31 December 2021 (Desdemona Despair) – For Des, 2021 was the second year of studying pandemic numbers daily and obsessively. In the U.S., the go-to site was Covid Act Now, which presents the latest data at the county level. Tracking the changing numbers every day was like watching the weather report, but with mass death […]
31 December 2021 (Desdemona Despair) – If you’ve been on the internet for a few years, you may have encountered a skirmish with climate denialists or evolution “skeptics”. Frequently, these threads start with a “concern troll” who questions some aspect of science and insinuates corruption or deception on the part of scientists. The accusations are […]
By Trevor Hughes and Doyle Rice 30 December 2021 BOULDER, Colorado (USA TODAY) – Several grass fires near Boulder, Colorado, forced thousands of people to flee their homes Thursday, officials said, as high winds knocked down live power lines. The National Weather Service called it a “life-threatening” situation, as one gust of 110 mph was […]
By Vivian Wang and Joy Dong 30 December 2021 (The New York Times) – China, racing to control one of its worst outbreaks in a single city since the beginning of the pandemic, has put in place a sweeping lockdown and mass testing drives, making clear that the country has no intention of abandoning its “zero […]
29 December 2021 (DW) – Ever-growing environmental threats are pushing many animals and plants to the brink of extinction — the scale of which hasn’t been seen since dinosaurs died out, the German branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Wednesday. The stark warnings came as WWF Germany released its “Winners and Losers of 2021,” an annual […]
By Isabel Kershner 29 December 2021 JERUSALEM (The New York Times) – Israel is acting to contain a severe outbreak of avian flu that has already led to mass culling of infected poultry and has caused the deaths of about 5,000 migratory cranes in a popular nature reserve in the north of the country. The minister […]
By Andrew Freedman 27 December 2021 (Axios) – A weather station mounted on a tide gauge on the picturesque island of Kodiak, Alaska, recorded an air temperature of 67°F on 26 December 2021, which if verified would become the state’s record high for the month. The big picture: Such astonishingly mild conditions in America’s Arctic state come at […]
14 December 2021 (BBC News) – The highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic, 38C (100F), has been officially confirmed, sounding “alarm bells” over Earth’s changing climate. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Tuesday verified the record, reported in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk on 20 June last year. The temperature was 18C higher than […]
28 December 2021 (Desdemona Despair) – Bill Gates tweeted, “Just when it seemed like life would return to normal, we could be entering the worst part of the pandemic.” In a seven-tweet thread, he went on to say that the Omicron variant “is spreading faster than any virus in history” and it “will be the […]
AMHERST, Massachusetts, 15 December 2021 (University of Massachusetts Amherst) – New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming. The Little Ice […]