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Home » Topics » climate change (Page 10)

Oxfam warns food prices to soar due to climate change

Food market via AFP

PARIS — Staple food prices may double within the next two decades due to climate change and an increase in extreme weather including droughts and hurricanes, the anti-poverty group Oxfam said Wednesday. Oxfam warned current climate change research isn’t taking into account extreme weather events, which it warned could also…

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Democratic Party platform weakens commitment to climate change action

A polar bear. Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.

The Democratic Party’s 2012 platform no longer pledges to free Americans from the tyranny of big oil, dropping the prior platform’s hard-line support for renewable energy for an “all-of-the-above” strategy favored by President Barack Obama and his Republican rivals. While the platform does still call for an international deal to…

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In climate landmark, Arctic ice melts to record low

Arctic ocean via AFP

WASHINGTON — The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has melted to its smallest point ever in a milestone that may show that worst-case forecasts on climate change are coming true, US scientists said Monday. The extent of ice observed on Sunday broke a record set in 2007 and will…

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U.S. carbon emissions drop to 20-year low

Chimney via Shutterstock

US emissions of carbon dioxide blamed for climate change fell in 2011 and have slipped to a 20-year low this year as the the world’s largest economy uses more natural gas and less coal, data shows. The surprise drop from the world’s second biggest emitter comes despite the lack of…

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Climate change driving Australian fish south

spectatular jellyfish via Shutterstock

Australian scientists said Friday there was now “striking evidence” of extensive southward migration of tropical fish and declines in other species due to climate change, in a major ocean report card. Compiled by more than 80 of Australia’s leading marine experts for the government science body CSIRO, the snapshot of…

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Study: News networks largely ignored climate change during hottest month ever

A very sweaty man. Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.

Even amid July’s record-breaking heat wave, America’s most-watched news networks largely ignored the subject of climate change, according to a study by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters. Media Matters found that ABC and CNN were the worst offenders, with just 2 percent and 4 percent of their extreme weather…

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Europe braces as mosquitos venture north due to climate change

Behind air-tight doors in a lab in a southern French city, scientists in protective coveralls wage war against a fingernail-sized danger. Lurking in net cages is their foe: the Asian tiger mosquito, capable of spreading dengue fever and other tropical diseases in temperate Europe. First spotted in Albania in 1979, the black-and-white striped invader has gained a foothold on Europe's Mediterranean rim and is advancing north and west, according to captors' reports. Colonies are established in 20 European countries, in moderate climes as far north as Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. "The risk of disease is very low but it is growing," entomologist Jean-Baptiste Ferre told AFP at France's leading mosquito-control institute. "The more mosquitoes there are, the higher the risk." The Asian tiger mosquito -- Latin name Aedes albopictus -- can spread many kinds of viruses. They include dengue, which can result in a deadly haemorrhagic fever, as well as West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis and a painful disease of the joints called chikungunya. A. albopictus transmits the virus by taking blood from a sick person and handing on the pathogen the next time it takes a meal. The worry is that the insect will spread disease in Europe by biting infected people arriving from tropical countries where the viruses are endemic. In 2007, the tiger mosquito caused a home-grown outbreak in Italy of chikungunya, and in 2010, 10 locally-transmitted cases of dengue occurred in Croatia. That same year, two cases of each disease surfaced in southern France, prompting the alarm bells to ring loudly. From Montpellier, Ferre and his colleagues at the Entente Interdepartementale pour la Demoustication en Mediterranee (EID) monitor the spread with some 1,500 traps dotted around France, luring mosquitoes to lay their eggs. These provide insights into how A. albopictus is adapting to European life, with its varied habitats and cooler climate. Ferre points to maps that begin in 2004, when a tiny red dot represented the first settling of albopictus in France around Menton, near the Italian border. Year by year, the dot grows into red tentacles that probe north and west. The insect has a flight range of only about 200 metres (yards), so it hitch-hikes a ride in cars, trucks and traded goods. With climate change, "further expansion is probable," the journal Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases warned this year. That assessment is supported by scientists at Britain's University of Liverpool who point to warming trends in the Balkans and northwestern Europe. Asian tiger mosquitoes are aggressive and robust, able to breed prolifically in their short, 10-day lives. Feeding during the day, they can bite several people in quick succession, and their offspring can hatch even after long periods without water. Worse, the insect is a stealthy urban dweller. It does not need large, open bodies of water to reproduce, for it can lay its eggs in small, water-holding receptacles such as flowerpots, toys and blocked gutters, and this makes it much harder to fight. Since May this year, surveillance in France has thrown up 267 suspected dengue and chikungunya cases among people who had arrived from abroad, said EID project coordinator Gregory Lambert. The institute sometimes launches pre-emptive strikes if this can prevent the mosquitoes from spreading disease locally. It orders out insecticide trucks that spray streets in a 200-metre (650-foot) radius around the area where a case is notified. The operations take place before dawn, while most people are still in bed. "The imperative is to kill the mosquitoes before they transmit the disease," said Lambert. The war is unrelenting. "It is impossible to kill them all," said Anna-Bella Failloux of France's Pasteur Institute, one of the world's top centres for infectious disease. "Even if there is no mosquito around you, you still have eggs somewhere, waiting for the next rain."

Behind air-tight doors in a lab in a southern French city, scientists in protective coveralls wage war against a fingernail-sized danger. Lurking in net cages is their foe: the Asian tiger mosquito, capable of spreading dengue fever and other tropical diseases in temperate Europe. First spotted in Albania in 1979,…

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Eliot Spitzer: Why are we talking about ‘Obamaloney’ and ‘Romney Hood’?

Eliot Spitzer on Current TV screengrab

On his show Thursday night, Current TV host Eliot Spitzer lamented that the mainstream media was focused on “Obamaloney” and “Romney Hood” while ignoring warnings about climate change. “Silliness has taken over — the capacity to raise tough issues dissipated, if not gone entirely,” he said. “Climate change appears to…

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July hottest month on record in U.S.

A man wipes sweat off his head at a bus stop in New York via AFP

July was the hottest month in the contiguous United States since record-keeping began in 1895, government scientists have said, a trend that meteorologists attribute to climate change. The searing July heat contributed to a widening of troubling drought conditions, now affecting 63 percent of the nation, the National Oceanic and…

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Climate change to blame for extreme heat: NASA scientist

climate-change-melting-globe

Human-driven climate change is to blame for a series of increasingly hot summers and the situation is already worse than was expected just two decades ago, a top NASA scientist said on Saturday. James Hansen, who directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in the Washington Post that…

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