Archive for the 'Environment' Category
84 killed in Deadliest-Ever Australian Wildfires
February 8th, 2009Via: MSNBC: Entire towns have been seared off the map by wildfires raging through southeastern Australia, burning people in their homes and cars and raising the death toll Sunday to 84, making it the country’s deadliest fire disaster. Victoria state Premier John Brumby described the fire zone as “hell on earth” after touring devastated areas […]
CHINA DECLARES DROUGHT EMERGENCY
February 6th, 2009Via: BBC: China has declared an emergency in eight northern and central drought-hit regions, where nearly four million people are suffering water shortages. Nearly half of China’s winter crop – some 10m hectares (24m acres) of wheat and rape seed – are also under threat. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao ordered all-out efforts […]
Chinese Earthquake May Have Been Caused by Dam
February 2nd, 2009Via: Telegraph: The 511ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line, and three miles from the epicentre, of the Sichuan earthquake. Now scientists in China and the United States believe the weight of water, and the effect of it penetrating into the rock, could have […]
ICE STORM: TOTAL ACTIVATION OF KENTUCKY ARMY NATIONAL GUARD
February 1st, 2009Via: Courier Journal: Gov. Steve Beshear deployed every last one of his Army National Guardsmen on Saturday, with his state still reeling after a deadly ice storm encrusted it this week. More than half a million homes and businesses, most of them in Kentucky, remained without electricity from the Ozarks through Appalachia, though temperatures creeping […]
Amateurs Are Trying Genetic Engineering at Home
December 26th, 2008The 21st-century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge […]
Toxic Ash Pond Collapses in Tennessee
December 25th, 2008This should do wonders for water quality in the region. Via: Scientific American: The residue of millions of tons of coal burning at Kingston Fossil power plant in the Watts Bar Reservoir in Tennessee burst the bounds of the pond in which it was contained, burying as many as 400 acres of land in up […]
Light Pollution: Our Vanishing Night
December 12th, 2008Clear skies at night here on the Farmlet are astonishing. They put the whole show on Earth into perspective. Owen is going to have great fun with a telescope here! Via: National Geographic: Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony—the light of the […]
UN Suspends Leading Carbon-Offset Firm
December 10th, 2008The main Magic-8 ball of the fart tax industrial complex is, itself, spewing BS. Via: Nature: As international climate talks began last week in Poland, the United Nations (UN) suspended the work of the main company that validates carbon-offset projects in developing countries, sending shockwaves through the emissions-trading business. Based in Oslo, Det Norske Veritas […]
South Australia to Buy ‘Critical Needs’ Water
December 8th, 2008IL suggested this story and wrote: Uh… no water. Just a bit of an emergency, no? Just got back from there and it is dry, dry, dry. And to top it off, most of the populace seem oblivious. I mean they know it doesn’t rain much and they’re in the driest state in Aust (I […]
Pollution Causing Feminisation of Males Across Multiple Species
December 8th, 2008Via: Independent: The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals. The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, […]
