|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mountains Melting Earlier
A Time Bomb for Water Shortages
Glaciers and mountain snow are melting earlier in the year than usual, meaning the water has already gone when millions of people need it during the summer when rainfall is lower, scientists warned.
“This is just a time bomb,“ said hydrologist Wouter Buytaert at a meeting of geoscientists in Vienna, Reuters reported.
Those areas most at risk from a lack of water for drinking and agriculture include parts of the Middle East, southern Africa, the United States, South America and the Mediterranean.
Rising global temperatures mean the melt water is occurring earlier and faster in the year and the mountains may no longer be able to provide a vital stop gap.
“In some areas where the glaciers are small they could be gone in 30 or 50 years time and a very reliable source of water, especially for the summer months, may be gone.“
Buytaert, from Britain’s Bristol University, was referring to parts of the Mediterranean where her research is focused but she said this threat also applies to the entire Alps region and other global mountain sources.
Daniel Viviroli, from the University of Berne, believes nearly 40 percent of mountainous regions could be at risk, as they provide water to populations which cannot get it elsewhere.
He says the earth’s sub-tropic zones, which are home to 70 percent of the world’s population, are the most vulnerable.
And with the global population expected to expand rapidly, there may not always be enough water to drink, let alone to water crops, which use about 70 percent of melt-water.
In Afghanistan, home to some 3,500 of the world’s glaciers, the effects of global warming are already being felt in the Hindu Kush said US Geological Survey researcher Bruce Molnia.
“Glaciers are getting smaller and smaller,“ he said adding that this was leading to more frequent flooding.
In some valleys snow has completely disappeared during months when it usually blankets the mountains and many basins have drained, Molnia said.
“And what I am talking about here is adaptable to almost every one of the Himalayan countries that’s dependent on glacier-melted water,“ he said. It has also been difficult to collect data in the region with scientists preferring to rely on satellite imagery rather risk fieldwork in the Taliban-occupied mountains.
Buytaert points out that because only a handful of scientists study the hydrology of mountains, what they don’t know about them could be just as concerning as what they do.
“Mountains are seen as having water all the time and everywhere so people think they can take it all the time,“ she said.
“But mountains are black boxes in the scientific sense, there is so much data missing for our models. We don’t quite know what is going on.“
|
|
|
|
Call for Stricter US Gun Laws
Dozens of mayors of US cities gathered Monday in Washington to propose “common-sense“ measures to better control gun sales across the country, one year after the deadliest school shooting in US history.
Through the “Mayors Against Illegal Guns“ initiative, which brings together some 300 Democratic, Republican and independent mayors, the city leaders blasted the timidity of local and national lawmakers who refuse to strengthen legislation., AFP reported.
“There are 34 people murdered every single day. That’s two more than Virginia Tech,“ New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, referring to last April’s shooting rampage at a campus in the state of Virginia.
“Big cities, small cities, no matter what the politics are, we all have the same issue,“ he told reporters.
The group aims to broadcast a public service announcement calling for an end to the so-called “gun-show loophole,“ which excludes merchants at gun shows from having to conduct federally mandated background checks on buyers.
Closing the loophole is supported by all three main candidates for the US presidency this year.
“You can walk into a gun show, having a criminal record a mile long, and just walk up to a counter and buy 20 guns and walk out the door with no checks and no federal restrictions whatsoever,“ Bloomberg said. “It is just craziness.“
The mayors also proposed a code of behavior for gun dealers, already signed by retail giant Wal-Mart, which would require video surveillance at sales counters, a computerized alert network, identity checks for buyers, and the power of employees to refuse a sale if they believe the buyer poses a danger.
John Peyton, the mayor of Jacksonville, Florida, stressed the need for a “common-sense approach to really trying to get illegal guns off the streets.
|
|
|
|
UK Gender Pay Gap Widens With Age
British women workers in their 40s earn 20 percent less than men, according to an analysis of government data.
Research for the Office of National Statistics found that the gender pay gap jumps from 1 percent for women in their 20s to 20.3 percent for full-timers aged 40 to 49.
The findings come after a study by the Trade Union Congress suggested the pay gap may be even wider, with the “motherhood penalty“ making women in their 40s 22.8 percent worse off than men, the Guardian reported. The new analysis combines the government’s labor force survey and annual survey of hours and earnings to create a more comprehensive picture of pay by using data from households and employers’ pay records.
Older women are more likely to have career breaks to care for children and elderly parents, impacting on their level of work experience and in turn affecting pay, the analysis says.
|
|
|
|
|
Smaller Brains
Mother’s substance use during pregnancy can mean a smaller brain for her child, according to a new study.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Healthy Diet Means Better School Performance
Kids who eat better perform better in school, a new study of Nova Scotia fifth-graders confirms.
Students who ate an adequate amount of fruit, vegetables, protein, fiber and other components of a healthy diet were significantly less likely to fail a literacy test, Dr. Paul J. Veugelers of the University of Alberta in Edmonton and colleagues found.
While a healthy diet is generally assumed to be important for good school performance, there has actually been little research on this topic, Veugelers and his colleagues note, Reuters reported.
To investigate, they looked at 4,589 fifth-graders participating in the Children’s Lifestyle and School-performance Study, 875 (19.1 percent) of whom had failed an elementary literacy assessment. The better a student’s eating habits based on several measures of diet quality, including adequacy and variety, the less likely he or she was to have failed the test, the researchers found, even after they adjusted the data for the effects of parental income and education, school, and sex.
Eating plenty of fruit and vegetables, and getting fewer calories from fat, was also associated with a lower risk of failing the test.
Stolen Rhino Horns Could Be Deadly
Two 19th century rhino horns stolen from a South African museum could be deadly because they are drenched in poison, a museum official said.
The “priceless“ horns were snatched from a display at the historic mammal gallery in Cape Town on Saturday evening, said Jatti Bredekamp, chief executive of Iziko Museums, Reuters reported.
“Unknowingly, the thieves have exposed themselves to more than the danger of arrest and prosecution,“ Bredekamp said in a statement.
“Before the mid-twentieth century, taxidermy mounts were prepared by being soaked in arsenic and preserved from insect infestation through regular applications of DDT, both highly toxic poisons that retain their toxicity over time,“ he said.
EU to Propose Ban On Seal Imports
The EU’s environment chief Stavros Dimas will propose to ban imports of all seal products resulting from culls where animals suffer, he told Reuters, setting up a possible trade conflict with Canada.
Belgium and the Netherlands last year banned imports of seal products on their own, prompting Canada to launch a trade dispute with the EU as a whole in September. Both bans were the result of concern about cruel hunts.
“We will propose a ban of seal fur imports if (a country) can’t prove they were obtained in a humane way,“ Dimas said late on the fringes of an April 11-12 informal meeting of environment ministers in Slovenia.
When asked on the timing of a ban he said--“It takes some time.“ The plan would need the backing of the rest of the EU’s executive Commission, and would apply to all seal products including furs, skins and health products including vitamins.
Serious Concern Over Sao Paulo Traffic
In Brazil’s financial capital of Sao Paulo, the traffic is so bad that vendors line its major highways during rush hour, selling cold drink and snacks to motorists.
Traffic jams around the city can total more than 200 km (124 miles), and on a good day it can take more than two and a half hours to cross town.
The gridlock underscores a broader challenge facing the Latin American giant. As the economy booms, the country’s creaky infrastructure is bursting at the seams, forcing public officials to scramble for ways to compensate for decades of poor planning, Reuters reported. “For too long, the prevailing mind-set in this country has been to tackle problems with temporary solutions that bring a short-term fix,“ said Candido Malta Campos, an urban planner at the University of Sao Paulo.
“If we keep doing that, Sao Paulo is going to grind to a halt in four or five years.“
Sao Paulo has nearly 11 million people, 6 million passenger cars, 650,000 motorcycles and 32,000 taxis. And that doesn’t include the urban sprawl that holds another 7 million people around the city.
In many ways, it has long seemed like a metropolis on the verge of collapse. In the 1960s and 1970s, millions of Brazilians from the countryside flocked here in search of work in its factories, spawning a population boom that urban planners struggled to keep up with.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
