WORLD
MEXICO CITY – Rising global temperatures could melt Latin America’s glaciers within 15 years, cause food shortages affecting 130 million people across Asia by 2050 and wipe out Africa’s wheat crop, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday.
The report, written and reviewed by hundreds of scientists, outlined dramatic effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, the disappearance of species and intensifying natural disasters. The report stated 30 percent of the world’s coastlines could be lost by 2080.
Scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlined details of the report in news conferences around the world Tuesday, four days after they released a written summary of their findings.
The report is the second of three being issued this year. The first dealt with the physical science of climate change and the third will deal with responses to climate change.
Scientists predicted that global warming could cost the Brazilian rain forest up to 30 percent of its species and turn large swaths into savannah. They said ocean levels are projected to rise 4.3 feet by 2080 and flood low-lying cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Polar ice caps will likely melt, opening a waterway at the North Pole and threatening to make the Panama Canal obsolete, IPCC member Edmundo de Alba said. Warmer waters will spawn bigger and more dangerous hurricanes that will threaten coastlines not traditionally affected by them, he said.
NATION
ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Maryland officially became the first state on Tuesday to approve a plan to give its electoral votes for president to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the candidate chosen by state voters.
Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, signed the measure into law one day after the state’s General Assembly adjourned.
The measure would award Maryland’s 10 electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. The plan would only take effect if states representing a majority of the nation’s 538 electoral votes decided to make the same change.
State Sen. Jamie Raskin, a law professor and sponsor of the idea, said Maryland is largely ignored by presidential candidates during campaigns because they assume the Democratic state will vote for the Democratic candidate.
Raskin, a Democrat, said he hoped Maryland’s support for the idea will start a national discussion and “kick off an insurrection among spectator states – the states that are completely bypassed and sidelined” during presidential campaigns.
STATE&LOCAL
VIRGINIA BEACH – Poop does not lie. And there was plenty of nutria poop to be side stepped last week at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.
“See, it looks like a burned hush puppy,” said Todd Barnes, president of a local conservation group, as he pointed to a specimen. “But it certainly wouldn’t taste as good.”
The animal droppings are not good news to Barnes and others trying to preserve Back Bay, a shallow and stressed estuary along the Atlantic Ocean at the marshy southern tip of Virginia Beach.
The poop indicates the not-so-subtle presence of nutria, an orange-toothed rodent native to South America. Resembling big muskrats, nutria were imported to the United States in the 1930s for their fur, and showed up in Virginia in the early 1950s.
When the fur-farming experiments went bust, most nutria were set free. They have since become notorious for tearing up and damaging marshes and wildlife habitat in more than a dozen states, from Oregon to Louisiana, and along the Chesapeake Bay.
Accompanying Barnes on a tour of several affected waterfowl ponds last week were officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s wildlife division, the Back Bay Restoration Foundation and the chief biologist at the federal refuge, John Gallegos.