The Colorado River is the water source for 27 million people in seven Western states. But years of drought and increased demand have cut the water supply in half, leaving the river at risk. Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls the Colorado “a train wreck at this point,” and scientists are predicting that the Lake Mead Reservoir along the Colorado could be a virtual dry hole by the year 2021. In our Sunday Morning Cover Story, correspondent Jerry Bowen looks at the water crisis in the West, and how farmers and city dwellers are addressing the very real possibility that there won’t be enough water to go around. He talks with Kennedy, with the water planner for Las Vegas, with an avocado grower in California forced to stump nearly a-third of his avocado trees, and with the scientist whose research sounded the alarm about the Colorado.

For full article, visit:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories

See an editorial by National Audubon Society’s President that was distributed to 800 U.S. newspapers and magazines today by the Cagle Syndication Service.
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Slower Population Growth Would Benefit People, Birds, and Climate

Like canaries in the coal mine, birds are an important indicator of our planet’s health. For thousands of years, they have been one of our most important early warning systems, predicting the change of seasons, the coming of storms, and the rise of toxic levels of pollution in the food chain.

Today, birds are telling us that our climate is changing—and in many places, it may change more quickly than they can adapt, signaling complex ecosystem changes that will have serious consequences for wildlife and humans alike. We know that avoiding the worst consequences of global warming will require bold strategies for reducing our dependence on fossil fuel, expanding renewable energy, and managing our land and forests more thoughtfully. These are commonsense approaches that those of us concerned about the climate crisis have been advocating tirelessly.

For full article, visit:
http://www.caglepost.com/column

Today as we commemorate World Population Day, Population Media Center and Population Institute pledge their commitment to help bring population numbers into balance with natural resources, so humanity can live in harmony with the earth.
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Climate change is already affecting public health across the globe. The World Health Organization estimates that climatic changes are already causing more than 150,000 deaths annually and substantial losses in quality of life due to diarrheal disease, malaria, malnutrition, and flooding. And the health impacts from climate change will likely increase over time.

Some of these anticipated health impacts include:

* Asthma and allergic diseases are likely to worsen. Warmer temperatures favor the formation of ozone, which aggravates asthma; higher CO2 and other climate changes may increase allergenic pollen formation.ii,iii,iv

* Food and water-borne disease could increase. Climate-related increases in natural disasters and warmer ambient temperatures could increase the burden of food- and water-borne diarrheal diseases.

* Increased extreme weather events will directly impact health. More frequent and severe heat waves,v,vi hurricanes, wildfires, and floods will cause deaths and injury.vii Contact with contaminated floodwater,viii and displacement contribute to additional morbidity and mortality.

For full article, visit:
http://media-newswire.com/release

Thanks to Katie Elmore for this article from the New York Times.
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Nine years ago The Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel.

In any case, The Economist asserted, the world faced “the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future.”
Last week, oil hit $117.

It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com

I am pleased to report to you that the Board of Directors of the Population Institute (PI) has formed a formal partnership with Population Media Center (PMC).
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Thanks to Steve Kurtz for this article. Contemplating the demise of civilization is not for the faint of heart. At least it is fair to say we live in interesting times.
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DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?

Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see “Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?”). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?

For full article, visit:
http://www.newscientist.com

Thanks to Paul Paquet, Alan Kuper and Jim Motavalli for this article.
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It was a spectacular late-May afternoon in southern Italy, but the streets of Laviano — a gloriously situated hamlet ranged across a few folds in the mountains of the Campania region — were deserted. There were no day-trippers from Naples, no tourists to take in the views up the steep slopes, the olive trees on terraces, the ruins of the 11th-century fortress with wild poppies spotting its grassy flanks like flecks of blood. And there were no locals in sight either.

The town has housing enough to support a population of 3,000, but fewer than 1,600 live here, and every year the number drops. Rocco Falivena, Laviano’s 56-year-old mayor, strolled down the middle of the street, outlining for me the town’s demographics and explaining why, although the place is more than a thousand years old, its buildings all look so new. In 1980 an earthquake struck, taking out nearly every structure and killing 300 people, including Falivena’s own parents.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com

Thanks to Albert Kaufman for sending this article.
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The Arctic Council’s recent report on the effects of global warming in the far north paints a grim picture: global floods, extinction of polar bears and other marine mammals, collapsed fisheries. But it ignored a ticking time bomb buried in the Arctic tundra.

There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

For full article, visit:
http://www.energybulletin.net/3647.html

You may have seen An Inconvenient Truth. This half-hour talk in March 2008 by Al Gore updates the slides from An Inconvenient Truth. In this talk, he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of “generational mission” — the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement — to set it right. Gore’s stirring presentation is followed by a brief Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates’ climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future.

http://www.ted.com