-water storms. Those measures could include both "hard" public works, like improved drainage systems and wave barriers, and "soft" projects like restoring wetlands as storm buffers, the report says.

"The biggest thing we run into is people are confused: 'Do I have to raise my house or not?' " said Pastor Drew Overgard of Cedar Run Assembly of God in West Creek, N.J., which sponsors volunteer teams that are rebuilding homes in Beach Haven West. Coordinated by churches of the Southern Ocean County Community Resource Center, the work crews are trying to make homes habitable again for seniors, the uninsured and under-insured.

..."It's not just sea-level rise," said Robin Leichenko, an economic geographer with Rutgers who led the climate impact project. "There's a whole fleet of things people need to think through," such as longer droughts and forest fire seasons in the Pine Barrens," a heavily forested area of coastal plain that stretches across more than seven counties in southern New Jersey....

Sunset at Barnegat Bay, shot by Andrew Bossi, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Why we need to put the fish back into fisheries

Space Daily via SPX: Overfishing has reduced fish populations and biodiversity across much of the world's oceans. In response, fisheries are increasingly reliant on a handful of highly valuable shellfish. However, new research by the University of York shows this approach to be extremely risky.

The research, published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, shows that traditional fisheries targeting large predators such as cod and haddock, have declined over the past hundred years. In their place, catches of shellfish such as prawns, scallops and lobsters have rocketed as they begin to thrive in unnaturally predator-low environments often degraded by the passage of trawls and dredges.

In many places, including the UK, shellfish are now the most valuable marine resource. The research by the Environment

Department at York suggests that although a shellfish-dominated ecosystem appears beneficial from an economic perspective, it is highly risky. Like simplified agricultural systems, these shellfisheries are unstable in the long-term and at great risk of collapse from disease, species invasions and climate change.

Warming and acidification of our oceans due to greenhouse gas emissions is expected to affect shellfish worst. Ocean acidification, in particular, will limit the ability of scallops and other shellfish to form proper shells, and lead to widespread mortality....

Shellfish on a beach, shot by Titus Tscharntke, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Growing peas and greens to maximise water usage in Kenya

Miriam Gathigah in IPS: Amid warnings that Kenya’s agricultural water use is surpassing sustainable levels and adversely affecting food security, biodiversity researchers say that agrobiodiversity should be considered as a vital tool to combat this.

“In order to feed the nation, the country must explore agrobiodiversity, specifically (the growing of) vegetables and fruits, which have been neglected in favour of maize,” Mary Abukutsa-Onyango, a professor of horticulture at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, told IPS.

As climate change continues to wreak havoc on rainfall patterns, resulting in intermittent prolonged dry spells across this East African nation, vegetables present the best alternative to maize because they do not require large amounts of water.

The 2012/2013 Kenya country brief by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations stated that the “October to December ‘short-rains’ season performed poorly … (and) a series of dry spells also caused poor germination … leading to wilting and drying out of crops.”

According to the United States Agency for International Development Kenya, this nation is “classified among the most water scarce countries in the world.” And government statistics indicate that 13 million Kenyans lack access to improved water supply.

“In Kenya, and by extension Africa, desertification and water scarcity are a major threat to agriculture and to pastoralist communities. Strategies such as irrigation, water harvesting and conservation, and tree planting must be revamped,” Nashon Tado, of the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Horn of Africa and Yemen office, told IPS....

Watering livestock in Kenya, USAID photo

World on course to run out of water, warns Ban Ki-moon

John Parnell in the Guardian Environment Network via RTCC: Ban Ki-moon has warned the world is on course to run out of freshwater unless greater efforts are made to improve water security.

Speaking on the UN's International Day of Biological Diversity, Ban said there was a "mutually reinforcing" relationship between biodiversity and water that should be harnessed.

"We live in an increasingly water insecure world where demand often outstrips supply and where water quality often fails to meet minimum standards. Under current trends, future demands for water will not be met," Ban said.

Water, food, energy and climate are all linked. Most forms of energy generation require water, variable weather is making agriculture harder while extreme weather events are hindering natural water storage.

Ban believes there is an opportunity to address these challenges as the Millennium Development Goals are replaced with a new set of objectives….

Lake Vianden, a reservoir in Belgium, shot by Vincent de Groot - http://www.videgro.net, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Amazon River exhales virtually all carbon taken up by rain forest

Terra Daily via SPX: The Amazon rain forest, popularly known as the lungs of the planet, inhales carbon dioxide as it exudes oxygen. Plants use carbon dioxide from the air to grow parts that eventually fall to the ground to decompose or get washed away by the region's plentiful rainfall.

Until recently people believed much of the rain forest's carbon floated down the Amazon River and ended up deep in the ocean. University of Washington research showed a decade ago that rivers exhale huge amounts of carbon dioxide - though left open the question of how that was possible, since bark and stems were thought to be too tough for river bacteria to digest.

A study published this week in Nature Geoscience resolves the conundrum, proving that woody plant matter is almost completely digested by bacteria living in the Amazon River, and that this tough stuff plays a major part in fueling the river's breath.

The finding has implications for global carbon models, and for the ecology of the Amazon and the world's other rivers.

"People thought this was one of the components that just got dumped into the ocean," said first author Nick Ward, a UW doctoral student in oceanography. "We've found that terrestrial carbon is respired and basically turned into carbon dioxide as it travels down the river."

NASA image of the Amazon River

Matt Ridley has joined the real climate debate

A trenchant response by Myles Allen to his study, now being cited by gung-ho denialists everywhere. From the Environment blog in the Guardian (UK): It isn't often, as a climate scientist, that you find your research being enthusiastically endorsed by climate sceptic Matt Ridley in the Times. We published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday giving a new best estimate of 1.3C for the warming expected at the time in the future when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaches double the level it did before the industrial revolution (known as Transient Climate Response, or TCR).

Ridley is excited about this, because he feels it means that until his teenage children reach retirement age, they won't have to worry about global warming. And he is worried that government policies are misguided because they place their faith in climate models, like one of the Met Office models that puts the warming instead at 2.5C, almost twice our estimate.

But no one places their faith in any single climate model, and no one has done so for 20 years. Climate scienitsts are all well aware the Met's model (HadGEM2) is at the top end of the current range. The Met Office's advice to government is based on the range of results from current climate models, not just their own.

The relevant comparison is not with the 2.5C response of one model, but with the average of climate models used by the UN's climate science panel in its upcoming major report, which is 1.8C. Now 1.3C is 30% less than 1.8C, but this is hardly a game changer: at face value, our new findings mean that the changes we had previously expected between now and 2050 might take until 2065 to materialise instead. Then again, they might not: 1.8C is within our range of uncertainty; and natural variability will affect what happens in the 2050s anyway.

Despite this, our study seems to be being enthusiastically cited by Ridley and climate sceptics the world over as final endorsement of their position. If this means their position is that the most likely response is 30% lower than the average of our current models, then perhaps the debate on global temperature is indeed over: 30% is well within the range of uncertainty anyway. But that doesn't mean all debate about climate is over.

Is Ridley right that there is no actual evidence of harm as long as droughts, floods and storms are within historic variability? Try explaining to a casino bouncer that it doesn't matter you are using loaded dice because a triple-six is within historic variability – but that is a different story.

Where Ridley may well be right is that if you are confident that citizens of 2065 will be rich enough and smart enough to cope with whatever we bequeath to them; or if you really don't care about unborn generations anyway (what have unborn generations ever done for me?); or if, like Bjorn Lomborg, you discount future damages to give very little weight to anything that happens after 2065; or if you firmly believe that the "second coming" will occur before 2065 anyway – then there probably isn't much point in trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. These are perfectly coherent ethical positions: they don't happen to be positions that I subscribe to, but if that is what Ridley thinks, so be it....

Iceberg west of Ilulissat inlet, Greenland, shot by Uta Wollf, Rodebay, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Oklahoma tornado spread destruction like a 'two-mile-wide lawnmower blade'

Gary Tuchman and Holly Yan in CNN: Even for a city toughened by disaster, Moore has never seen this kind of devastation. A massive, howling tornado pulverized a vast swath of the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, chewing up homes and businesses, and severely damaging a hospital and two elementary schools.

The storm carved a trail through the area as much as two miles wide and 22 miles long, officials said. The storm killed dozens, but amid the confusion of search and rescue efforts, a precise death toll was hard to come by. Hundreds of people were injured.

Firefighters, police, National Guard members and volunteers worked by flashlight overnight and into Tuesday morning, crawling across piles of debris in a determined search for survivors and victims. Air National Guard members brought in thermal imaging equipment to aid in the work.

Complicating their efforts: downed power lines, hissing natural gas pipes and so much debris blocking roads it was difficult to bring in heavy equipment to help.

Still, more than 100 people had been pulled from the rubble alive since Monday afternoon, the state Highway Patrol said. Early Tuesday, authorities asked news crews to move satellite trucks from the scene because the idling engines were making it difficult for rescuers to listen for the faint sounds of survivors beneath the rubble....

The Moore, Oklahoma tornado on May 20, 2013, shot by Ks0stm, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Could radio help mitigate climate change in the Congo Basin?

Babatope Akinwande of CIFOR in Thomson Reuters Foundation: Climate change is hitting the Congo Basin region hard and while communities there and in other parts of Africa struggle to adapt to rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, scientists are trying to help — using radio to spread the word.

For those living in urban areas, getting information is easy. But for forest dwellers, who are the most likely to be affected, it is more difficult because they are isolated by poor road infrastructure and a lack of such basic amenities as electricity, telephones and Internet access, said Anne-Marie Tiani, a senior scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research and coordinator of the COBAM project (Climate Change and Forests in the Congo Basin: Synergies between adaptation and mitigation).

“Radio remains the most dominant, affordable and accessible mass medium in Africa,” added her colleague, Denis Sonwa, explaining why the team decided it needed to find new ways to share research findings, rather than relying on text. “We wanted as wide an audience as possible,” he said. “And in the Congo Basin region, radio is still the most effective way to reach local communities.”

The radio program builds on CIFOR’s previous research activities on livelihoods and governance. The COBAM project covers Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo, aiming to provide policymakers and local communities with information to help implement policies and projects for adaptation to climate change and reduction of carbon emissions in the forests.

It covers livelihood activities, local institutions and trends in forest degradation and deforestation. It also analyzes with local communities the impacts of potential REDD activities on livelihoods and associated risks, opportunities and needed institutional changes....

NASA image of the Congo Basin

Bird flu costs China industry $6.5 billion, according to state media

AFP: China's human H7N9 bird flu outbreak has cost the country's poultry industry more than 40 billion yuan ($6.5 billion) as consumers shun chicken, government officials said, according to state media.

The sector has been losing an average of one billion yuan a day since the end of March, the Beijing Times said on Monday, citing Li Xirong, head of the National Animal Husbandry Service.

H7N9 avian influenza has infected 130 people in China, killing 35, since it was found in humans for the first time, according to latest official data.

Poultry sales have tumbled and prices plunged, Li said, causing major financial problems and job losses as a result.

Another agriculture ministry official, Wang Zongli, said government agencies should set a good example for the public by treating "poultry products in a correct way", the report added....

Hydropower frenzy threatens Carpathian mountains

Space Daily via AFP: The frenzy to build hydropower stations across the Carpathian mountains poses an "imminent" threat to biodiversity in Eastern Europe, conservationist group WWF warned Monday.

"The planned construction of thousands of hydropower stations across the Carpathian mountains presents an imminent threat to hundreds of streams and rivers", the WWF said in a press release, ten years after seven Eastern European countries signed a convention to protect the unique mountain range. Romania and Ukraine are particularly at risk from planned small-scale hydropower stations", Konstantin Ivanov, the head of communication for the Danube-Carpathian program, told AFP.

Small-scale hydro generally does not involve the construction of a dam. Instead, part of the flow is diverted through a pipe to a downstream turbine which generates the electricity.

In theory, this should not have a big impact on the environment. But in many cases pipes have been installed in the bed of the stream and diverted water amounts to as much as 80 percent of the flow, posing lasting threats to biodiversity, environmentalists say....

A brook in the Carpathian mountains of the Czech Republic, shot by Jan.Kamenicek, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Heatwave deaths in New York city could rise by up to 22%, study shows

Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian (UK): New York city could experience up to 22% more deaths from extreme summertime heat in the coming decade under global warming, according to a study of the impact of climate trends. The higher deaths will be partially offset by a reduction in deaths due to the milder winters predicted in Manhattan.

Overall, however, the net effect of the new temperature norms under climate change would be to increase weather-related deaths in New York city by up to 6.2% a year by the 2020s, according to the scientists.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, predicted oppressive summer temperatures would exact an increasingly heavy toll on people living in metropolitan areas such as Manhattan in the coming decades. The numbers would not be significantly offset by milder winters, the study found, and deaths due to extreme temperatures would rise more dramatically in the later decades of this century.

Without bold action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, heatwave deaths in New York city could rise by as much as 91% on 1980s levels by the 2080s, according to the study's projections. The net loss of life would be as much as 31% on 1980s levels, the study said.

"This is the first real study of the seasonal trade-off of climate change," Patrick Kinney, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University and one of the authors of the study, said. Kinney added: "What our study suggests is that the heat effects of climate change dominate the winter warming benefits that might also come: climate change will cause more deaths through heat than it will prevent during winter."...

East Houston Street in Manhattan, shot by David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license

Research into carbon storage in arctic tundra reveals unexpected insight into ecosystem resiliency

Science Daily: When UC Santa Barbara doctoral student Seeta Sistla and her adviser, environmental studies professor Josh Schimel, went north not long ago to study how long-term warming in the Arctic affects carbon storage, they had made certain assumptions.

"We expected that because of the long-term warming, we would have lost carbon stored in the soil to the atmosphere," said Schimel. The gradual warming, he explained, would accelerate decomposition on the upper layers of what would have previously been frozen or near-frozen earth, releasing the greenhouse gas into the air. Because high latitudes contain nearly half of all global soil carbon in their ancient permafrost -- permanently frozen soil -- even a few degrees' rise in temperature could be enough to release massive quantities, turning a carbon repository into a carbon emitter.

"The Arctic is the most rapidly warming biome on Earth, so understanding how permafrost soils are reacting to this change is of major concern globally," Sistla said.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers visited the longest-running climate warming study in the tundra, the U.S. Arctic Long-Term Ecological Research site at Toolik Lake in northern Alaska. This ecosystem-warming greenhouse experiment was started in 1989 to observe the effects of sustained warming on the Arctic environment.

What they initially found was typical of Arctic warming: low-lying, shallow-rooted vegetation giving way to taller plants with deeper roots; greater wood shrub dominance; and increased thaw depth. What they weren't expecting was that two decades of slow and steady warming had not changed the amounts of carbon in the soil, despite changes in vegetation and even the soil food web.

The answer to that mystery, according to Sistla, might be found in the finer workings of the ecosystem: Increased plant growth appears to have facilitated stabilizing feedbacks to soil carbon loss. Their research is published in the recent edition of the journal Nature.

"We hypothesize that net soil carbon hasn't changed after 20 years because warming-accelerated decomposition has been offset by increased carbon inputs to the soil due to a combination of increased plant growth and changing soil conditions," Sistla said....

Alaskan tundra, shot by Maisotti, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Bold action, big money needed to curb Asia floods

Space Daily via AFP: Asia's flood-prone megacities should fund major drainage, water recycling and waste reduction projects to stem deluges and secure clean supply for their booming populations, experts said Sunday.

Rapid urbanisation has heaped pressure on water resources and drainage systems across Asia, leaving low-lying areas exposed to massive floods such as those that paralysed Jakarta and Manila last year and central Thailand in 2011.

"The lust for land -- driven by urbanisation -- is narrowing drainage across most Asian cities so even small amounts of rainfall can cause massive problems," Kulwant Singh of the UN-HABITAT said at a water security forum in Thailand.

Citing the estimated $45 billion cost of the kingdom's catastrophic floods in late 2011, Singh said "there should be no question" of governments paying for big infrastructure projects to protect cities. "If ten years of wealth is suddenly wiped out, it makes sense to spend a fraction of that on long-term prevention," he added, urging consideration for ambitious prevention schemes.

Flood management has been in focus in Thailand since the 2011 floods, which inundated swathes of the country for months, deluged parts of the capital and tool a heavy toll on its lucrative manufacturing base....

Thailand flooding in October, 2011, photo by Voice of America

After Cyclone Mahasen, Myanmar camps face monsoon threat

The Times of India via AFP: Myanmar's victims of sectarian strife were spared the full force of Cyclone Mahasen, but many are now returning to flimsy tents in flood-prone camps with the monsoon just weeks away.

Myanmar's Rakhine state is pockmarked with makeshift settlements for up to 140,000 people -- mainly Rohingya Muslims -- displaced by sectarian unrest last year that claimed about 200 lives and saw whole villages razed.

Many were evacuated last week ahead of Cyclone Mahasen, which later veered into neighbouring Bangladesh. But most have now returned, according to Kirsten Mildren of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

"They are actually no better off than where they were last week before the storm," she said, adding the cyclone was simply a "dress rehearsal" for the rainy season -- set to hit in a few weeks.

Many of the camps consist of little more than ramshackle bivouacs of bamboo and tarpaulin flung up in soggy paddy fields.  Sanitation is a key concern. Rain last week left standing water in many of the camps and Mildren said water-born diseases such as cholera were a particular fear...

Cyclone Mahasen on May 13, 2013

Carbon Based at the beach!

Somewhat fatigued with the strain of nonstop adaptation, Carbon Based took a break over the past few days.

Of course, we didn't call it that. Ostensibly we were inspecting coastal infrastructure on Cape Cod, taking careful note of eroding dunes, crumbling seawalls, and other cheery mainstays of this blog.  On both the bay side and the ocean side, we visited sites of interest, including Ballston Beach in Truro, Masssachussetts, where the sea broke through a dune in March and rushed inland, imperiling the town itself.  A protective dune has since been rebuilt.

But really, we were being lazy. Taking pictures of some birds, then having a little nap.  Nibbling at some fried clams, followed by another walk on the beach. 

Scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change stands

Science Daily: A comprehensive analysis of peer-reviewed articles on the topic of global warming and climate change has revealed an overwhelming consensus among scientists that recent warming is human-caused.

The study is the most comprehensive yet and identified 4000 summaries, otherwise known as abstracts, from papers published in the past 21 years that stated a position on the cause of recent global warming -- 97 per cent of these endorsed the consensus that we are seeing human-made, or anthropogenic, global warming (AGW)

Led by John Cook at the University of Queensland, the study has been published 16 May, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters.

The study went one step further, asking the authors of these papers to rate their entire paper using the same criteria. Over 2000 papers were rated and among those that discussed the cause of recent global warming, 97 per cent endorsed the consensus that it is caused by humans.

The findings are in stark contrast to the public's position on global warming; a 2012 poll* revealed that more than half of Americans either disagree, or are unaware, that scientists overwhelmingly agree that Earth is warming because of human activity.

John Cook said: "Our findings prove that there is a strong scientific agreement about the cause of climate change, despite public perceptions to the contrary. There is a gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public perception. It's staggering given the evidence for consensus that less than half of the general public think scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. This is significant because when people understand that scientists agree on global warming, they're more likely to support policies that take action on it."

Caspar David Friedrich, Das Eismeer

Methane emissions higher than thought across much of US

University of California-Santa Barbara news release: After taking a rented camper outfitted with special equipment to measure methane on a cross-continent drive, a UC Santa Barbara scientist has found that methane emissions across large parts of the U.S. are higher than currently known, confirming what other more local studies have found. Their research is published in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, stronger than carbon dioxide on a 20-year timescale, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, though on a century timescale, carbon dioxide is far stronger. "This research suggests significant benefits to slowing climate change could result from reducing industrial methane emissions in parallel with efforts on carbon dioxide," said Ira Leifer, a researcher with UCSB's Marine Science Institute.

Leifer was joined by two UCSB undergraduate students on the road trip from Los Angeles to Florida, taking a primarily southern route through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and along the Gulf of Mexico. They used specialized instrumentation, a gas chromatograph, to measure methane. The device was mounted in the RV, with an air ram on the roof that collected air samples from in front of the vehicle.

"We tried to pass through urban areas during nighttime hours, to avoid being stuck in traffic and sampling mostly exhaust fumes," Leifer said. "Someone was always monitoring the chromatograph, and when we would see a strong signal, we would look to see what potential sources were in the area, and modify the survey to investigate and, if possible, circumnavigate potential sources."

...Previous methane studies have focused primarily on large-scale airborne data, which were challenging to separate from local sources, according to Leifer. In fact, clear identification of individual sources often could not be conducted, requiring computer models and other surface measurements....

Cross-country data superimposed over satellite data from SCIAMACHY and from GOSAT. Satellite data shows positive methane anomalies for the southern U.S. are centered on eastern Texas. From the UC-Santa Barbara website

Measure on Amazon sugar cultivation gains in Brazil Congress

Seed Daily via AFP: A bill that would allow increased sugar cultivation in the Amazon region has passed a key senate committee, in what activists decried as a major environmental setback. The measure, which still needs approval in the lower chamber of Brazil's Congress, authorizes sugar cultivation in deforested and savannah areas but not in untouched parts of the rainforest.

Marina Silva, an environmental activist, former cabinet minister and 2010 presidential candidate, called the bill's passage on Tuesday "a grave environmental setback" that "authorizes further deforestation to plant sugar cane."

Brazil is the world's leading producer of coffee, sugar cane, beef and orange juice, and is tied with the United States as the world's leading soy bean producer.

Senators supporting the bill say the country needs to increase sugar cane production to meet to future demand for both sugar and sugar-cane based ethanol. This would also boost the impoverished Amazon region's economy, they argue.

Environmentalists have long clashed with the agricultural lobby in the ongoing war over expanding Brazil's agricultural frontier....

Smoke from a Brazilian sugar cane factory, shot by Ramonbicudo, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

India develops cheap rotavirus vaccine

T.V. Padma in SciDev.net: An Indian vaccine against rotavirus — the leading cause of diarrhoea-related deaths in most developing countries — promises cheap home-grown protection while adding to the global basket of rotavirus vaccines, an international team announced.

Severe diarrhoea caused by rotavirus claims the lives of 453,000 under-five children worldwide each year. India tops the list, contributing to 22 per cent of the deaths or an estimated 100,000-163,000 each year. Half of India’s rotavirus-related diarrhoeal deaths are of less-than-a-year old infants.

The two internationally licensed oral rotavirus vaccines, GlaxoSmith Kline (GSK)’s Rotatrix and Merck’s Rotatec, are priced at US$ 40 per dose, but provided at US$ 2 per dose in poor countries under an arrangement with the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative (GAVI).

This week (14 May), scientists announced in New Delhi the results of third phase of clinical trials — involving 6,799 infants in three Indian states — of Rotavac, an oral vaccine based on a strain circulating in India and developed under an Indo-US partnership.

Rotavac reduced severe rotavirus-related diarrhoea cases by 56 per cent in infants under-one year, with protection continuing into the second year, K Vijayargahavan, secretary, Department of Biotechnology, told an international symposium....

Computer reconstruction of a rotavirus particle, by Dr Graham Beards, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Illegal logging poses greater threat to liberia's forest

AllAfrica.com via Heritage (Monrovia): A fresh report released by the environmental watchdog Global Witness indicates that illegal logging in Liberia is posing greater threat to the country's forest.

The Global Witness' report, which states that illegal logging is robbing several people in Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, substantiates the group's earlier report stating that last year in Liberia, "private use permits" were issued on a massive scale, allowing logging companies to claim more than 40 percent of the country's forests during a two-year period.

However, Global Witness' team leader for forest sector transparency, David Young, says, although the proportional scale of the problem was biggest in Liberia, the permits also pose a grave threat to Ghana, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Said Young: "The area involved proportionately in Liberia is much greater than in the other countries, so it was a much greater threat to Liberia's forests. But the systemic nature of them in the other countries, if not controlled, could lead to similar destruction."

Howbeit, the Global Witness' team leader for forest sector transparency added: "The good news in Liberia is that the president issued an executive decree in early 2013 to completely close down the private use permits, and she has promised criminal investigations and prosecutions where necessary. But that was back in January. We're now in May and we haven't seen much progress in that investigation and those prosecutions."...

A logging road in Liberia, shot by John Atherton, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license 

AccuWeather predicts busy Atlantic hurricane season

Doyle Rice in USA Today: Private weather firm AccuWeather has joined the parade of forecasting teams predicting a busy hurricane season in the Atlantic. In a forecast released this morning, AccuWeather expects that 16 named tropical storms will form, of which eight will be hurricanes.

A typical year, based on records that go back to 1950, has 12 tropical storms, of which seven are hurricanes, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Last year, 19 named tropical storms developed. A tropical storm has sustained winds of 39 mph; it becomes a hurricane when its winds reach 74 mph.

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season officially begins June 1 and includes all tropical systems that form in the Atlantic, Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico.

Unusually warm water across the Atlantic and Caribbean, along with less frequent wind shear, should result in an above-normal number of storms.

AccuWeather says three of the storms are predicted to make landfall in the USA. Florida is long overdue for a direct hurricane hit, according to AccuWeather meteorologist Dan Kottlowski. Though the state has been hit by named tropical storms in the past couple of years, he says, a direct hit by a hurricane has not occurred since Hurricane Charley in 2004...

August 30, 2012, had four storm systems brewing: Hurricanes Isaac, Ileana, and Kirk, with Tropical Depression 12 tagging along. From NASA

Floods could overwhelm London as sea levels rise - unless Thames Barrier is upgraded

Steve Connor in the Independent (UK): There is significant risk of London being hit by a devastating storm surge in the Thames estuary by 2100 that could breach existing flood defences and cause immense damage to the capital, a study of global sea-level rise has found.

Melting of polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers could increase sea levels significantly over the coming decades leading to a 1 in 20 risk that the existing Thames Barrier would be unable to cope with an extreme storm surge, the study concluded.

Extreme storm surges that can breach the barrier would in the past have occurred with a frequency of about 1 in 1,000 years, but in a warmer world they could occur as frequently as 1 in every 10 years, scientists said.

The increased threat posed by rising sea levels is one of the reasons why flood defences around the Thames estuary and the barrier itself will be strengthened.

An international panel of glaciologists and climate scientists said there is still huge uncertainty about how sea levels will change in the coming century as a result of climate change and its effect on polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers....

The Thames Barrier at night, shot by John Sparshatt, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Diplomatic cables reveal aggressive lobbying for genetically modified plants by US officials

Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian (UK): American diplomats lobbied aggressively overseas to promote genetically modified (GM) food crops such as soy beans, an analysis of official cable traffic revealed on Tuesday.

The review of more than 900 diplomatic cables by the campaign group Food and Water Watch showed a carefully crafted campaign to break down resistance to GM products in Europe and other countries, and so help promote the bottom line of big American agricultural businesses.

The cables, which first surfaced with the Wikileaks disclosures two years ago, described a series of separate public relations strategies, unrolled at dozens of press junkets and biotech conferences, aimed at convincing scientists, media, industry, farmers, elected officials and others of the safety and benefits of GM products.

The report offers a further glimpse of the power of the agricultural and biotech industries in America, after the supreme court came down on the side of Monsanto in its effort to enforce its patented GM soybeans....

Saudi Arabia sees more SARS-like virus cases

Al-Jazeerah.com: Saudi Arabia has confirmed four new cases of the SARS-like coronavirus in its Eastern Province, state media has reported, citing the health ministry.

The health ministry said that one of the four new cases had been treated and the patient had been released from hospital, while the three other new cases were still being treated, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Monday. 

On Sunday, Saudi Arabia said it had a total of 24 confirmed cases since the disease was identified last year, of whom 15 had died.

World Health Organisation officials visiting Saudi Arabia to consult with the authorities on the outbreak said on Sunday it seemed likely the new virus could be passed between humans, but only after prolonged, close contact....

The Gulf of Suez from orbit, via NASA

Urbanization and surface warming in eastern China

Space Daily via SPX: A recent study indicated that the urbanization in eastern China has significant impact on the observed surface warming and the temporal-spatial variations of urbanization effect have been comprehensively detected.

This work was led by YANG XiuQun, professor of meteorology in the Institute for Climate and Global Change Research, School of Atmospheric Sciences at Nanjing University. The article entitled "Urbanization and heterogeneous surface warming in eastern China" was published in Chinese Science Bulletin, 2013, No. 12.

Urbanization, as one of the most significant processes in land use/cover change, can not only alter surface vegetation distribution, but also affect surface energy and water balance.

Some previous studies indicated that urbanization has little impact on surface warming. However, recent investigations have suggested that urbanization plays an essential role in regional climate change.

China has been experiencing intensive urbanization since the 1980s. Due to close ties in social and economic aspects, single cities have expanded to form distinctive city clusters in eastern China, such as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Pearl River Delta (PRD) city clusters...

This shows moving spatial anomalies of seasonal mean surface air temperature trends for three types of filtering window sizes (?: 8 + 8 , ?: 12 + 12 , ?: 16 + 16 ) for (a) summer and (b) winter (Unit: C per decade). Credit: Science China Press.

Scientists find extensive glacial retreat in Mount Everest region

A press release from the American Geophysical Union: Researchers taking a new look at the snow and ice covering Mount Everest and the national park that surrounds it are finding abundant evidence that the world’s tallest peak is shedding its frozen cloak. The scientists have also been studying temperature and precipitation trends in the area and found that the Everest region has been warming while snowfall has been declining since the early 1990s.

Members of the team conducting these studies will present their findings on May 14 at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico – a scientific conference organized and co-sponsored by the American Geophysical Union.

Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snowline has shifted upward by 180 meters (590 feet), according to Sudeep Thakuri, who is leading the research as part of his PhD graduate studies at the University of Milan in Italy.

Glaciers smaller than one square kilometer are disappearing the fastest and have experienced a 43 percent decrease in surface area since the 1960s. Because the glaciers are melting faster than they are replenished by ice and snow, they are revealing rocks and debris that were previously hidden deep under the ice.  These debris-covered sections of the glaciers have increased by about 17 percent since the 1960s, according to Thakuri. The ends of the glaciers have also retreated by an average of 400 meters since 1962, his team found.

The researchers suspect that the decline of snow and ice in the Everest region is from human-generated greenhouse gases altering global climate. However, they have not yet established a firm connection between the mountains’ changes and climate change, Thakuri said.

...“The Himalayan glaciers and ice caps are considered a water tower for Asia since they store and supply water downstream during the dry season,” said Thakuri. “Downstream populations are dependent on the melt water for agriculture, drinking, and power production.”...

The north face of Everest, shot by Luca Galuzzi (Lucag), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Feds prepare for tough US fire season

Laurel Morales in KPBS: Federal officials told reporters Monday they are preparing for the worst this fire season. Severe drought conditions and beetle ravaged trees throughout the west combined with reduced firefighting budgets do not bode well for the coming weeks.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says the Forest Service will have 500 fewer firefighters this season. That’s five percent less manpower. Vilsack says 45 million acres across the country need to be thinned or treated. But he says his agency is managing on a billion dollars less than it had five years ago due to across the board budget cuts.

"There’s no question there will be fewer acres treated," Vilsack said. "There will obviously be fewer firefighters. There will be fewer engines. Hopefully we’ll be able to manage this situation and make sure that people are protected and properties protected. I mean that’s the ultimate goal."

Even though the eastern states have had a mild fire season, fire experts said it will be a different story for the west. "As we transition out of the what is typically the eastern southeastern fire season and into the western fire season. We’re confident we’re going to see above normal fire potential in those areas," said Jeremy Sullens, wildfire analyst for the National Interagency Fire Center. Out west there's been severe drought conditions in place for quite some time. Very little precipitation has occurred since the beginning of 2013...

A 1936 fire in the Pacific Northwest

Peru spares Amazon rainforest from oil and gas push

David Hill in the Andes to Amazon blog in the Guardian (UK): Peru has announced a bidding round for new oil and gas concessions but, contrary to what was initially expected, none of them are in the Amazon rainforest. Nine concessions are to be auctioned, energy company Perupetro declared recently, but all of them are offshore along Peru's Pacific Ocean coast.

This constitutes a significant change of plan by Perupetro which last September issued a statement that before the end of 2012 36 new concessions would be established. According to a presentation made to the World Heavy Oil Congress in Aberdeen in Scotland the same month, 27 of these concessions – totaling millions of hectares – would be in the Amazon.

...Perupetro's new chairman, Luis Ortiga Cuneo, who took over from Ortiz in December, told Peruvian press the reason for the postponement was a 'prior consultation law' approved by Congress in 2011. The law's stated aim is to give "indigenous or native peoples" the right to be previously consulted about development projects or "administrative or legislative" measures affecting their collective rights to their "quality of life, cultural identity or physical existence."

...Amazon Watch's Andrew Miller, currently in Peru, says the "sustained campaigns of local indigenous communities, their federations and international allies appear to have changed the government's calculus. Whereas in the past they promoted the oil rounds to international companies without advising communities, now they have to comply with the consultation law."

But others remain extremely skeptical. "The government has been granting concessions without doing consultations for 40 years and it'll be difficult to change now," says Jesus Castro Suarez, from Lima-based NGO Eco-Dess. "I suspect they'll find some legal device to avoid consulting people. This can't or shouldn't be described as a civil society victory."...

Amazon Rainforest, seen from the Alto Madre de Dios river, in Peru, shot by Martin St-Amant (S23678), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

African Development Bank renews support of climate change resilience with additional resources from Least Developed Countries Fund

AllAfrica.com via the African Development Bank: The African Development Bank, renewed its support for climate change resilience in Madagascar, Benin and Angola in accessing US $17.8 million of adaptation finance in the form of grants from the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) during the second quarter of 2013. It follows the approval last March of US $18.6 million for three water and sanitation projects.

Madagascar will receive US $6.2 million to promote climate change adaptation by ensuring (a) that agricultural water infrastructure planned with African Development Fund support is modified so as to be resilient in the face of climate change; (b) that the vulnerability of the agriculture catchment to cyclones and flooding is reduced, and (c) that local agricultural livelihoods are adapted to climate change through water management and health interventions.

Benin will receive US $7.2 million to allow flood control and climate resilience of agriculture infrastructures in Oueme Valley. Under this project, flooding risk mapping and climate resilient agriculture infrastructures like dykes will be promoted along with flood resistant grain storage systems.

Angola will receive US $4.4 million to increase the scope of the four pilot demonstration centres to climate change technology for sustainable development.

The Council of the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF), hosted under the Global Environment Facility (GEF), has approved financing totaling US $17.8 million for three agriculture and natural resource management projects. These projects aim at increasing the adaptation capacities of three African countries....

Global warming trends contribute to the spread of West Nile Virus to new regions in Europe

Newswise via the University of Haifa: Global warming trends have a significant influence on the spread of West Nile Virus to new regions in Europe and neighboring countries, where the disease wasn’t present before, according to a new study by the University of Haifa. The study was commissioned by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, which belongs to the European Union. The study found that rising temperatures have a more considerable contribution than humidity, to the spread of the disease, while the effect of rain was inconclusive.

“These results are an additional testament that global warming contributes to the outbreak of mosquito-borne and other temperature-sensitive vector-borne diseases. The indications to this are piling up in different parts around the globe”, says Dr. Shlomit Paz, who led this research. These findings were recently published in the online scientific journal, “Plos One”.

West Nile Virus is spread by mosquitoes that repeatedly bite infected birds. The potential threat the infection poses to man is the possibility of causing irreversible brain damage or even death through encephalitis or meningitis. The elderly and people with weak immune systems are most susceptible.

...The current study examined the link between daily temperature, humidity and precipitation data and West Nile incidence in Europe and neighboring countries. “We used statistical tools and found that as a result of heat waves, a dramatic increase in the number of cases resulted from increased activity of the virus and a growth of the mosquito population”, claims Paz. According to her, these results were seen in various countries....

A CDC electron micrograph of the West Nile virus

Ice-free arctic may be in our future

UMassAmherst Office of News & Media Relations: Analyses of the longest sediment core ever collected on land in the Arctic, recently completed by an international team led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, provide “absolutely new knowledge” of Arctic climate from 2.2 to 3.6 million years ago and show that with estimated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) similar to today’s levels, the Arctic was very warm, with no ice sheets.

“While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands. As if reading a detective novel, we can go back in time and reconstruct how the Arctic evolved with only a few pages missing here and there,” says Brigham-Grette.

Results of analyses that provide “an exceptional window into environmental dynamics” never before possible were published this week in Science and have “major implications for understanding the pacing and context of how the Arctic transitioned from a forested landscape without ice sheets to the ice- and snow-covered land we know today,” she adds.

Their data come from analyzing sediment cores collected in the winter of 2009 from under ice-covered Lake El’gygytgyn, the oldest deep lake in the northeast Russian Arctic. “Lake E” was formed 3.6 million years ago when a huge meteorite hit the Earth and blasted out an 11-mile (18 km) wide crater. It has been collecting sediment layers ever since. Luckily for geoscientists, it lies in one of the few Arctic areas not eroded by continental glaciers, so a thick, continuous sediment record was left remarkably undisturbed. Cores from Lake E reach back in geologic time nearly 30 times farther than Greenland ice cores that cover the past 140,000 years.

“One of our major findings is that the Arctic was very warm in the Pliocene [~ 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago] when others have suggestedatmospheric CO2 was very much like levels we see today. This could tell us where we are going in the near future. In other words, the Earth system response to small changes in carbon dioxide is bigger than suggested by earlier models,” the authors state....

NASA image showing the location of Lake El'gygytgyn

KFC China sales crash 36% in April on bird flu fears

Seed Daily via AFP: Sales of fast food giant KFC in China slumped an estimated 36 percent last month, according to parent Yum! Brands, as consumers shunned chicken due to the H7N9 bird flu outbreak in humans.

For Yum overall, which includes other restaurant chains such as Pizza Hut, Chinese same-store sales -- a measure of turnover in established outlets -- fell an estimated 29 percent in April, according to an exchange filing on Friday.

An outbreak of H7N9 avian influenza, found in humans for the first time, has killed 33 people in China since the government began reporting figures in late March, according to the official news agency Xinhua. Chinese cities have shut live poultry markets in response.

"Beginning the first week of April, publicity surrounding avian flu in China has had a significant, negative impact on KFC sales," Yum said. China is a key market for Yum, which has more than 4,200 KFC restaurants in the country...

Image shot by 陳炬燵, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

One-third of animal species will be hit by climate change, scientists warn

The Guardian (UK): One-third of common land animals could see dramatic losses this century because of climate change, scientists predict. More than half of plants could be hit the same way as habitats become unsuitable for numerous species. The collapse of ecosystems would have major economic impacts on agriculture, air quality, clean water access, and tourism.

Global temperatures are set to rise 4C above preindustrial levels by 2100 if nothing is done to stem greenhouse gas emissions. This could have a hugely destructive effect on thousands of common as well as rare and endangered species around the world, according to the researchers.

An estimated 57% of plants and 34% of animals were likely to lose half or more of their habitat range. But the damage would be greatly reduced if emissions were scaled down in time, the study shows. Losses are reduced by 60% if global warming is cut to 2% above preindustrial levels, with emissions peaking in 2016 and then being reduced by 5% a year. If emissions peak in 2030, losses are reduced by 40%.

Lead scientist Dr Rachel Warren, from the University of East Anglia's school of environmental science, said: "While there has been much research on the effect of climate change on rare and endangered species, little has been known about how an increase in global temperature will affect more common species....

A tree frog in Portland, Oregon, shot by CopyrightFreePhotos.HQ101.com, who has generously released the image into the public domain

Canadian oil company threatens the survival of Peru’s ‘Jaguar people’

Sarah Gilbertz in the Ecologist: The Yaquerana River in the Amazon rainforest marks the border between Peru and Brazil, but to the Matsés tribe, who live on both sides of it, this international border is meaningless. To them the streams, floodplains, and white-sand forests make up an ancestral territory that is shared by the entire tribe.

Today they are at risk of losing their land to a Canadian oil company which plans to cut hundreds of miles of seismic testing lines through their forest home and to drill exploratory wells.

There are around 2,200 Matsés living on the Peru-Brazil frontier in the Amazon rainforest. They hunt, fish and grow crops in their gardens; little is imported into their communities and most of what they need for survival comes from the rainforest. These communities live close to the riverbank, and every morning before the children go to school, they will join their parents and to catch the day’s fish.

....In 2012, the Canadian oil company Pacific Rubiales began to explore for oil on part of the Matsés’ ancestral land. The $36 million project will see hundreds of seismic lines cut through 700 sq km of forest, and wells drilled in search of oil, affecting the headwaters of three major rivers that are essential to the Matsés’ livelihoods.

The Matsés are worried about the future of their forest and their own survival. In a rare interview with Survival International, Antonina Duni Goya Nesho, a Matsés woman, said “Oil will destroy the place where our rivers are born.  What will happen to the fish?  What will the animals drink?”...