Direct and indirect employment, as of 2013-2014, in the global renewable energy industry.
In a report Tuesday, Environment and Climate Change Canada said the 51 separate herds [of boreal caribou] across the country remain under pressure from human and natural disturbances to their habitat more than five years after the federal and provincial governments concluded a protection agreement.
The range of the boreal caribou extends across the country from Yukon to Labrador, but its forest habitat has been increasingly disturbed by industrial activity such as forestry, mining and oil and gas development, as well as by forest fires, the spread of pests and other impacts of climate change.
Every year a dead zone forms in the Gulf of Mexico. This year’s dead zone is the largest on record.
From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
“Nitrogen and phosphorus pollution enters the Mississippi [River] throughout its watershed, which includes runoff from the Midwest cropland and factory livestock and chicken farms, and pollutants from sewer systems and septic tanks in other locations...The lighter freshwater containing the nutrients creates a layered effect when it reaches the Gulf and the nutrients trigger blooms of phytoplankton - microscopic marine algae - in the spring and summer. The fresher, warmer water in the upper layer is separated from the saltier, colder water in the lower layer, resulting in a barrier to the normal diffusion of oxygen from the surface to the bottom... When the algae dies and sinks to the bottom, it decomposes, using up oxygen in the deeper heavy saltwater and creating dead zone conditions. Those conditions don't change until wind or weather, especially tropical storms or hurricanes, mix the freshwater at the surface into the saltier water.”
A monitoring cruise measured a dead zone of 8,776 square miles, “4 1/2 times the size of the of the goal of about 1,950 square miles set by the federal-state Mississippi River Nutrient/Hypoxia Task Force.” The result are marine life, such as crabs and crustaceans, that die due to oxygen deprivation.
The eclipse fingerprint on solar panels in Missoula, MT.
Source: https://twitter.com/mfrank406/status/899986864303611905
Elephant populations are in decline throughout Africa largely due to poaching. Poaching is a problem in all regions of Africa, but especially severe in western and central Africa.
A lacy, cloud-like pattern drifting across a Denver-area radar screen turned out to be a 70-mile-wide (110-kilometer) wave of butterflies, forecasters say... An unusually large number of painted ladies, which are sometimes mistaken for monarch butterflies, has descended on Colorado’s Front Range in recent weeks, feeding on flowers and sometimes flying together in what seem like clouds.
Once just an alluring pet, the ravenous lionfish is now a predatory threat to reefs in the Atlantic. Learn more: to.pbs.org/2c3CjnU
Preparedness for climate change (top) and coastal flooding (bottom), from States at Risk
Look at that wind and solar growth
Change in mean sea level over the past two decades. The lull in 2011 was the result of La Nina, not a pause in climate change.
A visual exploration of environmental problems, movements and solutions.
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