Monthly Archives: December 2009

New kid on the block. The Tatai River.

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A little introduction to our newest edition.

The Tatai River in Koh Kong Province, Cambodia.

Take our new interactive Riverside Guide and explore the estuaries, mangrove and prickly palms as well as the emerald forests of bamboo that saturate the riverside in brilliant fresh morning sunshine.

We hope this edition clearly illustrates the diversity of landscapes, from the surreal to the majestic found in this remarkable province.

Point people to it. Use it to promote your business in Koh Kong.

You don’t even have to get your feet wet.

Enjoy, Paul Stewart

Earth as Art

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The Lena River delta in the Arctic Circle.

Check more of these images out from our friends at NASA and Earth as Art. Photographed by the Landsat-7 satellite and more recently Terra Satellite’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER).

Download high resolution files too.

Start here.

Image courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office. Thanks NASA!

If you like the above, make your way here for some context at UNEP’s Atlas of Our Changing Environment

Time for a Smarter Approach to Global Warming

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Investing in energy R&D might work. Mandated emissions cuts won’t.

By BJORN LOMBORG in Copenhagen for The Wall Street Journal Online

The saddest fact of climate change—and the chief reason we should be concerned about finding a proper response—is that the countries it will hit hardest are already among the poorest and most long-suffering.

In the run-up to this month’s global climate summit in Copenhagen, the Copenhagen Consensus Center dispatched researchers to the world’s most likely global-warming hot spots. Their assignment: to ask locals to tell us their views about the problems they face. Over the past seven weeks, I recounted in these pages what they told us concerned them the most. In nearly every case, it wasn’t global warming.

Everywhere we went we found people who spoke powerfully of the need to focus more attention on more immediate problems. In the Bauleni slum compound in Lusaka, Zambia, 27-year-old Samson Banda asked, “If I die from malaria tomorrow, why should I care about global warming?” In a camp for stateless Biharis in Bangladesh, 45-year-old Momota Begum said, “When my kids haven’t got enough to eat, I don’t think global warming will be an issue I will be thinking about.” On the southeast slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, 45-year-old widow and HIV/AIDS sufferer Mary Thomas said she had noticed changes in the mountain’s glaciers, but declared: “There is no need for ice on the mountain if there is no people around because of HIV/AIDS.”

There is no question that global warming will have a significant impact on already existing problems such as malaria, malnutrition, and water shortages. But this doesn’t mean the best way to solve them is to cut carbon emissions.

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In Bolivia, Water and Ice Tell of Climate Change

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By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL for NYTimes

EL ALTO, Bolivia — When the tap across from her mud-walled home dried up in September, Celia Cruz stopped making soups and scaled back washing for her family of five. She began daily pilgrimages to better-off neighborhoods, hoping to find water there.

Though she has lived here for a decade and her husband, a construction worker, makes a decent wage, money cannot buy water.

“I’m thinking of moving back to the countryside; what else can I do?” said Ms. Cruz, 33, wearing traditional braids and a long tiered skirt as she surveyed a courtyard dotted with piglets, bags of potatoes and an ancient red Datsun. “Two years ago this was never a problem. But if there’s not water, you can’t live.”

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Australian Research Shows Warmer Water Raises Aggression In Fish

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Phil Mercer | Sydney for VOA

New research in Australia has shown that coral reef fish can undergo radical personality changes in warmer water, work that suggests climate change may make some marine species more aggressive. Experiments have been conducted on two species of young damselfish on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which have shown that water temperatures can alter a fish’s behavior.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney have said that a slight increase in water temperature of just one or two degrees Celsius may cause some fish to become up to 30 times more active and aggressive.

Scientists believe that as the water becomes warmer, the animals’ metabolism rapidly speeds up. Fish are ectotherms and their body temperature is the same as the environment around them.

There are concerns that as the world’s oceans heat up under the effects of climate change, then bolder, more active fish may increasingly become targets for predators.

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