Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Countries blame China, not nature, for water shortage

By THOMAS FULLERPublished: April 1, 2010 BANGKOK — In southern China, the worst drought in at least 50 years has dried up farmers’ fields and left tens of millions of people short of water. But the drought has also created a major public relations problem for the Chinese government in neighboring countries, where in recent […]

Southern California beach erosion is worst in a decade

Powerful winter storms sweep away a spectacular amount of sand, leaving a rugged landscape of rock and cliff-side staircases that drop off into the air. By Tony Barboza April 2, 2010 Jeremy and Fernando Gutierrez descended a staircase to a cove in Laguna Beach for a nighttime lobster dive and almost fell into the ocean. […]

Ken Salazar: Water a ‘ticking time bomb’ for California

The U.S. Interior secretary discusses water infrastructure and climate change legislation with Times editors and reporters. March 22, 2010 Below are excerpts from a conversation Monday morning between U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Times reporters and editorial board members. Dan Turner, L.A. Times: I know that you’ve been involved in the climate bill talks. […]

Despite the rain, California drought lingers — ‘Agriculture will have another year of record acres unfarmed’

California needs much more to beat effect of three dry years By Mark Grossi, mgrossi@fresnobee.comand John Holland, jholland@modbee.com The Sierra Nevada snowpack has improved. Waterfalls are starting to thunder in Yosemite Valley. A spring storm adds to the bounty. It’s time to celebrate the end of the state’s three-year drought. Right? Wrong. The El Niño-powered […]

Graph of the Day: Global Average Temperature, 1850-2009

HadCRUT3 Diagnostics: global average (NH+SH)/2 Calculating the global mean as the mean of the northern and southern hemisphere averages helps prevent the value becoming dominated by the Northern hemisphere, where there are more observations. Technorati Tags: global warming,climate change

Ocean acidification threatens Alaska fisheries

KUCB News (2010-03-26) UNALASKA, AK (kucb) – The cold waters and currents of the North Pacific Ocean make the ecosystems around the Aleutians more susceptible to ocean acidification. Brad Warren with the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership spoke about the issue at the Western Alaska Interdisciplinary Science Conference Thursday. “It’s a cross cutting threat to food webs […]

Ecologists fear for Lake Baikal as Putin saves factory

  BAIKALSK, Russia (Reuters) – On the shores of Lake Baikal, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is held up as a savior and cursed as a scourge after allowing a Soviet-era paper mill to reopen beside the world’s largest freshwater lake. Ecologists have branded Russia’s most powerful man as the killer of Baikal, a 25-million-year-old […]

Metal-tainted insects poison carnivorous plants

By David DeFranza  on 04.1.10 When we think about pollutants moving their way up the food chain, we picture a process that begins with plants or plankton and gradually compounds until it reaches species at the top — like polar bears or humans. In the case of carnivorous plants, new research has shown, consuming toxic […]

U.S. personal bankruptcies increase sharply in March

By DUFF WILSONPublished: April 1, 2010 More Americans filed for bankruptcy protection in March than during any month since the federal personal bankruptcy law was tightened in October 2005, a new report says, a result of high unemployment and the housing crash. Federal courts reported over 158,000 bankruptcy filings in March, or 6,900 a day, […]

Image of the Day: Dried Riverbed in Kenya

A young boy from the Turkana tribe stands on a dried up riverbed on November 9, 2009 near Lodwar, Kenya. (Christopher Furlong / Getty Images) Scenes from Kenya Technorati Tags: drought,freshwater depletion,Africa,Kenya,desertification,global warming,climate change

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