“Google’s Biggest Moonshot Is Its Search for a Carbon-Free Future”
Google’s New Green Campus Brings Sustainability to Silicon Valley – Bloomberg
Sundar Pichai wants to head the first giant company run without emissions around the clock. It will take far more than money to achieve
“Melting Glaciers Imperil Kathmandu, Perched High Above Rising Seas”
A month’s walk from the nearest sea, Kathmandu — elevation almost a mile — is as vulnerable to climate change as the world’s coastal megacities.
The capital of the poorest Asian country after Afghanistan already is feeling the effect: Rising temperatures are crimping power and food supplies as rural migrants stream to a city of 1 million that’s among the world’s most crowded.
The mountainous Himalayan nation may have crossed a tipping point of irreversible damage. Its glaciers have lost about a third of their ice reserves since 1977. Just like giant icebergs in the ocean, those glaciers play a critical role in the high-altitude jet streams that can delay monsoons, prolong droughts or spawn storms.
Global warming is a problem at high altitude as well as low altitude coastal regions.
“2014 Headed Toward Hottest Year On Record”
2014 is currently on track to be hottest year on record, according to new reports from both the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the U.K.’s Met OfficeWednesday. Similarly, NOAA reported two weeks ago that 2014 is all but certain to be the hottest year on record.
“Peru’s forests store more CO2 than US emits in a year, research shows”
Peru, the host for December’s UN climate change summit, stores nearly seven billion metric tons of carbon stocks, mostly in its Amazon rainforest. That’s more than US annual carbon emissions for 2013 which were calculated at 5.38 billion tons, the new research by the Carnegie Institute for Science (CIS) shows.
I’ll be there in seven months’ time.
“The extinction of the passenger pigeon”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/459ed93e-26ed-11e4-a46a-00144feabdc0.html#slide0
No one knows when the last great auk died. Or the last dodo. But the last passenger pigeon’s death can be dated more or less exactly: the afternoon of September 1 1914. There was something else extraordinary about this extinction. This was not some marginal species, retiring from trying to eke out an existence on a remote island or a lonely mountainside. When the white man arrived in North America, this was almost certainly the most common bird on the continent, quite possibly the most common in the world.
As the title of a centenary exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington has it, Once There Were Billions. And then there were none.
It was not ordinary destruction that killed Martha and her kind.
The damage was done by the innocent God-fearing farmers, hacking down what they called wilderness, which we would now call virgin forest
The raids on farms may have been an early warning of distress: the passenger pigeon’s food of choice was not an infant cornfield but “mast”: the nuts of the beech, oak and, to a lesser extent, chestnut trees that once covered the landscape. Ohio was 95 per cent forest when the white settlers moved in, 54 per cent by 1853, 10 per cent by 1900.
It was towards the end that American insouciance towards mass slaughter made its contribution.
The pigeons were meat; their oils and fat produced a kind of ersatz butter; 50 birds were said to make a feather pillow. As late as 1883 a dealer in Wisconsin sent 2m of them to market.
A nightmare tale of the American Dream.
My Trip To The Amazon 
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