Author: postMigrator

Plans to control access to Amazon 
By Gary Duffy
BBC News, Sao Paulo 

The Brazilian government is wary of bio-piracy

Brazil’s Congress is to be asked to consider a law which could require foreign visitors and workers in the Amazon region to have a permit.

The legislation is designed to prevent outside interference and illegal use of the rainforest’s resources.

Those in the region without a permit would be fined up to $60,000 (£30,000).

But some scientists have warned that if passed the measure could have a negative impact on research, and would force experts to look elsewhere.

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Brazil “soy king” sees Amazon as food solution
Fri Apr 25, 2008 1:45pm EDT 

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – More of the Amazon rain forest should be cut down to make way for farmland to help ease the global food crisis, the governor of a big Brazilian farming state was quoted on Friday as saying.

Blairo Maggi, the governor of Mato Grosso state and Brazil’s largest soy producer, was quoted in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper as defending deforestation.

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More 08 Caribbean hurricanes than avg: AccuWeather
Fri Apr 25, 2008 11:01am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) – AccuWeather.com on Friday predicted the 2008 hurricane season in the Caribbean would be slightly above average, with an increased chance that storms would make landfall in North America.

A waning La Nina condition in the Pacific Ocean and a warm water cycle in the Atlantic ocean are the two main factors cited by the private weather forecasting service.

“The warming is not uniform across the entire Atlantic. In some areas where hurricanes normally form … ocean water temperatures are near or below normal,” Joe Bastardi, AccuWeather’s chief long-range forecaster, said in a news release.

Bastardi told Reuters in an interview in early April that the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season would see 12 to 13 named storms.

Up to four of the predicted storms would become hurricanes, with one of those becoming a major hurricane, Bastardi said.

Average hurricane seasons have 10 named storms.

(Reporting by Robert Campbell, editing by Matthew Lewis)

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“Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago,
extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small
numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction.”
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Associated Press
Apr 24 06:15 PM US/Eastern

Study says near extinction threatened people
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – Human beings may have had a brush with extinction
70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests. The human
population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in
Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis
released Thursday.

The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford
University estimated the number of early humans may have shrunk as
low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone
Age.

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