Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Fall 2009 salmon run ‘may set a new record low’

By MATT WEISER, Sacramento Bee SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Salmon didn’t make the big fall comeback in California’s Central Valley rivers that anglers and nature lovers yearned for, raising the likelihood of a third year of fishing restrictions. Some areas saw more fall-run chinook return from the ocean to the Sacramento River and its tributaries. This […]

Graph of the Day: Trend in Ocean Surface Temperature, 1959-2008

Long-term 50-year change in sea surface temperature (SST) during 1959-2008 calculated by fitting a linear trend to 50 years of monthly SST data at each grid point. The SST fields are from the Hadley Centre data set as described by Rayner et al. (2006). The Copenhagen Diagnosis, 2009: Updating the world on the Latest Climate […]

Polar bears in southern Beaufort Sea spending more time on land and open water

  ANCHORAGE, ALASKA, January 2010 — A long-term study showing the changes in habitat associations of polar bears in response to sea ice conditions in the southern Beaufort Sea has implications for polar bear management in Alaska. Karyn Rode, a polar bear biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, Alaska and one […]

Warmer climate could stifle carbon uptake by trees

  (University of Colorado at Boulder) Contrary to conventional belief, as the climate warms and growing seasons lengthen subalpine forests are likely to soak up less carbon dioxide, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study. As a result, more of the greenhouse gas will be left to concentrate in the atmosphere. “Our […]

Scotland seabird decline is a disturbing trend

Published:  07 January, 2010 IN the last few years, there have been several serious causes for concern as far as wildlife conservations is concerned and perhaps none more so than with seabirds. Around Scotland, including the Highlands, there are many important international colonies of seabirds. These are sometimes in very large numbers such as gannets, […]

Cold iguanas free-fall from trees

Iguanas Go Into Hibernation State In Cold Weather POSTED: Wednesday, January 6, 2010UPDATED: 3:10 pm EST January 6, 2010 HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — Record lows across South Florida are literally freezing the invasive iguana in its tracks. Kamikaze iguanas, plummeting from their treetop perches, have long been a Floridian urban legend. On Wednesday morning, Local 10 […]

Kenya tribe slowly driven off its ancestral lands

First it was colonists who put the Ogiek on reserves in Mau Forest. After freedom corrupt officials drove them out as they set up farms. Now a reforestation effort has forced them even farther away. By Robyn Dixon, January 4, 2010 Mau Forest, Kenya – For centuries, the little-known Ogiek people foraged wild honey and […]

Ice-capped roof of world turns to desert

Scientists warn of ecological catastrophe across Asia as glaciers melt and continent’s great rivers dry up By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor,  Sunday, 7 May 2006 Global warming is rapidly melting the ice-bound roof of the world, and turning it into desert, leading scientists have revealed. The Chinese Academy of Sciences – the country’s top scientific […]

Invasive species multiply in U.S. waterways

By Matthew Berger WASHINGTON, Jan 4 (IPS) – As 2010, the U.N.’s International Year of Biodiversity, gets underway, a fight against some of the most damaging invasive species in U.S. waterways is heating up. The U.N. says some experts put the rate at which species are disappearing at 1,000 times the natural rate, and invasive […]

Graph of the Day: Aragonite Saturation in the Greater Caribbean Region, 1880-2009

An extended time series of the regional mean aragonite saturation state for the Greater Caribbean Region derived using the NOAA extended reconstructed SST (ER SST V3b; red curve) with the Experimental Ocean Acidification Product Suite v0.3 values derived from satellite SST overlaid (blue curve). The global mean (green curve) is estimated from the representative SST […]

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