Blogging the End of the World™
From Calculated Risk: The graph shows the year-over-year change in both indices. The Composite 10 is off 18.6% over the last year. The Composite 20 is off 18.7% over the last year. This is near the worst year-over-year price declines for the Composite indices since the housing bubble burst started. … Case-Shiller: Prices Fall Sharply […]
U.S. Department of the Interior will grant $15 million to 55 projects to “thin overgrown forests” [logging] and remove potential fuels for wildfires on public lands” [so the wood can be burned elsewhere]. The “hazardous fuels reduction” projects selected will create jobs in 12 states. The DOI press release on this program reports that “wood […]
By GILLIAN FLACCUS, Associated Press Writer SAN DIEGO – Six months ago, Jim Wiseman didn’t even have a spare nutrition bar in his kitchen cabinet. Now, the 54-year-old businessman and father of five has a backup generator, a water filter, a grain mill and a 4-foot-tall pile of emergency food tucked in his home in […]
A fifth of reptiles and almost a quarter of amphibians in Europe are threatened with extinction on the continent, according to the European Commission. By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent The first European Red Lists of threatened species for the two groups of species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) shows 23 per […]
BY ALAN CLENDENNING SAO PAULO — Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 44 people and left 376,000 homeless. Flooding is common in the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer […]
People have been listening to skylarks singing in Britain for 10,000 years. But now they, and many other much-loved species, are vanishing fast. By David Adam, environment correspondent …the star attraction of the neighbouring fields has flown. Until a year ago, a clutch of woodlark nested there, one of Britain’s rarest birds with just 1,000 […]
By Tan Ee Lyn HONG KONG (Reuters) – A paint chemical that is widely used in China is leaking into the Yangtze river and may be responsible for deformities and decreasing numbers of rare wild Chinese sturgeon, a study has found. In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers […]
From Calculated Risk: This graph shows broker’s commissions as a percent of GDP. Not surprisingly – giving the housing bubble – broker’s commissions soared in recent years, rising from $56 billion in 2000, to $109 billion in 2005. Commissions have declined to an annual rate of $57 billion in Q1 2009 – the lowest since […]
By Shar Adams Australia is exhibiting climate change weather patterns that were not predicted to manifest till 2020, says one of the country’s most prominent climate change scientists. Professor Ian Lowe, AO, an award-winning scientist and author of a number of books on climate change, said that when he wrote his first book, Living […]
By PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY As job losses rise, growing numbers of American homeowners with once solid credit are falling behind on their mortgages, amplifying a wave of foreclosures. In the latest phase of the nation’s real estate disaster, the locus of trouble has shifted from subprime loans — those extended to home […]
