Ghana: Why are the Chinese miners here?

Ghana has sold its soul to China, said Alex Bossman Baafi. Small-scale gold-mining permits are reserved by law for native-born Ghanaians only. Yet Chinese immigrants are operating illegal gold mines all over the country, with expensive machinery and guards armed with illegal guns. These miners hurt the environment by razing our forests and dumping toxic mining by-products like cyanide into […]

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Lasting Impact of Deepwater Disaster

  It’s been five years since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 and releasing a torrent of petroleum into the sea. But despite a massive, multibillion-dollar cleanup effort, the effects of the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history may linger for decades. BP (British Petroleum), which operated the rig, has already paid […]

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Evergreen Trees at risk in Southwest U.S.

Evergreen trees

A research paper published in Nature Climate Change predicts widespread death of needleleaf evergreen trees (NET) within the Southwest United States by the year 2100 under projected global warming scenarios. The research team that conducted the study, which includes University of Delaware’s Sara Rauscher, considered both field results and a range of validated regional predictions and global simulation models of […]

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Pollution arrives on winds from China

Along with goods for U.S. markets, China’s booming factories are exporting pollution that fouls the air over the Western U.S., a new study has found. “We’ve outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it is blowing back across the Pacific to haunt us,” University of California, Irvine, earth scientist Steven Davis tells The Telegraph (U.K.).The study […]

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China’s Ecological Mess

Thousands of pigs were found dead in rivers supplying Shanghai’s water, a grisly discovery that has drawn attention again to China’s toxic pollution, which contributes to some 700,000 deaths each year. Here are some points of concern: WASTE Tai Lake—a massive basin that holds China’s third largest body of freshwater, providing water for 30 million people—has been classified as a […]

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Drastic climate change

An analysis of isotopes in marine fossils from around the world yielded the most complete record of Earth’s temperatures yet—and showed that the planet is heating up at a rate unprecedented in the past 11,300 years. Scientists say that if it weren’t for greenhouse gas emissions, a cooling trend that began 5,000 years ago after a shift in the planet’s […]

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