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Emission: Very, Very Possible

After two days and a night of negotiations at a climate change conference in New Delhi, India, developing countries left with a victory on Friday: The final wording of the main document coming out the meeting did not require the countries to commit to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions at any point in the future. […]

Eye Spy

In an effort to catch environmental violators with their pants down, a deep-pocketed environmentalist armed with a digital camera and a helicopter is snapping photos of every inch of California’s 1,100-mile coast and posting them on the Internet. The two-week-old website will eventually contain about 13,000 images, all taken in 2002 by Ken Adelman with […]

Sunken Ships, Loose Lips

Toxic goop leaking from more than one thousand sunken World War II vessels is threatening fish stocks, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and other tourist destinations. The South Pacific Regional Environment Programme has begun cataloguing the risks posed by the 1,080 wrecks, which are loaded with such toxic goodies as chemicals, ordnance, and oil. Last year, […]

Sand Witches

Growing demand for concrete and asphalt in southern California in the last three years is scarring Baja California’s once-sandy riverbeds. As much as 2 million tons of sand are being excavated, both legally and illegally, each year from Baja and then sent north to help with construction projects in the U.S. Eroding riverbanks, flooding, and […]

Cooked Vegetables

Nearly half of the world’s plant species could be facing extinction, say two leading botanists today in the journal Science. That finding contrasts sharply with a commonly cited assessment by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), which concluded that only 13 percent of the world’s plant species were at risk of vanishing. The new report argues […]

Umbra on crows

Dear Umbra, Is there a national increase in the crow population, or am I just noticing them more as I age? JimLa Jolla, Calif. Dearest Jim, Probably both. I’ll wager that you have become more observant as the years pass, but it’s also the case that, according to various bird counts and surveys, the American […]

Keep the Pedal From the Metal

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is barring off-road enthusiasts from one of their favorite playgrounds in Utah — but this time, it’s to safeguard their own health, not that of the environment. At Manning Canyon, a recreation area near Salt Lake City, the soil is contaminated with arsenic, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals […]

Presto Change-o

Frogs are changing genders — and it ain’t just to Halloween getup. The most popular weed-killer in the U.S. is causing sex changes in frogs, according to a summary of a new study published today in Nature. The study, led by Tyrone Hayes, a biologist with the University of California at Berkeley, contains the first […]

Sites for Sore Eyes

High-priority toxic waste clean-ups at seven sites in the U.S. will be left incomplete this year due to Superfund shortages, according to a report by the U.S. EPA’s inspector general. The sites include two former wood-treatment facilities in Texas that are leaching chemicals into nearby water supplies, an abandoned copper mine in Vermont polluting a […]

Taps

Contaminants found in the tap water in California’s largest cities could pose risks to children, pregnant women, and people with compromised immune systems, according to a new study from the Natural Resources Defense Council. The findings in the report, “What’s on Tap,” were the result of a review of tap-water data from 19 cities in […]