Jennifer Marohasy

As we have seen over the past year, drought can take an emotional, as well as financial toll on farmers, placing individuals, families and local communities under extraordinary stress.
Helping people cope under such pressure is essential but the challenges of a changing climate demand a visionary new approach in the way Australia deals with drought.
Read [...]

The Spanish company Pharmamar explores the depths of the oceans in search of marine products for the treatment of cancer. Their first success, a drug for the treatment of soft tissue sarcomas, has just got European-wide approval.
The oceans hold 34 of the 36 phyla of life, some of them (i.e. Ctenophora, Echinodermata, Porifera, Phoronidea, Brachiopoda [...]

The UN has released it’s ‘Global Environment Outlook’ or ‘GEO4′ report.
It can be downloaded via the BBC News website. It’s 22MB so you may have a bit of a wait.
Also on the BBC website is the ‘State of the planet, in graphics:’
Globally human populations are growing, trade is increasing, and living standards are rising [...]

Rainforest Action Network issued the invitation to the former Vice President, according to RAN executive director Michael Brune. The San Francisco-based group has a twenty-year history of protesting against destructive logging practices and other causes of climate change; it specializes in targeting corporations as much as governments.
Read the rest of the article, ‘If Gore Were [...]

Collectively, the current IPCC computer modelled scenarios for the iconic doubling of atmospheric CO2 range from 1.1C to 6.4C, with a ‘most likely’ range of 2C to 4.5C. Higher estimates have a much lower probability of being accurate.
In this week’s Science magazine there are two related papers that discuss climate sensitivity:
Why Is Climate Sensitivity [...]

Any day now, the rainforests of the Daintree will resound of the arrival of the Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfisher Tanysiptera sylvia.
They are very punctual, arriving in the last week of October, first week of November, each year. The males industriously excavate upwardly climbing tunnels into terrestrial termite mounds and upon breaching the internal cavity, rely [...]