Best of our wild blogs: 15 Jan 19



Chinese New Year Resolution – Let’s be kind to sharks and rays!
Mei Lin NEO


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Price of eggs up 4% over 6 months: Chan Chun Sing

Channel NewsAsia 14 Jan 19;

SINGAPORE: The local retail price of eggs increased by about 4 per cent between June and November last year, according to Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing.

He revealed this in a written parliamentary reply on Monday (Jan 14) in response to a question from Non-Constituency Member of Parliament Associate Professor Daniel Goh on the cause behind the increase in the price of eggs in the past six months and whether profiteering has been a factor.

Mr Chan said the import prices of eggs from some of Singapore's import sources have gone up significantly between June and November 2018, some by up to 50 per cent.

"However, we also have other import sources where the import prices have either remained stable or shown slight declines of up to 7 per cent. As such, the local retail price of eggs has increased around 4 per cent over the same period," he said.


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Thailand to make it rain as pollution chokes Bangkok

AFP Yahoo News 15 Jan 19;

Bangkok (AFP) - Thailand is set to deploy rainmaking planes to seed clouds in an effort to tackle the pall of pollution that has shrouded the capital in recent weeks.

The weather modification technique involves dispersing chemicals into the air to aid cloud condensation, which should in theory result in rain.

"The Department of Royal Rainmaking and Agricultural Aviation... expects the rainmaking to be done tomorrow (Tuesday) but it depends on wind and humidity levels," Pralong Dumrongthai, director-general of Thailand's Pollution Control Department, told reporters.

As Thais woke up Monday morning to another day of murky air blanketing its bustling construction-filled capital, environment group Greenpeace said Bangkok was currently the 10th most polluted in the world, rivalling some cities in China.


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Australia: Million dead fish cause environmental stink

AFP Yahoo News 14 Jan 19;

Sydney (AFP) - As many as a million fish are believed to have died along the banks of a major river system in drought-battered eastern Australia, and the authorities warned Monday of more deaths to come.

The banks of the Murray-Darling Rivers are thick with rotten fish, with officials putting the number of dead at hundreds of thousands and saying the toll is likely closer to one million.

Further high temperatures forecast for this week could make the situation worse, the New South Wales government has warned.

Low water conditions and the heat may also have encouraged an algae bloom that starves the fish of oxygen and produce toxins.


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Desalination produces more toxic waste than clean water

Marlowe HOOD, AFP Yahoo News 15 Jan 19;

Paris (AFP) - More than 16,000 desalination plants scattered across the globe produce far more toxic sludge than fresh water, according to a first global assessment of the sector's industrial waste, published Monday.

For every litre of fresh water extracted from the sea or brackish waterways, a litre-and-a-half of salty slurry, called brine, is dumped directly back into the ocean or the ground.

The super-salty substance is made even more toxic by the chemicals used in the desalination process, researchers reported in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Copper and chlorine, for example, are both commonly used.


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Antarctica is losing ice 6 times faster today than in 1980s

SETH BORENSTEIN, Associated Press Yahoo News 15 Jan 19;

WASHINGTON (AP) — Antarctica is melting more than six times faster than it did in the 1980s, a new study shows.

Scientists used aerial photographs, satellite measurements and computer models to track how fast the southern-most continent has been melting since 1979 in 176 individual basins. They found the ice loss to be accelerating dramatically — a key indicator of human-caused climate change.

Since 2009, Antarctica has lost almost 278 billion tons (252 billion metric tons) of ice per year, the new study found. In the 1980s, it was losing 44 billion tons (40 billion metric tons) a year.

The recent melting rate is 15 percent higher than what a study found last year.


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