Desdemona Despair – Page 11 – Blogging the End of the World™

Heavy rainfall caused catastrophic flooding in Derna, northeastern Libya, on 11 September 2023. Photo: AFP / Getty Images

September 30, 2023

Horrific Libya flooding made up to 50 times more likely by planet-warming pollution, scientists find – “Through these events we are already seeing how climate change and human factors can combine to create compounding and cascading impacts”

By Laura Paddison 19 September 2023 (CNN) – The deadly rainfall which caused catastrophic flooding and destruction in Libya, as well as other parts of the Mediterranean, this month was made much more likely and worse by the human-caused climate crisis, in addition to other human factors, according to a new scientific analysis [Interplay of climate change-exacerbated […]

Number of generic extinctions per century among in different classes of vertebrates. The low number of reptiles and amphibia, which underestimate the magnitude of extinction pattern, is probably the result of the lack of information in earlier centuries, where very few species had been described. The dotted line represents the background extinction rate. Graphic: Ceballos and Ehrlich, 2023 / PNAS

September 30, 2023

Study finds human-driven mass extinction is eliminating entire branches of the tree of life – “We’re losing our only known living companions in the entire universe”

By Sean Cummings 18 September 2023 (Stanford News) – The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise […]

Wind farms in Boqueirão da Onça, or Jaguars’ Ravine, in the Caatinga in northeastern Brazil. Conservationists say companies shouldn’t install turbines in long rows, which forces animals to make unnecessarily long detours. Photo: Dado Galdieri / The Wall Street Journal

September 30, 2023

Brazil’s big cats under threat from wind farms – “Wind power is a fantastic proposal, and the northeast certainly has plenty of wind … but wind parks must also take into account what is happening here on the ground”

By Luciana Magalhaes and Samantha Pearson 17 September 2023 JUAZEIRO, Brazil – Weighing more than 100 pounds, big cats have long reigned over this hot and semi-arid region of Brazil, developing tougher paws for the scorched earth and reaching speeds of 50 miles an hour to bring down wild boar and deer. But nothing could […]

Residents walk through floodwaters during a heavy rain storm in the New York City suburb of Mamaroneck in Westchester County, 29 September 2023. Photo: Mike Segar / REUTERS

September 30, 2023

New York City area gets one of its wettest days in decades, as rain floods subways and streets – “The sad reality is that our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond”

By Jake Offenhartz, Jennifer Peltz, and Bobby Caina Calvan 29 September 2023 NEW YORK (AP) – Rain walloped the New York metropolitan area with a startling punch Friday, knocking out several subway and commuter rail lines, stranding drivers on highways, flooding basements and shuttering a terminal at LaGuardia Airport for hours in one of the […]

Flood damage in the city of Derna, where the death toll from floods in eastern Libya on 11 September 2023 was expected to soar dramatically. Photo: AFP / Getty Images

September 12, 2023

Up to 10,000 people feared dead after “catastrophic” floods sweep Libya – “The bodies are still lying on the ground in many parts. Hospitals are filled with bodies. And there are areas we have yet to reach.”

By Patrick Smith 12 September 2023 (NBC News) – As many as 10,000 people are feared dead after a storm slammed into Libya, unleashing a devastating surge of floodwaters across the country’s east. A disaster wrought by intense rainfall from Mediterranean storm Daniel intensified when two dams burst — with more than 2,000 people killed in […]

Smoke rises from the Crater Creek (K52125) wildfire near Keremeos, British Columbia, Canada, 15 August 2023. BC Wildfire Service / REUTERS

September 11, 2023

Carbon credit market confidence ebbs as big names retreat – Voluntary carbon markets shrink in 2023 for the first time in at least seven years

By Susanna Twidale and Sarah Mcfarlane 1 September 2023 LONDON (Reuters) – Voluntary carbon markets have shrunk for the first time in at least seven years, as companies including food giant Nestlé and fashion house Gucci reduced buying and studies found several forest protection projects did not deliver promised emissions savings. Preserving forests is crucial […]

The Bald Mountain Wildfire burns in the Grande Prairie Forest Area in Alberta on 12 May 2023. Government of Alberta Fire Service / Canadian Press / AP

September 10, 2023

Forests are no longer our climate friends – “As extreme as this year’s wildfire emissions have been, they are just the latest escalation in a multi-decade flood of CO₂ pouring out of Canada’s ‘managed’ forests and forestry”

By David Wallace-Wells 6 September 2023 (The New York Times) – Canadian wildfires have this year burned a land area larger than 104 of the world’s 195 countries. The carbon dioxide released by them so far is estimated to be nearly 1.5 billion tons — more than twice as much as Canada releases through transportation, […]

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology glaciologist and head of the Swiss measurement network “Glamos”, Matthias Huss, work at the Rhone glacier with his team near Goms, Switzerland, Friday, 16 June 2023. A top glacier watcher warned that a warm early summer and a heat wave could have caused severe glacier melt across Switzerland, threatening to make 2023 the second-worst year for ice loss after a record thaw in 2022. Photo: Matthias Schrader / AP Photo

September 10, 2023

Swiss glacier watcher warns 2023 heat wave threatens severe melt again after record 2022 – “We can definitely say that we had very high melting in Switzerland and in Europe in general”

By Jamey Keaten 1 September 2023 GENEVA (AP) – A top glacier watcher has warned that a warm early summer combined with a heat wave last week may have caused severe glacier melt in Switzerland, threatening to make 2023 its second-worst year for ice loss after a record thaw last year. Matthias Huss of the GLAMOS […]

Percent prevalence of undernourishment, 2015-2022. Data: FAOSTAT Suite of Food Security Indicators, cited 12 July 2023. Graphic: Gallup

September 10, 2023

Hunger, food insecurity still higher than before pandemic – At the global level, there was no progress toward reducing food insecurity in 2022

30 August 2023 (Gallup) – Although hunger at the global level stopped rising in 2022, the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report shows that it is still increasing in many places around the world and that levels of both hunger and food insecurity remain higher today than they were before the pandemic. […]

The Trinity test fireball, 25 thousandths of a second after its detonation at the Alamogordo bombing range in New Mexico at 5:29 a.m. Mountain time on 16 July 1945. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory

September 10, 2023

The atomic bomb laid down the marker for humanity’s era of catastrophic change – “An observable, unambiguous change in the physical properties or fossil content of the strata”

By Stephen Trimble 3 September 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – Christopher Nolan believes J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. “By unleashing nuclear power,” the film director concludes, “he gave us the power to destroy ourselves.” Nolan might exaggerate, but Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s hit movie, is surely worthy of the […]