Blogging the End of the World™
By Naaman Zhou24 January 2019 (The Guardian) – Temperature records have tumbled across South Australia, with the city of Adelaide experiencing its hottest day on record, as the second heatwave in as many weeks hit southern parts of Australia Adelaide hit 46.6C on Thursday afternoon, the hottest temperature recording in any Australian state capital city […]
17 January 2019 (Radboud University) – Currently approximately 600 species might be inaccurately assessed as non-threatened on the Red List of Threatened Species. More than a hundred others that couldn’t be assessed before, also appear to be threatened. A new more efficient, systematic and comprehensive approach to assess the extinction risk of animals has shown […]
By Hope Yen and Calvin Woodward20 January 2019 WASHINGTON (AP) – There’s nothing like a cold snap to bring out the global-warming skepticism of President Donald Trump The fact that periods of extreme cold happen in a warming climate is well known by his government but Trump’s crack Sunday — “Wouldn’t be bad to have […]
By Ivana Kottasová18 January 2019 LONDON (CNN Business) – America’s push for oil and gas supremacy could lead to a “climate catastrophe,” a new report has warned. The report by Oil Change International said that the United States is set to “unleash the world’s largest burst” of carbon emissions from new oil and gas development […]
By Tamino19 January 2019 (Open Mind) – We’ve spoken before (as have many before us) of the fact that climate isn’t just about the average, it’s about the whole distribution (the probability distribution if you want to get technical). We also emphasized that the tails of the distribution — the probabilities for extreme values (very […]
By Petra Löw8 January 2019 (Munich Re) – When compared with the record losses of the previous year from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, the indications at the start of 2018 were that it would be a more moderate year. However, the second half of the year saw an accumulation of billion-dollar losses from floods, […]
20 January 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – At the beginning of each year, the World Economic Forum publishes its Global Risks Report, which “presents the results of our latest Global Risks Perception Survey, in which nearly 1,000 decision-makers from the public sector, private sector, academia and civil society assess the risks facing the world.” In 2019, […]
AUSTIN, Texas, 17 January 2019 (Earthjustice) – Toxic coal ash pollutants are leaking into groundwater surrounding 100 percent of Texas’s power plants for which data are available, with unsafe levels of arsenic, cobalt, lithium, and other pollutants seeping from the ash dumps, according to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). Industry groundwater monitoring […]
By Bob Henson 16 January 2019 (Weather Underground) – Just two years after shrinking to its lowest extent ever measured, Antarctic sea ice may challenge that record a few weeks from now. This depletion comes just as scientists reported a harrowing sixfold increase in the loss of Antarctic land ice over the last 40 years. […]
By Gillian Tett17 January 2019 (Financial Times) – What are the biggest risks stalking the world today? A cynic might gripe that the list is so depressingly long that it is pointless even to try to choose: populism, cyber attacks, trade wars, weather shocks and global debt are all on the rise. However, during the […]