By Thomas Erdbrink18 December 2015 POUZE KHOON, Iran (The New York Times) – The early-morning sun meagerly brightened the gloom of this sad township, a collection of empty, crumbling houses along a highway through the dusty desert landscape in southeastern Iran. Until a decade or so ago, Amin Shoul would come here every year to […]
By Ron Patterson21 December 2015 (Peak Oil Barrel) – I follow the JODI World Oil Database primarily because it is now four months ahead of the EIA international data base. I make some adjustments however. I use the OPEC MOMR “secondary sources” for all OPEC data where JODI also uses the MOMR but uses their […]
By Chris Mooney21 December 2015 (Washington Post) – In a troubling new study just out in Nature Climate Change, a group of researchers says that a warming climate could trigger a “massive” dieoff of coniferous trees, such as junipers and piñon pines, in the U.S. southwest sometime this century. The study is based on both […]
GREECE, 22 December 2015 (IOM) – IOM confirmed yesterday (21 December 2015) that over a million irregular migrants and refugees arrived in Europe in 2015, mostly from Syria, Africa, and South Asia. Through the weekend, IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix – Flow Monitoring System counted 999,745 irregular arrivals across the Mediterranean, including migrants journeying by both […]
21 December 2015 (Maritime Executive) – A national poll, commissioned by Sea Shepherd Australia and undertaken by Australian market research company Roy Morgan Research, has shown that 76.9 percent of Australians want the Federal Government to send a ship to oppose Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. The poll, involving 1,000 people, was announced by […]
By Bob Henson 18 December 2015 (Weather Underground) – The weather story of this month is the record warmth swaddling much of eastern North America and Europe. We’ll have much more to say about that next week, but keeping with the warm theme for today, I’ll share a couple of melt-related tidbits that drew my […]
By Roz Pidcock18 December 2015 (CarbonBrief) – With the ink only just dry on the agreement signed in Paris to curb global carbon emissions, scientists at this year’s American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco have been reacting to the landmark deal and digesting some of the finer details. Here are a few scientists Carbon […]
9 December 2015 (Pew Research Center) – After more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and […]
By Ian James and Steve Reilly10 December 2015 SUBLETTE, Kansas (USA TODAY) – Just before 3 a.m., Jay Garetson’s phone buzzed on the bedside table. He picked it up and read the text: “Low Pressure Alert.” He felt a jolt of stress and his chest tightened. He dreaded what that automated message probably meant: With […]
By Jeff Masters17 December 2015 (Weather Underground) – November 2015 was Earth’s warmest November on record by a huge margin, according to data released by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) on Thursday. November 2015 also had the second largest positive departure of temperature from average of any month among all 1631 months in […]
