Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Wildlife trapped by Kenyan bush fires

  NAIVASHA, Kenya, March 23 (Reuters) – Game wardens fear wildlife is trapped in the crater of an extinct Kenyan volcano that was engulfed by a bush fire for a third day on Monday. The blaze at on Mount Longonot — one of the best-known trekking spots in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley — has sent […]

Abandoned horses are latest victims of financial collapse

By Kara Finnstrom and Chuck Conder LANCASTER, California (CNN) — The sound of pounding hooves thunders in the high desert air. A cloud of dust marks the trail of a herd of wild horses as they race across the arid plain. This is Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue, a shelter for wild mustangs and unwanted horses […]

Orlov: Welcome to Fuffland!

I always enjoy blockquoting Dmitry Orlov, but this post is a real gem. In the unfolding global financial collapse, it is not just our accounts and balance sheets that come up short, but our language as well. What do you call a bunch of liar loans packaged into toxic assets and placed on the balance […]

Monbiot: Say goodbye to 2 degrees of warming

by GEORGE MONBIOT Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than 2 degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with 4 degrees. […]

Scenes from the Great Recession

From The Big Picture: The state of our global economy: foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, layoffs, abandoned projects, and the people and industries caught in the middle. It can be difficult to capture financial pressures in photographs, but here a few recent glimpses into some of the places and lives affected by what some are calling the […]

Deadly nerve toxin entering deep ocean food web

  By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) – A nerve toxin produced by marine algae off California appears to affect creatures in the deep ocean, posing a greater threat that previously thought, U.S. researchers said on Sunday. Surface blooms of the algae known as Pseudo-nitzschia can generate dangerously high levels of domoic acid, a neurotoxin blamed […]

Drought shuts down Tampa Bay’s surface water supply

Mar. 13–TAMPA — With local lakes and rivers at critically low levels, the region’s water provider has virtually shut down the surface water supply to the Tampa Bay region. "The reservoir’s level is so low we are unable to provide water, consistently, to the water treatment plant and we are unable to pull water from […]

Dilbert on doom

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Oceans awash in toxic seas of plastic

Go down to the beach today and you’ll find plenty of garbage among the sand — but that’s nothing compared with the continent-sized whirlpools of lethal waste out there beyond the horizon  By WINIFRED BIRD, Special to The Japan Times Umbrella handles. Pens. Popsicle sticks. Lots and lots of toothbrushes. These are just a few […]

Major losses for Caribbean reef fish in last 15 years

(Cell Press) By combining data from 48 studies of coral reefs from around the Caribbean, researchers have found that fish densities that have been stable for decades have given way to significant declines since 1995. The study appears online on March 19 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. "We were most surprised to discover […]

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