The loss of tropical rain forests is likely to reduce the energy output of hydroelectric projects in countries like Brazil that are investing billions of dollars to create power to support economic growth.

Felicity Barringer, NYTimes. Good, quick read.

watershedplus:

Lying just outside the Amazon Basin, the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in northeastern Brazil is subject to a regular rain season during the beginning of the year. The fresh water collects in the valleys between sand dunes creating lagoons for half of the year and almost completely disappear during the dry season.

Source 1, 2, 3

ryanpanos:

Rua Goncalo de Carvalho: Most Beautiful Street in the World via Amusing Planet

Above, the gigantic Jirau Dam is one of 34(!) hydroelectric dams being built in the Amazon by Brazil. Thousands of people and dozens of communities and towns will be flooded by the dams. Meanwhile, environmentalists are left out of negotiations.

When it is completed in 2015, the Jirau hydroelectric dam will span the Madeira River, feature more giant turbines than any other dam in the world and hold as much concrete as 47 towers the size of New York’s Empire State Building.

And then there are the power lines, draped along 2,200 km of forests and fields to carry electricity from the middle of South America to Brazil’s urban nerve center, Sao Paulo.  Still, it won’t be enough.

The Jirau Dam and the Santo Antonio complex that is being built a few kilometers downstream will provide just 5 percent of what government energy planners say Brazil will need in the next 10 years. 

So the country is building more dams, many more, courting controversy by locating the vast majority of them in the world’s largest and most biodiverse forest.

Excellent coverage by the Japan Times

colchrishadfield:

The Amazon, as though it were clearing away the clouds. A hugely impressive river, even from orbit.

You are following Col. Chris Hadfield, rrriiiiigghhtt??? He’s an astronaut who runs this tumblr from the International Space Station!

I poked around the New Scientist’s new interactive climate change map. Pretty neat. The maps show the average temperature changes by location, and average temperature change over time. Data is scraped from NASA databases. There are better, more complex maps out there, but this one is easy to understand.

The graphs and maps all show changes relative to average temperatures for the three decades from 1951 to 1980, the earliest period for which there was sufficiently good coverage for comparison. This gives a consistent view of climate change across the globe. To put these numbers in context, the NASA team estimates that the global average temperature for the 1951-1980 baseline period was about 14 °C.

The analysis uses land-based temperature measurements from some 6000 monitoring stations in the Global Historical Climatology Network, plus records from Antarctic stations recorded by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. Temperatures at the ocean surface come from a measurements made by ships from 1880 to 1981, plus satellite measurements from 1982 onwards.

Surface temperature measurements are not evenly distributed across the globe. Via

I took the above are screens with temp-change graphs of Piaui, Brazil; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Vienna, Austria. Compare the location graphs to the global average.

Map your home town: Warming World.

wncworldnewsvideo:

Brazil Flooding Leaves Hundred 10,000+ Homeless

• Scores dead
• Dozens missing
• 10,000 people homeless
• Landslides burying roads and highways, making emergency response difficult
• Months of rains caused the Amazon River to flood villages and towns
• Flood waters headed to Peru, where massive evacuations are in the works

More at Reuters

Coffee prices plunge on global supply forecast ›

thepeoplesrecord:

Brazilian Indians threaten mass suicide over loss of land
October 24, 2012

Approximately 100 adults and 70 children members of the indigenous tribe Guarani-Kaiowa announced this week that they prefer collective death to leave the Cambar’s farm in the State of Mato Grosso do Sul, where they settled, than to accept the Federal Court rule that everyone should leave immediately. 

The collective death threat, interpreted as a warning of collective suicide, was made in a letter to the Indigenous Missionary Council, which reaffirms that the Indians will not abide by the decision of the court. The Indians say they are not going to leave the region. They call this region ‘tekoha’ which means ancestral cemetery. 

According to the Federal Court’s decision, the Indians must leave the farm and if they do not, the National Foundation of Indians, FUNAI, will have to pay a fine of approximately $ 250 per day. 

According to the Indians Missionary Council, the Guarani-Kaiowa tribe is known for continuing acts of suicide and almost every six days, one tribesman kills himself, because of the stress of the threat of being evicted from their land. 

In the letter sent to Federal Court, they demanded that the decision be over ruled, for the reason that they won’t leave the grounds of their ancestors. They also ask that the Justice secure their rights to be buried in these lands, so that even in their dead bed, they will continue to occupy their territory. 

Source

This is heartbreaking. We’ll continue to track the story & post updates. 

Norway to tax big oil to create $1.6 billion adaptation fund for developing countries ›

Climate sceptics feature more prominently in newspapers in the US and UK than other countries, and their views are more likely to go unchallenged in right-leaning papers, an academic study has shown.

Friday’s report, which was published in the Environmental Research Letters journal, delved deeper into data that was first published last year. For the study, 2,064 newspaper articles from the US, UK, France, China, Brazil and India over two three-month periods in 2007 and 2009-10 were scrutinised for the quantity and type of climate sceptic voices featured on both news and opinion pages.

The authors examined in particular the political leanings of each newspaper and concluded that there was “little evidence” that this influenced coverage of climate sceptics in Brazil, India and China. However, in the US and UK, and to some extent France, the political leaning of the newspaper did affect coverage of climate sceptics.

Newspapers in UK and US give climate sceptics most column inches via The Guardian.

sustainable-sam:

Mystery of 500 penguins washed up on beach in Brazil

(via speakerforthetrees)

She’s 17 years old and calls bullshit at the Rio+20. What do you think of this?

plantedcity:

Speaking for the world’s 3 billion children: “Are you here to save face? Or are you here to save us?”

From TckTckTck via YouTube:

On Wednesday 20 June, 2012 17-year-old Brittany Trilford of Wellington, New Zealand addressed 130 heads of state at the opening plenary of the Rio+20 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This is her speech.

New Chevron Oil Leak Detected Off the Coast of Brazil ›

“In this photo released by Armada de Chile, fire and smoke rise from Brazil’s Comandante Ferraz station in Almirantazgo Bay, in the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, Saturday Feb. 25, 2012. In an emailed statement, the Brazilian navy said the fire broke out Saturday morning in the machine room that houses the energy generators of the station where one man suffered non-life threatening injuries, and at least two people were reported missing. (AP Photo/Armada de Chile)”

Associate Press