Category Archives: Species loss

Arctic Spring Arriving Earlier

Researchers have found that spring is arriving in the polar regions considerably earlier, and they anticipate that the long-term effect will be that species from warmer climates will establish themselves further north, competing with and in some cases crowding out now-native flora and fauna. From the BBC: Spring in the Arctic is arriving “weeks earlier” […]

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84 Siberian Tigers Born in China

I figure readers would like to hear good news now and again. From PhysOrg: In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, three cubs are seen near their mother at the Siberian Tiger Park in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province. (AP) — Eighty-four Siberian tigers, among the world’s rarest animals, have been […]

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Bee Update

The sudden disappearance of bees from many colonies is arguably the most underreported environmental story. Varroa mites have devastated the feral bee population, and as a result, one-third of the crops in the US depend on commercial beekeeping operations (meaning bees are brought in to a farm solely for the purpose of fertilizing its crops). […]

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Why Fish Stocks Are in Danger: Subsidies

Ever since we learned that the perilous state of the oceans is a top 25 underreported story, we decided to our bit to rectify that by giving articles on the state of the seas more prominence. At current fishing rates, fish stocks will collapse by 2050. But why hasn’t the invisible hand interceded? If fish […]

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Top 25 Censored Stories

To clarify: this list of “censored,” meaning seriously underreported, articles is for 2007 and covers stories from roughly July 2005 through June 2006. I call you attention to it primarily because it’s important, but secondarily, because we actually discussed a few on this blog (they appear to continue to be underreported), despite the fact that […]

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Climate Change: From Denial to Lip Service?

The third installment of this year’s series of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is out, this one focusing on the level of corrective measures needed to counteract climate change and their likely cost. As we reported earlier (“Third IPCC Report: Compromised on Arrival“), each successive report is more and more politicized. This […]

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Larry Summers on Climate Change Realism

Larry Summers, in a Financial Times comment “We need to bring climate idealism down to earth“, takes up “the best is the enemy of the good” theme as it applies to global warming. He argues that the Kyoto accords haven’t accomplished much because neither the targets nor the penalties are binding, that carbon markets run […]

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Is Modern Agriculture Killing Bees?

Now and again, the press has reported on the disappearance of large numbers of bees, and the potentially dire implications, since a large proportion of US agricultural pollination depends on the efforts of bees brought in by beekeepers. Nattering Naybob gave us a disheartening reminder as well as a bit of useful background, which inspired […]

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Is Modern Agriculture Killing Bees?

Now and again, the press has reported on the disappearance of large numbers of bees, and the potentially dire implications, since a large proportion of US agricultural pollination depends on the efforts of bees brought in by beekeepers. Nattering Naybob gave us a disheartening reminder as well as a bit of useful background, which inspired […]

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Jeffrey Sachs on Species Loss

All the hubub about global warming seems to have driven the other environmental slow-motion-train-wreck, species loss, out of the news and the popular imagination. The story in brief, as reported by the Secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in a Reuters story, “Humans spur worst extinctions since dinosaurs:” “In effect, we are currently […]

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