Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Graph of the Day: UAH Globally Averaged Satellite-Based Temperature of the Lower Atmosphere, Jan 1979 – Jan 2010

From Climate Progress: Yes, the mid-Atlantic region appears headed toward an epic snow storm as “amazing moisture feeds into what is already a gigantic system,” according to the Capital Weather Gang. But while the anti-science crowd will no doubt tout that as evidence we aren’t warming — just as they did with the “cold snap” […]

Water at core of climate change impacts: experts

OSLO (Reuters) – The main impact of climate change will be on water supplies and the world needs to learn from past cooperation such as over the Indus or Mekong Rivers to help avert future conflicts, experts said on Sunday. Desertification, flash floods, melting glaciers, heatwaves, cyclones or water-borne diseases such as cholera are among […]

Climate change, pollution are suspects in rusty blackbirds' plummeting numbers

By RANDY LEE LOFTIS / The Dallas Morning Newsrloftis@dallasnews.com, 12:00 AM CST on Sunday, February 7, 2010   From North Texas to Florida, a high-pitched voice is strangely missing from the chatter of wintering birds. The rusty blackbird, a winter visitor to Dallas-Fort Worth, has suffered one of North America’s steepest and least understood declines. Since […]

Torrential rains swell Australia rivers and dams

By ELLIE HARVEYFebruary 8, 2010 NO MATTER how much it rains, it never seems to hit the right spots, but at the weekend the water may have finally found the dams. The Warragamba catchment received its biggest fall in 2½ years. Total drinking storage increased by about 2 per cent since the rain began last […]

Graph of the Day: Americans’ Beliefs about Global Warming, by Departure of Local Weather from Normal Temperature

Local weather’s effect on beliefs that Earth is getting warmer. Figure 3 displays the simple bivariate relationship between temperature and beliefs about the evidence for global warming. Because the dependent variable is dichotomous, a typical scatterplot is inappropriate to display the relationship. To construct the figure, we divided the cases in our dataset into 100 […]

Few remain in Pennsylvania coal town as 1962 fire still burns

By MICHAEL RUBINKAMAssociated Press Writer Standing before the wreckage of his bulldozed home, John Lokitis Jr. felt sick to his stomach, certain that a terrible mistake had been made. He’d fought for years to stay in the house. It was one of the few left standing in the moonscape of Centralia, a once-proud coal town […]

Rain swamps Sydney's water catchments

Sydney’s catchments have been swamped in rain, bringing some of the best falls in up to four years. The rain-starved Warragamba only this week posted yet another drop in capacity and is now about 50.9 per cent, Martin Palmer, meteorologist with The Weather Company, says. Huge falls around the Central Tablelands on Friday, as bands […]

Amazon rainforest ‘is very close to a tipping point’

The Amazonian apocalypse is just around the corner, according to scientists gathered at the conference launching the International Year of Biodiversity. By Stephen Leahy PARIS, Feb 1 (Tierramérica).- The Amazon forest “is very close to a tipping point,” and if destruction continues, it could shrink to one third of its original size in just 65 […]

Tibet temperatures highest ever recorded, rainfall at record low

(China Daily) LHASA: The “roof of the world” is getting warmer. The average temperature in the Tibet autonomous region was 5.9 C last year, 1.5 C higher than normal and a record high in almost four decades, latest figures from the regional climate center showed. The 2009 climate report, issued by the center yesterday, was […]

Russia 'dumped waste in Baltic'

Sweden wants explanation on Baltic nuclear ‘dumping’  By Damien McGuinness BBC News, Riga  The Russian military allegedly dumped nuclear waste into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, according to a report on Swedish television. Radioactive material from a military base in Latvia is thought to have been thrown into Swedish waters. For many the […]

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