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Category: Environment

Conservation has a human rights problem. Can the new UN biodiversity plan solve it?

Conservation has a human rights problem. Can the new UN biodiversity plan solve it?

Inside Climate News reports: For decades, if not centuries, Maasai cattle farmers in Northern Tanzania have reared their animals alongside iconic wildlife species like cheetahs, lions and black rhinos. But that may change this year for a Maasai community living in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a park adjacent to Serengeti National Park and about the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The Tanzanian government, citing the growth in population of the Maasai and their cattle as the main threat…

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How fires across the world have grown weirder

How fires across the world have grown weirder

Daniel Immerwahr writes: The hundreds of bush fires that hit southern Australia on 7 February 2009 felt, according to witnesses, apocalyptic. It was already hellishly hot that day: 46.4C in Melbourne. As the fires erupted, day turned to night, flaming embers the size of pillows rained down, burning birds fell from the trees and the ash-filled air grew so hot that breathing it, one survivor said, was like “sucking on a hairdryer”. More than 2,000 homes burned down, and 173…

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Extreme heat in oceans ‘passed point of no return’ in 2014

Extreme heat in oceans ‘passed point of no return’ in 2014

The Guardian reports: Extreme heat in the world’s oceans passed the “point of no return” in 2014 and has become the new normal, according to research. Scientists analysed sea surface temperatures over the last 150 years, which have risen because of global heating. They found that extreme temperatures occurring just 2% of the time a century ago have occurred at least 50% of the time across the global ocean since 2014. In some hotspots, extreme temperatures occur 90% of the…

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The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation

The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation

A satellite captured large and small deforestation patches in Amazonas State in 2015. The forest loss has escalated since then. USGS/NASA Landsat data/Orbital Horizon/Gallo Images/Getty Images By Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, University of Florida; Cynthia S. Simmons, University of Florida, and Robert T. Walker, University of Florida Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they…

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Rare and ancient trees are key to a healthy forest

Rare and ancient trees are key to a healthy forest

Science reports: About 800 years ago, a giant oak tree in England’s Sherwood Forest helped shelter Robin Hood from the corrupt sheriff of Nottingham. Though the tale is likely a myth, the tree is not: It still stands as one of the world’s oldest oaks. Such ancient trees—some dating back more than 3000 years—are key to the survival of their forests, new research shows. Rare trees—some so scarce scientists have yet to find them—are also critical to forest health, another…

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A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

NPR reports: Late last year, just days after pledging to cut fossil fuels at international climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, the Biden administration held the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. On Thursday, a federal judge invalidated that sale in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the administration didn’t adequately consider the costs to the world’s climate. The administration used an analysis conducted under former President Donald Trump that environmental groups alleged was critically flawed. The decision represents…

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The Great Unconformity has baffled geologists for a century

The Great Unconformity has baffled geologists for a century

Motherboard reports: Scientists can reconstruct incredible details about bygone eras in Earth’s history using fossils, rocks, and other clues preserved in its crust. But sometimes, the absence of geological records is just as telling as their presence. The Great Unconformity, a missing chunk of time that appears in rocks across the world, is the ultimate example of this phenomenon. This giant lapse in Earth’s memory exceeds one billion years in some places, resulting in 550 million-year-old rocks sitting atop ancient…

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Earth is now a coalmine, and every wild bird is a canary

Earth is now a coalmine, and every wild bird is a canary

Kim Heacox writes: When the poet Mary Oliver wrote “Instructions for living a life,” she reminded us: “Pay attention. Be astounded. Tell about it.” This past autumn, wildlife officials announced that a bird, a male bar-tailed godwit, flew nonstop across the Pacific Ocean 8,100 miles from Alaska to Australia in just under 10 days. Fitted with a small solar-powered satellite tag, the godwit achieved “a land bird flight record”. But of course godwits have been doing this for centuries. Come…

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Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?

Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?

Nature reports: The missing earthworms were a sign. As archaeologist Harvey Weiss and his colleagues excavated a site in northeast Syria, they found a buried layer of wind-blown silt so barren there was hardly any evidence of earthworms at work during that ancient era. Something drastic had happened thousands of years ago — something that choked the land with dust for decades, leaving a blanket of soil too inhospitable even for earthworms. The drought hit in roughly 2200 BC, when the…

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Scientists find hints of a hidden mass extinction 30 million years ago

Scientists find hints of a hidden mass extinction 30 million years ago

Inside Science reports: Nearly two-thirds of mammal species in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula may have died off about 30 million years ago, a mass extinction that escaped detection for decades until now, a new study finds. During a time span known as the Eocene-Oligocene transition between 40 million and 34 million years ago, Earth’s climate shifted dramatically, with the planet growing cooler, ice sheets expanding and sea levels dropping worldwide. During the Eocene, Antarctica was covered by lush forests,…

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How long can humans survive?

How long can humans survive?

Tom Chivers writes: In the deep ocean, occasionally, a whale carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. Most of the time, in the state of nature, creatures have just about enough to survive. But the first creatures to find the whale have more food than they could ever eat. These scavengers live lives of extraordinary plenty — some of the smaller, faster-breeding species might do so for several generations. There is enough to go around a thousand times over….

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Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Justin McGuirk writes: The opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is problematic for many reasons, but there’s one that we rarely discuss. The ‘nature vs culture’ dualism leaves out an entire domain that properly belongs to neither: the world of waste. The mountains of waste that we produce every year, the torrents of polluting effluent, the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, the new cosmos of microplastics expanding through our oceans – none of this has ever been entered into the…

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After the wars in Iraq, ‘everything living is dying’

After the wars in Iraq, ‘everything living is dying’

Lynzy Billing reports: As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, the country remains awash in hazardous materials, such as depleted uranium and dioxin, which have polluted the soil and water. And extractive industries like the KAR…

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New data suggests a massive collapse of Antarctic’s Thwaites Glacier in as little as five years

New data suggests a massive collapse of Antarctic’s Thwaites Glacier in as little as five years

Jeff Goodell reports: One thing that’s hard to grasp about the climate crisis is that big changes can happen fast. In 2019, I was aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot-long scientific research vessel, cruising in front of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. One day, we were sailing in clear seas in front of the glacier. The next day, we were surrounded by icebergs the size of aircraft carriers. As we later learned from satellite images, in a matter of…

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Coal in America: A legacy of environmental catastrophe

Coal in America: A legacy of environmental catastrophe

James Bruggers writes: Along the winding, two lane road that leads to Tracy Neece’s mountain in Floyd County, Kentucky, there’s no hint of the huge scars in the hills beyond the oaks and the pines. Green forests cover steep slopes on each side of the road, which turns from blacktop to dusty gravel. Modest homes are nestled into the bottomlands along a creek with gardens that grow corn and zucchini under a hot summer sun. The first sign of the…

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