Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Jeddah floods recede, sewage lake still threatens

By Asma Alsharif, JEDDAHMon Dec 7, 2009 7:07am EST JEDDAH (Reuters) – Standing in brown sludge outside his house in Jeddah, Qassim Mohsin still gasps at the power of the flash floods that churned through the Saudi port city on the Red Sea 10 days ago, killing at least 116 people. “We climbed to our […]

Graph of the Day: Murray River System Daily Water Inflows, November 2009

For the week ending 2 December there was welcome rain across the lower half of the Murray-Darling Basin (see Map 1). The highest rainfall was recorded in the Snowy Mountains at Charlotte Pass with 80 mm and in the Victorian Alps with Mt Buffalo receiving 72mm. Notably, many regions such as the Riverina, the western […]

Exodus of dairy farmers threatens River Murray communities

Murray Bridge (AAP) —A mass exodus of dairy farmers is threatening small communities around the lower reaches of the River Murray in South Australia. In the past few years more than 80 per cent of the industry in Murray Bridge has collapsed, taking with it farm employment, property values and even entire families whose spending […]

Australia targets water thieves

Phil Mercer, Foreign Correspondent, Last Updated: December 06. 2009 7:47PM UAE / December 6. 2009 3:47PM GMT SYDNEY // Water thieves in Australia are to be targeted by tougher penalties as the authorities promise to protect declining supplies amid a long-standing drought and the threat of climate change. Officials have said vast that amounts of […]

Asian carp invasion: Prepare for the worst

BY ERIC SHARPFREE PRESS OUTDOORS WRITER Anglers in the Great Lakes watershed better fish as much as possible in the next decade. Chances are that yet-another monumental government screwup has let Asian carp into the world’s biggest freshwater reservoir, auguring a potential disaster for many of our sport fisheries. New tests let scientists detect the […]

Vanishing glaciers imperil Bolivia

By David ShukmanEnvironment correspondent, BBC News, La Paz, Bolivia Fears are growing for the future of water supplies in one of Latin America’s fastest-growing urban areas – Bolivia’s sprawling city of La Paz and its neighbour El Alto. Scientists monitoring the glaciers high in the Andes mountains – a key source of water – say […]

Graph of the Day: Spring Heatwave in Australia, November 2009

By Rebecca Lindsey A spring heat wave scorched southeastern Australia in mid-November 2009, pushing the fire danger to the “catastrophic” category in parts of South Australia and New South Wales and to “extreme” in other surrounding areas. Many cities, including Melbourne and Adelaide experienced record-breaking temperatures that continued for many days. This pair of images […]

One Asian carp found after six miles of river poisoned in Illinois

By Jeff Kart, Bay City, Michigan on 12. 5.09, Treehugger An emergency operation to stop invasive Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes used more than 2,000 gallons of rotenone to poison six miles of a canal near Chicago this week. Tens of thousands of fish were killed. Just one Asian carp, the target of […]

Warming rescue plan doomed, report warns

By ADAM MORTONDecember 5, 2009 THE world has little chance of avoiding at least two degrees of global warming this century – the projected threshold for unpredictable and accelerated climate changes – if the emissions targets proposed by rich nations are locked in at next week’s Copenhagen summit, an analysis has found. A report by […]

Extinctions on the rise in the Galapagos: fishing and global warming devastating islands' species

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com, December 03, 2009 We may never see again the Galapagos black-spotted damselfish, the beautiful 24-rayed sunstar, or the Galapagos stringweed. These species from Galapagos waters may all very well be extinct. Other species are on the brink, such as the Galapagos penguin and the Floreana cup coral. A new report in […]

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