ATHENS, Greece, 20 September 2015 (AP) – The latest developments as European governments rush to cope with the huge number of people moving across Europe. All times local: 2:30 p.m. Police say an arson attack on a future asylum shelter for up to 400 people in Wertheim in southern Germany destroyed the building so badly […]
By Tim Dickinson 15 September 2015 (Rolling Stone) – In May this year, the nearly unthinkable happened in the Pacific Northwest: The rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula, one of the wettest places on the continent, caught fire. By August, an inferno was stirring in the forests east of the Cascades. A wind-whipped blaze near the […]
[cf. Starving polar bears observed killing and eating dolphins that were forced north by global warming and Status of polar bear populations for 2014. As of the beginning of 2015, the Polar Bear Specialist Group lists the Barents Sea population as “data deficient”, so the status of this population officially is unknown. –Des] By Lorenzo […]
By Sophia Tesfaye18 September 2015 (Salon) – Arizona Republican Congressman Paul Gosar, describing himself as a “a proud Catholic” took to the conservative website Townhall to lecture Pope Francis and announce his planned boycott of his historic papal visit to Congress next week. Calling it his “moral obligation” to call out Catholic leaders who […]
20 September 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Here’s an update to last month’s post on wildfire data from the Western United States. Data from the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center (Fuels and Fire Danger [pdf]) show that the area burned by wildfires in the Northwest is well above average, and a spike in the number of wildfires […]
By Noah Seelam17 September 2015 (AFP) – Outdoor air pollution from sources as varied as cooking fires in India, traffic in the United States and fertiliser use in Russia, claim some 3.3 million lives globally every year, researchers said Wednesday. The vast majority of victims — nearly 75 percent — died from strokes and heart […]
By Katherine Purvis16 September 2015 (The Guardian) – Around the world, fresh water supplies are drying up: California in the US and São Paulo in Brazil are enduring historic droughts, groundwater sources have been plundered in south Asia, and globally more than 750 million people lack access to safe drinking water. The global fresh water […]
By Fiona Harvey15 September 2015 (The Guardian) – Tuna and mackerel populations have suffered a “catastrophic” decline of nearly three quarters in the last 40 years, according to new research. WWF and the Zoological Society of London found that numbers of the scombridae family of fish, which also includes bonito, fell by 74% between 1970 […]
By Kathryn Hansen18 September 2015 (NASA) – At the end of summer 2015, the western United States continues to face a deep, ongoing drought. Conditions were particularly severe in California, Oregon, and Washington, where below-average precipitation has had a large, lasting effect on water supplies. The shortage is visible to satellites that detect the movement […]
By Seth Borenstein17 September 2015 WASHINGTON (Associated Press) – Earth’s record-breaking heat is sounding an awful lot like a broken record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that August, this past summer and the first eight months of 2015 all smashed global records for heat. That’s the fifth straight record hot season in […]
