Blogging the End of the World™
By Marina Lopes 20 November 2019 SAO PAULO, Brazil (The Washington Post) – Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro shrugged off a government report that deforestation in the Amazon reached an 11-year high on his watch, saying Wednesday he expects the destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest to continue. “Deforestation and fires will never end,” the […]
By Editorial Board 15 November 2019 (The Washington Post) – Venice has always been linked closely with the water that surrounds it. The city is thought to have been founded by refugees seeking protection from Germanic invaders by sheltering in the northwestern Adriatic Sea’s islands and marshes. By the 12th century, the doge would annually […]
By James Temple 19 November 2019 (Technology Review) – A new report from the MIT Energy Initiative warns that EVs may never reach the same sticker price so long as they rely on lithium-ion batteries, the energy storage technology that powers most of today’s consumer electronics. In fact, it’s likely to take another decade just to eliminate […]
By Hayley Fowler 20 November 2019 CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (The Charlotte Observer) – Hurricanes aren’t the only hazard lapping at the shores of the Outer Banks, according to a report examining the threat of climate change on some of the country’s most beloved natural landscapes. Thanks to creeping sea levels and erosion rates, Cape Hatteras […]
By Colin Dwyer 18 November 2019 (NPR) – Picture, for a second, just how vast New York City is. All told, including Staten Island, the Bronx and every block in between, the massive metropolis takes up more than 300 square miles. Now, try to picture a hunk of land more than 12 times that size. That’s […]
By Michael Carlowicz and Adam Voiland 21 November 2019 (NASA) – Three weeks into November 2019, springtime bush fires continued to blaze across southern and eastern Australian states. As of November 20, government agencies counted 45 fires in South Australia and 49 in New South Wales, and dangerously dry and windy weather was fanning flames […]
By Neo Chai Chin 20 November 2019 (Eco-Business) – When about 50 tertiary students and members of the public gathered last month for a workshop in Singapore on next month’s United Nations climate change conference, they talked first about expectations and the ground to be covered at the conference. Then, they discussed feelings of anxiety and fear […]
By Deborah Netburn 12 November 2019 DONNER PASS, California (Los Angeles Times) – Art Shapiro stands on the edge of a Chevron gas station in the north-central Sierra, sipping a large Pepsi and scanning the landscape for butterflies. So far he’s spotted six species — a loping Western tiger swallowtail, two fluttering California tortoiseshells, a […]
By Sarah Gibbens 7 November 2019 (National Geographic) – When sea otters in Alaska were diagnosed with phocine distemper virus (PDV) in 2004, scientists were confused. The pathogen in the Morbillivirus genus that contains viruses like measles had then only been found in Europe and on the eastern coast of North America. “We didn’t understand how a […]
By Simon Denyer and Chris Mooney 12 November 2019 SHIRETOKO PENINSULA, Japan (The Washington Post) – Lined up along the side of their boat, the fishermen hauled a huge, heavy net up from swelling waves. At first, a few small jellyfish emerged, then a piece of plastic. Then net, and more net. Finally, all the […]
