By Malcolm Dowden, Solicitor and Environmental Law Consultant Despite widespread disappointment at the outcome of last year’s climate change summit in Copenhagen, quiet but significant progress has been made on issues such as reducing emissions... Read More

Using data from 541 randomly selected 18.5 by 18.5 km blocks, an analysis of Landsat-7 satellite data has concluded that 3% of the forests (1 million square kilometer) present in 2000 were gone by 2005. See map at http://www.sciencenews.org/view/download... Read More

The Amazon has long been conceived of as a CO2 sink because of its mass of vegetation. Researchers are now concerned that drought and deforestation may make it a net emitter. Because of regular measurements of about 100,000 trees, researchers estimate... Read More

By the end of the 15th century, between 40 and 80 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas. Many of them burned trees to make room for crops, leaving behind charcoal deposits that have been found in the soils of Mexico, Nicaragua... Read More

Prior posts have noted and described a number of human diseases that had their origin in animals. Now it appears that some diseases can be transmitted from humans to gorillas. Ecotourism has been seen as a boon for countries with "interesting"... Read More

When someone mentions "climate change" and people, most of us think about the start of the industrial revolution. Those with a more anthropological viewpoint will think about the advent of slash-and-burn agriculture some 8 thousand years ago... Read More

As noted in prior posts, Aspen trees in the West have been dying. There appears to be no single cause. However, drought in the 1990's and early 2000's probably made the trees more susceptible to cankers, fungi, and other maladies. The result is... Read More

Prior posts, occasionally with tongue planted firmly in cheek, have noted that human impact on carbon loading in the atmosphere goes back to well before the industrial era. A recent assessment has calculated that over the eight millennia before 1850... Read More