Blogging the End of the World™
By Sara Jean Green and Lauren Girgis 29 December 2023 (The Seattle Times) – King County has seen over 1,000 fatal fentanyl overdoses in 2023, surpassing a record set last year by an astounding 47%. Over 1,050 of the county’s nearly 1,300 fatal overdoses this year involved fentanyl, sounding yet another alarm about the potency of the […]
30 December 2023 (Desdemona Despair) – 2023 was another year of terrifying climate and ecological disasters, and it was another year of human apathy and futility toward averting the worst outcomes. The din and aggressiveness of antiscience forces, emboldened by successful anti-vaccine disinformation campaigns, reached new levels of delusion and penetration into mainstream society. And […]
By Safia Samee Ali 25 December 2023 (The Messenger) – The pace of mass murder shootings continued to accelerate in the U.S. in 2023, hitting a new record for both the number of attacks and the number of people killed. The year ended with a grim toll of 40 mass murder shootings — which left […]
By Jonathan Watts 29 December 2023 (The Guardian) – The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said. As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former NASA scientist […]
By Damian Carrington 8 November 2023 (The Guardian) – The world’s fossil fuel producers are planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over, a UN report has found. Experts called the plans “insanity” which “throw humanity’s future into question”. The energy plans of the petrostates contradicted their climate policies and pledges, the report said. […]
By Lauren Sommer 28 December 2023 (NPR) – As 2023 draws to a close, it’s going out on top. “It’s looking virtually certain at this point that 2023 will be the hottest year on record,” says Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit that analyzes climate trends. Though temperature records from December have […]
By Ian James 28 December 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – Six months ago, an explosion ripped apart Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, unleashing floods that killed 58 people, devastated the landscape along the Dnipro River and cut off water to productive farmland. The destruction of the dam — which Ukrainian officials and the European Parliament blame on Russia, […]
By Stephanie Hegarty 25 December 2023 (BBC World Service) – The Amazon rainforest experienced its worst drought on record in 2023. Many villages became unreachable by river, wildfires raged, and wildlife died. Some scientists worry events like these are a sign that the world’s biggest forest is fast approaching a point of no return. As […]
By Alec Luhn 24 December 2023 (Scientific American) – It was a cloudy July afternoon in Alaska’s Kobuk Valley National Park, part of the biggest stretch of protected wilderness in the U.S. We were 95 kilometers (60 miles) from the nearest village and 400 kilometers from the road system. Nature doesn’t get any more unspoiled. […]
20 December 2023 (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) – Traces of sunscreen agents were found at the North Pole, on the glaciers of the Svalbard archipelago. They were mainly deposited in winter, when night falls over the Arctic. A study conducted by researchers from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Institute of Polar Sciences – National […]
