TV News LIES

Take away the predators at the top of the food chain — the lions, tigers, wolves and cougars — and entire ecosystems start to change. A paper in today's edition of the journal Science suggests that humans' destruction of these top predators is causing reverberations worldwide in ways not apparent even a decade ago, including changes in the landscape and even increases in wildfires.

Although the idea that there are serious ecosystem consequences to the removal of top predators isn't new, with this paper, "it's come of age," says Aaron Wirsing, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

A gas company that legally doused a patch of West Virginia forest with salty wastewater from a drilling operation killed ground vegetation within days and more than half the trees within two years, a new report from the U.S. Forest Service says.

Lead researcher Mary Beth Adams says that the damage to the quarter-acre, detailed in a case study published in the Journal of Environmental Quality, shows the need for more research into industry practices.

Try organic gardening and lawn care with cheap homemade herbicides that are easy on the environment. See how vinegar, boiling water, salt and other simple ingredients and techniques can tackle any weed problem.

Here are 10 ways you can win the battle against weeds this summer without doing irreparable damage to either your wallet or the environment:

Serious spills of oil and gas from North Sea platforms are occurring at the rate of one a week, undermining oil companies' claims to be doing everything possible to improve the safety of rigs.

Shell has emerged as one of the top offenders despite promising to clean up its act five years ago after a large accident in which two oil workers died.

Warming air from climate change isn't the only thing that will speed ice melting near the poles - so will the warming water beneath the ice, a new study points out.

Increased melting of ice in Greenland and parts of Antarctica has been reported as a consequence of global warming, potentially raising sea levels. But little attention has been paid to the impact of warmer water beneath the ice.

But a report produced by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability found:

Approximately 18 million cubic feet of radioactive and chemical solid wastes onsite were disposed of since 1943. “All of the radioactive waste and most of the chemical waste have been buried on the mesas of Pajarito Plateau where LANL is located. Radioactive liquid wastes were discharged to the canyons, initially with little treatment.”

Scientists are to end their 20-year reluctance to link climate change with extreme weather – the heavy storms, floods and droughts which often fill news bulletins – as part of a radical departure from a previous equivocal position that many now see as increasingly untenable.

Climate researchers from Britain, the United States and other parts of the world have formed a new international alliance that aims to investigate exceptional weather events to see whether they can be attributable to global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) tomorrow will release its revised recommendations on mitigating the environmental impacts of high-volume hydraulic fracturing (high-volume fracturing). The recommendations contain these major revisions:

High-volume fracturing would be prohibited in the New York City and Syracuse watersheds, including a buffer zone;