TV News LIES

A UN panel has added Florida's Everglades National Park and Madagascar's tropical rainforest to a list of world heritage sites at risk. Unesco's World Heritage Committee said development in the Everglades had caused water flow to fall 60% in the wetland, a major wildlife sanctuary.

The pollution level there was so high it was killing marine life, it added. Illegal logging and poaching following last year's military coup has meanwhile imperilled Madagascar's rainforests.

The Coast Guard approved dozens of requests by BP to spread hundreds of thousands of gallons of surface oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s directive on May 26 that they should be used only rarely, according to documents and correspondence analyzed by a Congressional subcommittee.

In some cases, the Coast Guard approved BP’s requests even though the company did not set an upper limit on the amount of dispersant it planned to use.

Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.

Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them "in almost all" of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. -- more than 300 miles of coastline -- said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.

The amount of phytoplankton - tiny marine plants - in the top layers of the oceans has declined markedly over the last century, research suggests. Writing in the journal Nature, scientists say the decline appears to be linked to rising water temperatures.

They made their finding by looking at records of the transparency of sea water, which is affected by the plants.

A new climate change report from the Met Office and its US equivalent has provided the "greatest evidence we have ever had" that the world is warming. The report brings together the latest temperature readings from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean

Usually scientists rely on the temperature over land, taken from weather stations around the world for the last 150 years, to show global warming. But climate change sceptics questioned the evidence, especially in the wake of recent scandals like "climategate".

As part of the Obama Administration’s continuing commitment to open government, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has published the latest data on industrial releases and transfers of toxic chemicals in the United States between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2009.

EPA is making the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data available within weeks of the reporting deadline through its Web site and in the popular tools, TRI Explorer and Envirofacts. The database contains environmental release and transfer data on nearly 650 chemicals and chemical categories reported to EPA by more than 21,000 industrial and other facilities.