Group items tagged

'Brown Clouds' Are World's Newest Environmental Threat By TINI TRAN AND JOHN HEILPRIN / AP WRITER Friday, November 14, 2008 BEIJING - A dirty brown haze sometimes more than a mile thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns and threatening health and food supplies, the UN reported. The huge smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as "atmospheric brown clouds." Cars drive through thick smog on a street in Beijing in September 2008. Enormous brown clouds of pollution hanging over Asia are killing hundreds of thousands of people, melting glaciers, changing weather patterns and damaging crops, the United Nations said. (Photo: AFP) When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the UN Environment Program and released Thursday. "All of these points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet," said Achim Steiner, head of Kenya-based UNEP, which funded the report with backing from Italy, Sweden and the United States. Brown clouds are caused by an unhealthy mix of particles, ozone and other chemicals that come from cars, coal-fired power plants, burning fields and wood-burning stoves. First identified by the report's lead researcher in 1990, the clouds were depicted Thursday as being more widespread and causing more environmental damage than previously known. Perhaps most widely recognized as the haze this past summer over Beijing's Olympics, the clouds have been found to be more than a mile (kilometer) thick around glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountain ranges. They hide the sun and absorb radiation, leading to new worries not only about global climate change but also about extreme weather conditions. "All t

Problem of too many men is exacerbating as rural women 'marry out' into cities, says researcher

Problem of too many men is exacerbating as rural women 'marry out' into cities, says researcher

Nice little introduction animation (in French) for the global population problem.

The UK needs to consume less and share people around the country more equally in order to tackle its environmental problems, a report recommends.

Proponents of Italy's new anti-immigration laws say they are a much-needed response to a serious problem, but critics say they recall the policies of the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, reports the BBC World Service's Madeleine Morris in Milan.

Geography with out field work is like Science without experiments 

John Vidal looks at the impact of climate change on the sub-county and how it is hitting women the hardest

Problem of ageing population and fall in birth rate

good

Unintended Pregnancies in the US (a very quick article to stimulate a discussion about fertility rates in MEDCs)