Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Chinese zoo closed after tigers starve to death

Employee accuses bosses of making drink from bones of endangered animal By Clifford Coonan in Beijing Thursday, 18 March 2010 It is the Chinese Year of the Tiger but it has been far from auspicious. China’s Shenyang Zoo has closed after 11 Siberian tigers died of starvation or were shot this year amid murky tales […]

Mau settlers disrupt demarcation process

By Margaret Kalekye / KNA, Posted: Sun, Mar 14, 2010 Tension was high on Sunday in Maasai Mau forest in Narok South District where government surveyors are marking new boundaries ahead of the third phase of Mau evictions. The over 15,000 settlers earlier blocked the demarcation exercise following reports that the team of surveyors was […]

Historic China drought leaves millions short of water – cloud-seeding fails

  By Staff WritersBeijing (AFP) March 17, 2010 Millions of people face drinking water shortages in southwestern China because of a once-a-century drought that has dried up rivers and threatens vast farmlands, state media reported Wednesday. The drought has gripped huge areas of Guizhou, Yunnan, and Sichuan provinces, the Guangxi region, and the mega-city of […]

Graph of the Day: U.S. Real Consumption and Income Growth, 1933-2009

…Looking at real GDP growth over these periods, the 2002–09 era looks very weak, with only 1946–49 having a lower average annual rate of growth (in these years, GDP averaged an annual decline of 2.01 percent). Average annual real GDP growth was 1.72 percent for the 2002–09 period, much lower than the average of 3.97 […]

A year’s worth of Desdemona traffic

As you know, Desdemona loves data, of all sorts, and this makes Google Analytics especially fun to use. So here are all the visits to Desdemona Despair for the last year. Here are some statistics to go with that graph. Looks like the trend is generally upward, which pleases Desdemona.   Here are the top ten […]

Graph of the Day: Abundance of Five Fish Species, 1952-2007

People eat a lot of fish. In fact, per capita fish consumption has nearly doubled in the last 50 years. The problem is that there may not be any more fish if we keep catching and consuming them at this rate. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations measures how many of each […]

Global warming shown to cause early butterfly emergence

For the first time, climate change has been shown to alter the timing of a natural event – the emergence of the common brown butterfly For the first time, a causal link has been established between climate change and the timing of a natural event – the emergence of the common brown butterfly. Although there […]

High Arctic biodiversity down 26 percent since 1970

By John Platt Mammals, birds and fish living in the High Arctic experienced an average 26 percent drop in their populations between 1970 and 2004 due to the loss of sea ice, according to a new report from The Arctic Species Trend Index (ASTI), Tracking Trends in Arctic Wildlife [pdf]. The 2010 report, commissioned and […]

Tuna listing rejection dooms species to extinction

Japan, Canada and scores of poor nations opposed the measure on the grounds that ban would devastate fishing economies By Guardian staff and agencieswww.guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 March 2010 15.10 GMT A proposal to protect the Atlantic bluefin tuna prized in sushi was rejected at a UN wildlife meeting today. The decision was reached after Japan, […]

Caviar hunters push sturgeon to ‘extinction's edge’

  Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, editing by Michael Stott and Philippa Fletcher (Reuters) – After more than 200 million years, sturgeon are losing a battle for survival to poachers who have hunted the queens of caviar to the verge of extinction, a leading environmental group said on Thursday. Stocks of sturgeon, known in Russia as […]

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