Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

National parks in India and Nepal hit by rhino poachers

  By Jeremy Hancewww.mongabay.comMarch 02, 2010 The rare Indian rhinoceros is not safe from poachers even in national parks. In Nepal’s world renowned Royal Chitwan National Park, twenty-four Indian rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis) have been poached since the last census was taken in 2008. The most recent one was killed last Thursday. Approximately 372 Indian rhinos […]

Manure becomes pollutant as its volume grows unmanageable

By David A. FahrentholdWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, March 1, 2010 Nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, this is irony: The United States has reduced the manmade pollutants that left its waterways dead, discolored and occasionally flammable. But now, it has managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff in the […]

‘No comfort in knowing’ El Niño and a pathogen, not global warming, caused Costa Rica golden toad extinction

ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2010) — Scientists broadly agree that global warming may threaten the survival of many plant and animal species; but global warming did not kill the Monteverde golden toad, an often cited example of climate-triggered extinction, says a new study. The toad vanished from Costa Rica’s Pacific coastal-mountain cloud forest in the late […]

Eating Appalachia: NASA satellite images reveal mountain cannibalism for coal

1984   1988 www.mongabay.comMarch 02, 2010 Eating a mountain for coal New images released by NASA reveal the conversion of mountains and forests in southern West Virginia to a giant surface mine. The time-lapse shots from 1984 to 2009 show the process of mountaintop removal in Boone County, West Virginia. The images show forests being […]

Western Australia has hottest and driest summer on record

www.mongabay.comMarch 02, 2010 Western Australia endured its hottest summer on record, according to the state weather bureau. At 29.6°C, temperatures were 0.2°C warmer than the previous record, set in 1997-1998. Western Australia has been keeping state-wide temperature data since 1950. Perth, the state’s capital, had its driest summer since record-keeping began in 1897. Only 0.2 […]

The bleakest outlook in the world: Oil, gas, shipping and overfishing all threaten Arctic waters

On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear. By Richard Ellis. Knopf; 416 pages; $28.95. Buy from Amazon.com After the Ice: Life, Death and Geopolitics in the New Arctic. By Alun Anderson. Smithsonian; 304 pages; $26.99. Virgin Books; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk THE Arctic is changing faster and more dramatically than any […]

Graph of the Day: Sea Level Rise and City Flooding

What does a metre sea level rise actually mean? This is how we visualised some of the data confusion Posted by David McCandless, Monday 22 February 2010 14.33 GMT, guardian.co.uk Another day, another set of bewildering climate figures. Today, key climate scientists withdrew their predictions. of a metre sea-level rise by 2100. Other scientists meanwhile […]

Desperate California to get more water, but drought persists

By Dan Whitcomb (Additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Eric Walsh)LOS ANGELESFri Feb 26, 2010 4:33pm EST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Drought-stricken farmers and cities across California were granted a measure of relief on Friday when federal and state officials said they expected to supply significantly more water this year than last. The announcements […]

Huge iceberg ‘threatens sea-life’

A vast iceberg that broke off eastern Antarctic earlier this month could disrupt marine life in the region, scientists have warned. They say the iceberg, which is 78km long and up to 39km wide, could have consequences for the area’s colonies of emperor penguins. The emblematic birds may be forced to travel further afield to […]

Rampant logging destroying Papua New Guinea — ‘'They are logging Vanimo to its death’

By BARNEY ZWARTZFebruary 27, 2010 Environmental vandalism by loggers in Papua New Guinea is destroying the nation and its people while Australia makes futile promises to try to influence logging policy, according to a former missionary and a landowner. Brother Jim Coucher worked in and near Vanimo on the north-west coast of PNG for 43 […]

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