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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
A farming technique practised for centuries by villagers in West Africa, which converts nutrient-poor rainforest soil into fertile farmland, could be the answer to mitigating climate change and revolutionising farming across Africa.
How ambitious is the world? The Paris climate conference last December astounded many by pledging not just to keep warming “well below two degrees Celsius,” but also to "pursue efforts" to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C. That raised a hugely important question: What's the difference between a two-degree world and a 1.5-degree world?
Los remotos lagos en una zona perpetuamente libre de hielo de la Antártida muestran no sólo la firma química de los incendios forestales antiguos, sino también algunas pruebas mucho más recientes de la combustión de combustibles fósiles, según una investigación financiada por la Fundación Nacional de Ciencia (NSF por sus siglas en inglés) y publicada esta semana en la revista Geophysical Research Letters.
Hace unos meses, el Centros para el Control y Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC por sus siglas en inglés) publicó un mapa sorprendente que mostraba las partes de los EE.UU. que podrían albergar los mosquitos capaces de llevar el Zika. Muchos lectores, incluido yo mismo, pensaron: "El Zika podría venir a mi ciudad! ¡Podría venir a Connecticut! ¡O a Ohio e Indiana! ¡O al norte de California! ¡Ay Dios!"
Some 210 million years ago, Britain consisted of many islands, surrounded by warm seas. Europe at the time lay farther south, at latitudes equivalent to North Africa today. Much of Europe was hot desert, and at this point was flooded by a great sea – the Rhaetian Transgression.
Published in Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, the Bristol team's work is the most extensive study yet, based on more than 26,000 identified fossils, of the Rhaetian shallow sea sharks, bony fishes, marine reptiles, and other creatures. Unusually, five members of the team were undergraduates when they did the work, and this was part of a series of summer internships.
The team was led by Ellen Mears, now a postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh, and Valentina Rossi, now a postgraduate at the University of Cork.
Ellen Mears said: "I studied the shark and fish teeth, and found remains of at least seven species of sharks and four of bony fishes. The sharks were all predators, but some were quite small. The bony fishes were unusual because many of them were shell crushers."
A federal judge has ruled that the US Environmental Protection Agency is under no obligation to force pesticide makers to disclose supposedly 'inert' ingredients in their products - even where those ingredients are seriously hazardous to health or environment.
