Category: RT Newswire

USE ME! Essentially, this is a catch all for everything. This is probably the ONLY category where things that are not directly related to Rising Tide affiliates/allies should go. For example if a coal company goes out of business (and we didn’t directly cause it) it should probably only go here.

Rough Season for Wildfires Anticipated in U.S. West

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Fire managers predict bad year for blazes
Sat May 10, 2008 2:37pm EDT

By Laura Zuckerman

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) – U.S. fire managers are forecasting a grim year for blazes in drought-plagued Western states, just weeks after a premature start to the Southwest’s wildfire season.

This comes even as the U.S. Forest Service, the lead agency for fighting fires on vast swaths of public and private lands, is reassessing a years-old model that sought to contain all blazes at all times.

Environmental and financial strains paired with demographic changes have made that strategy ineffective in an era of record-size fires sweeping across the West, experts say.

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Major Severe Weather Outbreak Across South-Central, Southeast U.S.

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Sun May 11, 2008 11:51am EDT

Deadly tornadoes hit U.S.

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) – At least 19 people were killed in Missouri and Oklahoma when tornadoes and violent storms ripped through the central and southeastern United States, devastating neighborhoods and injuring hundreds, officials said on Sunday.

The National Weather Service reported six deaths in Oklahoma and 13 in Missouri but those tolls may rise.

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Depleted Groundwater Threatens Food Security

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Published on Friday, May 9, 2008 by The San Francisco Chronicle
Depleted Groundwater Threatens Food Chain
by Daniel Pepper

Hands clasped and head bowed, he offers a short prayer to a Sufi saint and asks for a bountiful supply of groundwater. He then cranks up a wheezing diesel engine, lines up the drill over the offerings and releases a lever that brings an iron cylinder crashing into the earth.

“Business is growing each year,” said Kumar. “But we’ve placed about as many tube wells as we can in this area.”

On either side of Kumar’s drill, the calm beauty of emerald rice patties belies a quiet catastrophe brewing hundreds of feet beneath the surface. As the water table in Punjab drops dangerously low, farmers across the state are investing – and often going into debt – to bore deeper wells with more powerful pumps.

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New Global “Cooling” Theory Fuel For Denialists

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Global cooling theories put scientists on guard
Fri May 9, 2008 1:44pm EDT  By Gerard Wynn

LONDON (Reuters) – A new study suggesting a possible lull in manmade global warming has raised fears of a reduced urgency to battle climate change.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of hundreds of scientists, last year said global warming was “unequivocal” and that manmade greenhouse gas emissions were “very likely” part of the problem.

And while the study published in the journal Nature last week did not dispute manmade global warming, it did predict a cooling from recent average temperatures through 2015, as a result of a natural and temporary shift in ocean currents.

The IPCC predicted global temperature increases this century of 1.8 to 4 degrees Celsius.

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