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All tagged climatechange
Last week the Centers for Disease Control released some startling information about the bird flu virus, namely that it can be spread between cats and humans. The data appeared briefly online, then vanished.
A team of scientists led by Mary Hagedorn, a research scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute, have proposed an extreme idea to save endangered species: by storing them frozen on the moon. The proposal appears in the journal BioScience.
For weeks, bears in eastern Russia’s Amur region were having a hard time bedding down for the winter, as warm weather has kept the region unfit for hibernation. In a normal year, the bears will tuck in by the end of October, but the temperature didn’t drop until this week, so it’s time to say goodnight at last.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has taken nearly two dozen animal species off of the endangered list, and that’s bad news because it means there’s no hope for them. The animals – one mammal, 10 types of birds, two species of fish, and eight types of mussels – are too far gone to warrant protection.
In the Florida Keys temperature of the seawater topped 100°F, a mark never before recorded, anywhere. The extreme heat is killing off coral reefs at a terrifying rate. The Coral Reef Foundation reports that even their coral-restoration sites – nurseries intended to replenish the depleted reeds – are being cooked to death.
Due to climate change and related factors, a dozen or two bird species have expanded their ranges into New York City. Among them: The black vulture, a grim looking fellow with a five-foot wingspan who, in the old days, never strayed this far north.
There are 66 known emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica. The most recently discovered group, about 1000 adults with chicks on the West Antarctic coast, gave away their position to satellite cameras — with their guano.
Nearly all turtles born on Florida beaches over the past four years have been females. Climate change is to blame, as increasingly warming sand where turtle eggs incubate have churned out a 99% female-to-male ratio over that time.
There’s been at least five shark attacks in the Northeast over the past month, enough to temporarily close a few Long Island beaches to swimming. Shark panic is an annual summer tradition, but perhaps the uptick in bites is a good sign.
The odds are stacked against the tiny raptor known as the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl (Glaucidium brasilianum). The owl’s range in the US – in isolated chunks of the southernmost parts of Arizona and Texas – is under siege by development, invasive species, wildfires, and of course climate change.
This week New Zealand unveiled a draft plan to tax farm-based methane emissions in an effort to fight climate change, which is another way of saying that the country is putting a price on belching cows and sheep.
