Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Tens of thousands go hungry after Kenya floods – “They have nothing to go back to. Their homes and crops have been destroyed and they have not been given any help to rebuild their lives.”

By Nita Bhalla; editing by Claire Cozens 4 July 2018 NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — After a severe drought last year, East Africa was hit by two months of heavy rains, disrupting the lives of millions of people in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Tens of thousands of survivors of Kenya’s worst floods in recent […]

Appalachia’s $84 billion secret: China and U.S. plan massive petrochemical hub in West Virginia – “Most people have no clue how much more damage is coming if it doesn’t stop. The industry doesn’t want people to know about this.”

By Natalie Stickel 13 June 2018 (Blue Ridge Outdoors) – The biggest energy project you’ve never heard of commonly goes by the acronym ASTH—the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. This massive petrochemical hub in West Virginia and Pennsylvania would be the largest infrastructure in the region’s history, consisting of hundreds of miles of pipelines, fracked […]

Northern Barents Sea warms dramatically – Sea-ice area around Svalbard lowest ever recorded

By Thomas Nilsen 5 July 2018 (The Barents Observer) – The northern Barents Sea is an Arctic warming hotspot, says Sigrid Lind with the Marine Research Institute in Tromsø, Norway. Changes go from Arctic to Atlantic climate, concludes a study Lind and other scientists have made. The results are published in a recent article in […]

Trump’s Interior Department plans to let people kill endangered red wolves – “FWS is passing a death sentence on an animal as American as the bald eagle”

By Darryl Fears 27 June 2018 (The Washington Post) – In a proposal that would essentially end a 30-year effort to reestablish critically endangered American red wolves in North Carolina, the Interior Department on Wednesday announced a plan that would allow private landowners to kill wolves that stray onto their property from a protected federal […]

Following a devastating pandemic, California’s sea stars are evolving as climate changes – “If we have too many extreme events in a row, maybe that becomes more challenging for species to respond to”

By Jason Alvarez 19 June 2018 (UC Merced) – In 2012, Environmental Systems graduate student Lauren Schiebelhut was collecting DNA from ochre sea stars living along the Northern California coast — part of an effort to study genetic diversity in various marine species that serve as indicators of habitat health. She had no idea that […]

2017 was the second-worst year on record for global deforestation – “We are trying to put out a house fire with a teaspoon”

By Damian Carrington, Niko Kommenda, Pablo Gutiérrez, and Cath Levett 27 June 2018 (The Guardian) – The world lost more than one football pitch of forest every second in 2017, according to new data from a global satellite survey, adding up to an area equivalent to the whole of Italy over the year.The scale of […]

The human cost of climate change – “If no action is taken, there may be more than 140 million climate migrants by 2050”

By Felipe Calderón 29 June 2018 (Newsweek) – Home is a place of stability and security. It is a place where families come together to work towards and celebrate mutual prosperity. But as the human and economic toll of climate change continues to rise, we face legitimate risk of this sense of home being uprooted. […]

China has refused to recycle the West’s plastics – “An estimated 111 million metric tons of plastic waste will be displaced with the new Chinese policy by 2030”

By Sara Kiley Watson 28 June 2018 (NPR) – For more than 25 years, many developed countries, including the U.S., have been sending massive amounts of plastic waste to China instead of recycling it on their own. Some 106 million metric tons — about 45 percent — of the world’s plastics set for recycling have […]

The Annapolis shooting is another reminder: Globally, it’s getting more dangerous to be a journalist – “The climate of hatred is steadily more visible”

By Ruby Mellen 28 June 2018 (The Washington Post) – On Thursday, 28 June 2018, a gunman stormed the office of a local newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, killing at least five people and injuring two others. According to my colleagues, the attack “likely is the deadliest involving journalists in the United States in decades.” Police […]

Rhode Island becomes the first U.S. state to file climate suit against oil industry

By Karen Savage 2 July 2018 (Climate Liability News) – Rhode Island is suing 21 oil and gas companies, state attorney general Peter Kilmartin announced on Monday, becoming the first U.S. state to attempt to hold the industry responsible for climate change-driven damages. “For a very long time, there has been this perception that ‘Big […]

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