Zimbabwe Cholera Death Toll Rises to 1,111, UN Says

By Mike Cohen and Frank Jomo

Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) — The death toll from a cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe has risen to 1,111, while 20,581 people are suspected to have contracted the disease, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“Major causes for the current outbreak continue to be a lack of clean drinking water and sanitation, weak health services” and an absence of medical staff, some of whom find it too expensive to travel to work, the agency said in an e-mailed statement from Geneva today. …

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World’s oceans turning acidic faster than expected

Acidification caused by carbon emissions could bring some oceans to a tipping point.

By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer/ December 18, 2008

Parts of the world’s oceans appear to be acidifying far faster than scientists have expected.

The culprit: rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere pumped into the air from cars, power plants, and industries.

The Southern Ocean represents one of the most high-profile examples. There, scientists estimate that the ocean could reach a biologically important tipping point in wintertime by 2030, at least 20 years earlier than scientists projected only three years ago. Among the vulnerable: a tiny form of sea snail that serves as food for a wide range of fish. …

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Water Footprint Network Launched

On 16 December 2008, the Water Footprint Network was launched at the Corporate Water Footprint Conference, in London (UK). Scientific Director Arjen Hoekstra presented the partner organisations and companies. This initial group organisations have fully endorsed the mission of the Water Footprint Network. The Water Footprint Network and its partners strive to develop and apply the Water Footprint to support the transition to sustainable and equitable water use and management globally. …

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Volcanoes Killed The Dinosaurs, New Evidence Suggests

Huffington Post | Nicholas Graham | December 16, 2008

Accepted theory holds that the dinosaurs became extinct after a large asteroid crashed into Earth, rending the environment uninhabitable. However, that theory is facing a serious challenge as evidence mounts that it may have been massive volcanic eruptions in India that ended the species: …

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More than 2T tons of ice melted in artic since '03

WASHINGTON – More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA’s GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating. …

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