Three Views of Ecology

Climate - Drought - Global Warming - American West - Arizona - Utah - Colorado - New Mexico - Nevada - New York Times: "Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,”

The Hindu : Front Page : Urban waste ‘imported’ from U.S. to be shipped back: "THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Taking a strong view of what it considers an attempt to make India a waste dump of the developed world, the Kerala government has sought the immediate return to its port of origin three containers carrying urban waste, which arrived at the Kochi Port from the United States in the first week of October."

Al Jazeera English - News - Pricier Grain Costs Africans Dear: "The price of basic food commodities such as wheat, rice and corn have risen around the globe and that price rise is affecting the levels of food aid. In the last seven years, the US, which is the world's largest single food donor, has more than halved its donations to 2.4 million tonnes a year and many fear the downward spiral will continue. But there are also other implications: the children in Finetown are not getting enough milk. 'Milk is very important, children need calcium, they need calcium in their bodies, especially many of our kids are sick, and they need the vitamins,' Linda Tukula, one of the women caring for the children in Finetown, told Al Jazeera"