7 November 2024 (Desdemona Despair) – My work here is done. After more than 13,000 posts warning of the end of the Phanerozoic eon and the imminent extinction of the human species, I’m calling it quits. The first Desdemona blog post was on 14 November 2008 and was titled, Rising CO2 accelerates coral bleaching: study. […]
30 September 2024 (World Bank) – Domestic food price inflation remains high in many low- and middle-income countries. Inflation higher than 5 percent is experienced in 77.3 percent of low-income countries (18.2 percentage points higher since the last Update on June 27, 2024), 54.3 percent of lower-middle-income countries (8.7 percentage points lower), 44% of upper-middle-income […]
By Molly McCrea 18 October 2024 (CBS News) – A shocking new report on global biodiversity is detailing what it calls “a catastrophic decline” in wildlife populations ahead of a major international conference on biodiversity. On Monday, 21 October 2024, the United Nations will convene a two-week conference in Cali, Colombia called COP16. On the agenda […]
By Alex Harris 10 October 2024 (Miami Herald) – A deadly and unprecedented wave of tornadoes swirled across Florida ahead of the arrival of Category 3 Hurricane Milton, which crossed the state from Sarasota to the Space Coast Wednesday evening. A series of twisters that struck St. Lucie County left at least five dead and, […]
By Bill McKibben 9 October 2024 (The Guardian) – Even as the good people of Florida’s west coast pulled the soggy mattresses from Helene out to the curb, Milton appeared on the horizon this week – a double blast of destruction from the Gulf of Mexico that’s a reminder that physics takes no time off, not even in the […]
By Rachel Ramirez 9 October 2024 (CNN) – The exceptionally warm water of the Gulf of Mexico that supercharged deadly Helene last month was made up to 500 times more likely by human-caused climate change, which also ramped up the hurricane’s wind and rain, according to a new scientific analysis. Helene, which made landfall in Florida as […]
By Melissa Hanson 4 October 2024 (Scientific American) – I wasn’t prepared to be a climate refugee. Not after relocating my family from drought and wildfire-prone California to the “climate haven” of Asheville, N.C. But less than two months after we moved into our delightfully wooded, mild-weather community, we were forced to leave. Even before […]
By Emily Cassidy 8 October 2024 (NASA Earth Observatory) – From the stable Lagrange point 1, located one million miles above Earth, NASA’s EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) imager on the DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) satellite observed an unusually active Atlantic Basin. In early October, three hurricanes simultaneously spun over the North Atlantic Ocean. This image shows the three […]
By Denise Chow 7 October 2024 (NBC News) – Hurricane Milton’s last 36 hours have been nothing short of astonishing, as it strengthened from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in just over a day. The storm’s blisteringly fast evolution is part of a trend of rapidly intensifying storms fueled by climate change. The term “rapid intensification” […]
By Sally Ho 5 October 2024 (AP) – A week after Hurricane Helene overwhelmed the Southeastern U.S., homeowners hit the hardest are grappling with how they could possibly pay for the flood damage from one of the deadliest storms to hit the mainland in recent history. The Category 4 storm that first struck Florida’s Gulf […]
