Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Laid-off guest workers flee Dubai as economy collapses

By ROBERT F. WORTH DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Sofia, a 34-year-old Frenchwoman, moved here a year ago to take a job in advertising, so confident about Dubai’s fast-growing economy that she bought an apartment for almost $300,000 with a 15-year mortgage. Now, like many of the foreign workers who make up 90 percent of […]

Smoke covers Melbourne as Victoria fires continue to burn

By James Campbell, Sunday Herald Sun MELBOURNE is shrouded in a smoke haze as the Victoria fires continue to burn across the state. Visibility at Melbourne airport is down to 2km with the Bureau of Meteorology warning the haze could linger until the end of next week. The Environment Protection Authority has issued a smoke […]

Lovelock: Too late for Earth

The Gaia thinker’s latest book warns that climate disaster is imminent by Camilla Cavendish  You may feel, as job losses soar and parts of the world descend into turmoil, that you’re apocalypsed-out for February. If so, you may not immediately leap at James Lovelock’s forthcoming book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. His warning that climate […]

Most penguin species in rapid decline

  Penguins are on the verge of a precipitous decline, one conservation group warns. A combination of changing weather patterns, overfishing, pollution, and other factors have conspired against the aquatic, flightless birds, according to a long-running study conducted by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society. The study’s findings were presented today by University of Washington […]

More 'megafires' to come, say scientists

  By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor Sunday, 2 September 2007 Fires of unprecedented ferocity are sweeping around the world, fuelled by global warming and misguided environmentalism. Dubbed "megafires", they rage over thousands of miles at 1,000C and create their own weather, even triggering tornadoes. Rapidly increasing in number, they are often unquenchable by any human […]

Australia wildfires release tens of millions of tons of carbon

by Asa Wahlquist VICTORIA’S bushfires have released a massive amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – almost equal to Australia’s industrial emission for an entire year. Mark Adams, from the University of Sydney, said the emissions from bushfires were far beyond what could be contained through carbon capture and needed to be addressed in […]

Prince William Sound orcas doomed by Exxon oil spill

By KYLE HOPKINS – McClatchy Newspapers An already-fragile population of killer whales that hunts Prince William Sound never recovered from the Exxon Valdez oil spill and is doomed to die off, biologists said last week. … One of the most striking surprises to emerge from the annual Alaska Forum on the Environment was the tale […]

Garbage disaster looms at giant Mexico City dump

  By Mica Rosenberg NEZAHUALCOYOTL, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexico City is facing a crisis over where to put its trash — enough to fill four sports stadiums a year — with its sprawling dump already crammed to bursting and under a closure order. One of the world’s biggest landfills, the Nezahualcoyotl dump site is a […]

Armageddon? In wake of so many disasters, one can't help but wonder

Here’s some Grade-A doomer porn, from the LA Times: It feels like Armageddon. Part of Australia becomes a raging inferno, killing more than 170 people and perhaps millions of animals, and elsewhere Down Under floods have forced people from their homes, and into watery streets they now share with crocodiles. Costa Rica still reels from […]

CO2 hits new peaks, no sign global financial crisis causing dip

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) – Atmospheric levels of the main greenhouse gas are hitting new highs, with no sign yet that the world economic downturn is curbing industrial emissions, a leading scientist said on Thursday. "The rise is in line with the long-term trend," Kim Holmen, research director at the Norwegian Polar […]

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