Areas like Rio De Janeiro in Brazil are having record numbers of dead or ill penguins washing up on their shore — so much so, makeshift triage centers have had to be constructed for the critters.
Reasons for the decline in polar flightless waterfowl: overfishing by humans and global warming.
Depressed:
This reminds me of a Woodsy Owl/Smokey the Bear anti-littering ad except it’s real and it’s pretty awful.
Long story short: bear in woods gets candy/popcorn jar stuck on his head.
The poor bear, hungry and dehydrated, desperately wandered into a Minnesota town. He was unable to eat or drink for several days.
After six days of attempts by local authorities to tranquilize and capture the bear, they eventually had to shoot him.
Now, I know some might pull a Ranger Smith here and say that it was the bear’s own fault for poaching some human food. But really, people — give a hoot.
Image of the poor bear here at BBC News.
Warned you this shit would happen but you wouldn’t believe him:
Australia’s Herald Sun reports on the case of a 17-year-old admitted to a psychiatric hospital for what the article refers to as “climate change delusion.” Specifically, the teen stopped drinking water because he “developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”
Are movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Day After Tomorrow” unnecessarily stirring paranoia and apocalyptic terrors in some people? Or is it just a case of an individual with a previous history of depression finding a “trigger” for further mental difficulties?
Of course, this all leads to the debate as to whether our planet is truly in danger from global warming or not, and this is the type of story that climate change skeptics might like to pounce on and use for their own purposes. But, as time goes on, might there be those who become unhealthily obsessed by tales of environmental collapse, the way people have been obsessed with tales of Y2K, Biblical revelations, and the threat of nuclear war?
Obligatory:
Hot — get it? — on the heels of my “sunglasses give you cancer” post is another story about how your everyday beauty accessories and products can potentially give you skin cancer.
This time, according to the MTV Switch blog, the culprit is lip gloss, which, if left on in the blazing sun, can apparently up the risk of frying and irradiating your tender lip-skin.
Next up: wear toenail polish, get skin cancer!
(I actually end up sunburning my toes quite a bit cuz I wear sandals.
Instructables explains how you can take all your used-up batteries and get big money for them — by paying attention to the international scrap market:
“The market goes up and down. Right now the dollar is low and China and India are buying scrap like crazy to sell it back to us as products. That drives up scrap values. Our military shooting bullets at villages all over the world doesn’t hurt the value of lead either.”
More at the link.
As for the author of the article, he had an ATM at the scrap center spit out $100 bills at him. Now that’s the type of eco-friendly thinking that actually pays off.
Environmental Graffiti reports that because the United States doesn’t have federal regulations on how much UV rays sunglasses need to block in order to be called “UV Protected,” a lot of glasses aren’t up to snuff. How about those $5 Nicole Richie glasses I got at the vendor on St. Marks? Are they going to give my eyeballs cancer? Could be.
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