中国与世界，环境危机大家谈 WHERE CHINA AND THE WORLD DISCUSS THE ENVIRONMENT

主页 home > 新闻 news > 最新世界环境资讯 A global environmental update
中文

February 08, 2012

A global environmental update

Russian scientists, after more than 20 years of drilling in Antarctica, have reached the surface of a huge freshwater lake hidden under kilometres of ice for some 20 million years, The Associated Press said. Lake Vostok may hold microbial life forms from the distant past and clues to the search for life on other planets. 

A small group of leading climate scientists, financially supported by billionaires, is lobbying governments and international bodies to back experiments into manipulating the climate on a global scale to avoid catastrophic climate change, The Guardian reported. Advocating geo-engineering methods, they say a “plan B” will be needed in the absence of agreement on reducing greenhouse gases.

Agricultural belts in eastern Australia have been inundated with flood rains for the second year running, Reuters said. Projections for a bumper cotton crop remain on track, however, despite a week-long deluge in major growing regions. The floods have forced thousands of people from their homes and left rivers dangerously swollen.

In Somalia, good rains, a successful harvest and donor aid have ended the famine declared seven months ago, according to The Irish Times, but UN officials said the next 90 days will be critical to ensuring that the country does not slip back into extreme hunger. The UN termed the gains both considerable and fragile – a temporary respite in a crisis that “affects 2.34 million people with high risks of malnutrition and insecurity”.

Large sectors of Spain’s olive-oil industry are in trouble after years of overproduction, according to The Independent. An exceptionally dry winter means that the sector – already faced with a glut of olives equivalent to 95 million litres of oil – is braced for its second big crop in a row, which may add 285 million more litres to the market.

A group of leading US virus experts has called for permanent new restrictions on research in the face of a genetically engineered avian influenza virus that could, in theory, kill half the world’s population, The Guardian reported. Currently, the H5N1 virus can be caught only be close exposure to infected birds, but two research groups say they have found a way to make it infectious through airborne transmission.

Diarrhoea kills more children than HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and its main cause is food and water contaminated with human waste, The Guardian noted. In Liberia, where six out of seven people do not have a toilet, president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is pushing for awareness of the link between sanitation systems and health.

US researchers found that the steady drone of motors in shipping lanes not only alters whale behaviour but can also physically affect the animals, The Daily Telegraph said. Evidence from studies in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, the scientists wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that exposure to low-frequency ship noise may be associated with chronic stress in North Atlantic right whales.  

 ，