It’s a scenario we’re all familiar with: Unequivocal climate change warms our oceans, which in turn causes ice sheets at either pole to melt and sea levels worldwide to increase. Citizens of low-lying nations such as Tuvalu, much of which is less than 1 meter above sea level, are forced ...
By 8 o’clock on a warm early summer morning on Chichijima, one of Tokyo’s Ogasawara Islands, bright sunshine was already ...
Swaths of the Amazon may have been grassland until a natural shift to a wetter climate about 2,000 years ago ...
I had returned from a three-month trip to the Canadian Arctic and was in Vancouver, meeting up with family and friends before returning to Japan. One of those friends was Wilf Wakely, who I’d known since 1975 when I was the assistant manager and ...
Global warming will cut Antarctica’s 600,000-strong population of emperor penguins by at least a fifth by 2100 as the sea ice on which they breed becomes less secure, a study said on Sunday. The report urged governments to list the birds as endangered, even ...
As much as 88 percent of the open oceans’ surface contains plastic debris, raising concern about the effects on marine life and the food chain, but there is less of it than expected, scientists said Monday. Mass-produced plastics from toys, bags, food containers and ...
First came the Ishigaki-teien, a mass of soaring limestone rocks, judiciously placed cycads and two lines of highly concentrated fukugi, the closely-matted leaves of the trees traditionally used in Okinawa as typhoon barriers. Owned by the Ishigaki family, who have lived on the island ...
Just over a year ago, tribal elder Gordon Yellowman watched on the TV news as a giant tornado roared toward the homes of his Cheyenne-Arapaho people in Oklahoma. Sirens blared, warnings were issued and many people rushed to shelters as the weather radar warned ...
After creeping slowly northward for weeks, the rainy season finally hit Tokyo earlier this month. And rain it has. For days on end the rain can fall, heavy and steady, saturating Tokyo. There’s not much we can do except wait out the downpours, but ...
Great white sharks are likely rising in numbers off the coast of California and are not at risk of extinction despite some reports to the contrary, U.S. researchers said Monday. The findings are good news for the ocean predator, suggesting that around 2,000 of ...
President Barack Obama was to announce Tuesday plans to significantly expand a U.S. sanctuary in the central Pacific Ocean in a move that could create the world’s largest such protected area, The Washington Post reported. Obama will announce his intent to enlarge the Pacific ...
UNESCO has added Japan’s Southern Alps mountain range and the Tadami beech forest to its global list of biosphere reserves, the government said Thursday. Known as “eco parks” in Japan, the U.N. agency assigns biosphere reserve status to regions that exemplify a balance between ...
Oriental stork 73; crested ibis 82; red-crowned crane 1,143; short-tailed albatross estimated 3,550. Those numbers of wild birds in Japan seem perilously low — and they are, especially when considered alongside the Japanese population of 126.75 million people — but in reality they are ...
The United States’ proposed cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions from its power plants is a bold step to tackle climate change, Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishihara says. “There are many states that are dependent on coal power,” Ishihara said at a news conference in Tokyo. “We ...
It was about 15 years ago when an old friend, Yoshito Umezaki, invited me to dinner in Tokyo to meet a friend of his named Masayoshi “Mike” Ushikubo — “a really great guy who loves mountains, travels all over the world and is a ...
