50 doomiest stories of 2014

Desdemona defines “the end of the world” as the destruction of the biosphere in which humans evolved. Conversely, “saving the world” would mean preserving at least some of the original biosphere. The human impulse for acquisitiveness drives the accelerating destruction. As the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) observed, “our planet is constantly losing […]

Climate change brings world closer to ‘doomsday’, say scientists – ‘It is now three minutes to midnight’

By Patrik Stollarz22 January 2015 (AFP) – Climate change and the danger of nuclear war pose an ever-growing threat to civilization and are bringing the world closer to doomsday, a group of prominent scientists and Nobel laureates said Thursday. “It is now three minutes to midnight,” said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of […]

Drought reduces São Paulo’s main water reservoir to 6 percent of capacity – ‘The water supply situation is critical and could become even more critical if the lack of rain and hot weather continue’

São Paulo, 16 January 2015 (Associated Press) – Halfway through the rainy season, the key reservoir for the southern hemisphere’s largest city holds just 6% of its capacity, and experts warned Friday that São Paulo’s authorities must take urgent steps to prevent the worst drought in more than 80 years from drying it out. The […]

Video: Last Days of Ivory – ‘Last year we were made aware of the very real connection between elephant poaching and terrorism’

7 December 2014 (YouTube) – Either we come together now to make these the last days of ivory-funded terrorism or we witness the last days of elephants in the wild. Created by Director Kathryn Bigelow, Writer Scott Z. Burns, and Annapurna Pictures, in collaboration with WildAid. Visit http://lastdaysofivory.com to get informed and take action. Last […]

Ocean life faces mass extinction, broad study finds – ‘We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event’

By Carl Zimmer15 January 2015 (The New York Times) – A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them. “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major […]

New Zealand Navy abandons pursuit of notorious poaching vessels in Southern Ocean – ‘These boats were caught red-handed fishing illegally, yet were able to thumb their noses at the New Zealand Navy’

16 January 2015 (ONE News) – Foreign Minister Murray McCully is urging Sea Shepherd to avoid actions that put their lives or the lives of others at risk in the Southern Ocean. The controversial anti-whaling campaigners claim they’re taking over the fight against illegal fishing operations by three boats in the Southern Ocean. A navy […]

Graph of the Day: Estimates of 20th-century global mean sea-level rise, calculated by different research groups

By Stefan Rahmstorf14 January 2015 (RealClimate) – The “zoo” of global sea level curves calculated from tide gauge data has grown – tomorrow a new reconstruction of our US colleagues around Carling Hay from Harvard University will appear in Nature (Hay, et al., 2015). That is a good opportunity for an overview over the available […]

NOAA: 2014 was warmest year on record – ‘The record temperatures underscore the undeniable fact that we are witnessing, before our eyes, the effects of human-caused climate change’

16 January 2015 (Associated Press) – Federal science officials say that for the third time in a decade, the globe sizzled to the hottest year on record. Both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA calculated that 2014 was the hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping. Earlier, the Japanese weather agency and an […]

Scientists: Human activity has pushed Earth beyond four of nine ‘planetary boundaries’ – The planet ‘is likely to be much less hospitable to the development of human societies’

By Joel Achenbach 15 January 2015 (Washington Post) – At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points […]

Mass animal die-offs are on the rise, killing billions and raising questions – ‘Such events can reshape the ecological and evolutionary trajectories of life on Earth’

By Jane J. Lee13 January 2015 (National Geographic) – We’re not talking about a few dead fish littering your local beach. Mass die-offs are individual events that kill at least a billion animals, wipe out over 90 percent of a population, or destroy 700 million tons—the equivalent weight of roughly 1,900 Empire State Buildings—worth of […]

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