Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Graph of the Day: Los Angeles Port Traffic, 1995-2009

From Calculated Risk: …This graph shows the loaded inbound and outbound traffic at the port of Los Angeles in TEUs (TEUs: 20-foot equivalent units or 20-foot-long cargo container). Although containers tell us nothing about value, container traffic does give us an idea of the volume of goods being exported and imported. Inbound traffic was 35% […]

Toronto ash trees to die within a decade

by Iain Marlow Toronto’s ash trees could be gone in as little as 10 years, killed by an unstoppable beetle that is spreading rapidly across the province, the city’s forestry czar says. "It’s the elimination of a genus from this part of the continent, which is absolutely staggering," said Richard Ubbens, the city’s director of […]

Liberia invaded by second wave of crop-destroying caterpillars

Liberia has been hit by a second invasion of crop-destroying caterpillars which have wreaked havoc in the west African nation, agriculture ministry officials said Thursday. "We have two weeks maximum to react. We have our teams out on the field preparing to contain the situation," Moses Subah, head of the agriculture ministry’s technical team, said. […]

Polar bears 'will not survive without urgent action'

By Daily Telegraph Reporter WWF, the conservation charity, said that the five countries which are home to the polar bear must commit to action on global warming to save the animal, which is reliant on the sea ice. Recent analysis by the US Geological Survey and World Conservation Union found that two-thirds of the 20,000 […]

Action needed to avoid world water crisis, U.N. says

By Patrick Worsnip UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The world needs to act urgently to avoid a global water crisis due to increased population, rising living standards, dietary changes and more biofuels production, the United Nations warned on Thursday. By 2030, nearly half of the world’s people will be living in areas of acute water shortage, […]

Global warming will render half of world's inhabited areas unliveable

Parts of China, India and the eastern US could all become too warm in summer for people to lose heat by sweating, expert warns by David Adam in Copenhagen Severe global warming could make half the world’s inhabited areas literally too hot to live in, a US scientist warned today. Parts of China, India and […]

Mass fish dieoff in Hanoi rivers and lakes

VietNamNet Bridge – Fish are dying en masse in the Nhue River and the lakes of Hoan Kiem, Linh Dam, Dinh Cong, and the West Lake, causing terrible smells and causing concern for local residents. The incident has been happening in Nhue River for four days. Dead fish covers up to a kilometer of the […]

US freshwater turtles near extinction

  TUCSON, Arizona, March 11, 2009 (ENS) – Conservation and health groups today filed emergency petitions with eight midwestern and southern states, seeking to end the commercial harvest of freshwater turtles sold for food in the United States and abroad. Not only are the turtles vanishing into extinction, but consumers are eating meat from turtles […]

Graph of the Day: Weekly Unemployment Claims, 1971-2009

From Calculated Risk. I’d like to try fitting a curve to that nonlinear growth post-Jan 2006. Parabolic? Exponential? The DOL reports on weekly unemployment insurance claims: In the week ending March 7, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 654,000, an increase of 9,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 645,000. The […]

Graph of the Day: China Monthly Exports and Imports, 1990-2009

From Calculated Risk: From Brad Setser: The fall in China’s exports caught up with the fall in China’s imports, at least for now After soaring for most of this decade — the pace of China’s export growth clearly turned up in 2002 or 2003 and then stayed at a very high pace — China’s exports […]

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