Blogging the End of the World™
CBC NewsFriday, January 7, 2011 | 3:50 PM ET Severe flooding in eastern Australia that forced thousands of people to flee their homes ended one of the wettest years ever recorded. The second half of 2010 was the rainiest since record-keeping began in 1900, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology reported [pdf] in its annual climate statement […]
Caption by Holli RiebeekJanuary 8, 2011 Though water levels had started to subside, the Australian city of Rockhampton was still inundated when the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite took this image on January 7, 2011. The image includes both thermal-infrared and visible light to increase the contrast between […]
By The Associated Press Published: Friday, January 07, 2011, 12:32 PM Oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster remains in marshes off the coast of Louisiana, where officials are renewing complaints about the cleanup effort by the oil giant BP and the federal government. State and parish officials took media on a tour Friday morning of […]
The blogosphere has noticed a seemingly large increase in the number of mass animal deaths globally, and Desdemona would be remiss not to comment. As a general rule, Des doesn’t post about big animal kills, unless they’re very large scale and unusual, e.g., Cold empties Bolivian rivers of fish — ‘There’s just a huge number […]
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent; Editing by Peter CooneyThu Jan 6, 2011 4:17pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Bacteria ate nearly all the potentially climate-warming methane that spewed from BP’s broken wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico last year, scientists reported on Thursday. Nearly 200,000 tons of methane — more than any other single hydrocarbon emitted […]
By David DeFranza, Washington, DCon January 6, 2011 Between 2005 and 2006, author Fen Montaigne traveled to Antarctica with Fraser to observe the life cycle of the penguins. “This colony was once much larger,” Montaigne says, “but in recent years all the Adélie colonies in the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula have been in steep decline as […]
By John Platt Jan 6, 2011 11:20 AM Six Australian birds that have not been seen in decades have been declared extinct by a team of scientists assessing the health of the country’s bird species. In most cases they could have been saved, says team leader Stephen Garnett, professor of tropical knowledge at Charles Darwin […]
By HENRY BREAN, LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNALJanuary 6, 2011 | 12:00 a.m. A flood that destroyed homes near Mesquite last month also delivered a welcome boost to Lake Mead. High flows on the Virgin River and its tributaries raised the level of the reservoir by about a foot and a half, according to rough projections from […]
By Roland Buerk, BBC News, Tokyo 5 January 2011 A tuna has sold at auction for a record 32.49m yen in Tokyo, nearly $400,000 (£257,320). The fish was a blue fin, a variety prized for making the finest sushi. It was bought by a joint Japanese and Chinese bid. The first auction in January at […]
The first decade of the 2000s, or the years 2001–2010, was warmer than the preceding decades in the whole of Finland, even though 2010 was colder than the long-time average. According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute’s statistics, the first decade of the 2000s (2001–2010) was the warmest decade in the history of Finland’s temperature measurements, […]
