About 40 years ago, a group of scientists met at the world’s first climate conference in Geneva and they raised the alarm about unnerving climate trends. Recently, more than 11,000 scientists again met at a conference and have signed a letter journal Bio science, calling for urgent climate challenge.
This is the largest number of scientists to explicitly support a publication calling for climate action. They come from many different fields, reflecting the harm our changing climate is doing to every part of the natural world.
The climate change skeptics would say well nothing has happened in 40 years so…
In recent years, coffee growers around the world have battled with disease, pests, droughts, and a lack of pollinators. Despite the fact that coffee is grown nearly everywhere, from South America to Africa to Asia, scientists worry that nearly half of this land won’t be able to generate harvests by 2050.
Coffee growers and coffee lovers have reasons to worry about the world’s caffeine supply. Coffee is susceptible to fungi, like Hemileia vastatrix(“coffee rust”), which damages the leaves, and to Colletotrichum kahawae, which destroys the fruit. It also succumbs to the coffee cherry borer, a small beetle that lays eggs…
Nowhere in Europe can compare with the pristine rivers, untouched forests and spectacular waterfalls of the Balkan Peninsula. Its 20,000km stretch of water between Slovenia and Albania — known as the Blue Heart of Europe — has become treasured as a hotbed of biodiversity.
But now that entire ecosystem is under attack. Nearly 3,000 hydropower dams and diversions are planned throughout the region, with 188 already under construction, threatening millions of people and hundreds of species.
Traditionally dams have been built for things like flood control, irrigation and power production — but they also disrupt river flows, degrade water quality…
If the viral video of a plastic straw stick in the nose of a sea tortoise was not enough for you to understand how a huge amount of plastic has entered our oceans and is a threat to sea life as well as us, let me hit you with some stats.
Each year 8 million metric tons of plastic enters our oceans. If we calculate closely it’s like dumping a truck full of rubbish every minute of the day for the whole year. …
