Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Image of the Day: Record Tennessee Flooding Viewed From Orbit, 4 May 2010

29 April 2010   4 May 2010 Caption by Holli Riebeek. Record-breaking rain triggered severe and widespread flooding across Tennessee starting on May 1, 2010. This false-color image provides a cloud-free view of the region’s swollen rivers as seen by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on May 4, 2010. Terra […]

Graph of the Day: Projected Oil Spill Path to 8 May 2010

Improving weather today allowed both NOAA overflights and dispersant operations to resume. Today, four aircraft applied dispersants to the surface slick, and dispersant application by vessels is expected to begin tomorrow. Monitoring of the dispersant efforts are ongoing. NOAA overflights were conducted over the source as well as south from Mobile. At present, technical specialists […]

Poor Mexico farmers fear that toxic-sludge irrigation will end

By ELISABETH MALKINPublished: May 4, 2010 MIXQUIAHUALA, Mexico — Night and day, Marcelo Mera Bárcenas slops the fetid water that has coursed 60 miles downhill from the sewers of Mexico City and spreads it over the corn and alfalfa fields of this once arid land. From the roads here in the Mezquital Valley, fields stretch […]

Antibiotic resistance increasing in soil microbes

(American Chemical Society) A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are reporting disturbing evidence that soil microbes have become progressively more resistant to antibiotics over the last 60 years. Surprisingly, this trend continues despite apparent more stringent rules on use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture, and improved sewage treatment technology […]

Herbicide-resistant superweeds invade US farmlands

By WILLIAM NEUMAN and ANDREW POLLACKPublished: May 3, 2010 DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides. But not this year. On a recent afternoon […]

Half of the Amazon rainforest could be lost by 2050

By Stephen Messenger, Porto Alegre, Brazil on 05. 4.10 In what could easily be considered a worst-case scenario for the fate of the world’s largest rainforest, a study led by Brazil’s National Institute of Special Research found that the size of the Amazon could be reduced 50 percent by 2050, the ‘tipping point‘ for when […]

Photo gallery: Flooding in Nashville

The Herald-DispatchMay 04, 2010 @ 11:47 AM NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Rescuers feared even more bodies would emerge as muddy flood waters ebb from torrential weekend rains that swamped Nashville, much of Tennessee and two neighboring states, leaving at least 29 dead. The Cumberland River that has submerged parts of Nashville’s historic downtown was expected […]

Graph of the Day: Extreme Rainfall in Kentucky and Tennessee, May 2010

Caption by Holli Riebeek Extreme rain inundated Tennessee and Kentucky on May 1-2, 2010. A line of severe thunderstorms moved over the states on Saturday, May 1, and a high-pressure system blocked the storms from moving east. Trapped in place and fed by humid air from the Gulf of Mexico, the storms unleashed heavy rain […]

Hurricane forecasters expect the worst in 2010 Atlantic season

By Brian K. Sullivan May 4 (Bloomberg) — The 2010 Atlantic hurricane season may rival some of the worst in history as meteorological conditions mirror 2005, the record-breaking year that spawned New Orleans- wrecking Katrina, forecasters say. The El Nino warming in the Pacific is fading and rain is keeping dust down in Africa, cutting […]

As weather tracks with climate scientists’ grim forecasts, Kenya is awash in misery

By MICHAEL BURNHAM AND NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD of GreenwirePublished: May 4, 2010 NAIROBI, Kenya — It’s the rainy season, but the sun is still baking the Mathare Valley slum. A half-million people live in this warren of shacks clustered amid 10 square kilometers of the Mathare River. When the rains fall, drops spill like marbles on […]

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