Blogging the End of the World™
By Tamino 21 June 2018 (Open Mind) – Thirty years ago James Hansen testified in congress that man-made climate change (a.k.a. global warming) was underway. He forecast that the world would get hotter.What happened since? The world got hotter. He also forecast that the Arctic would warm even faster. What happened since? The Arctic warmed […]
By Hans Nicholas Jong 21 June 2018 JAKARTA (Mongabay) – Indonesia’s national commission on human rights has vowed to investigate the death of a journalist who was being held on charges of defaming a palm oil company owned by a powerful tycoon.From November 2017 to March of this year, Muhammad Yusuf wrote at least 23 […]
By Taran Volckhausen 21 June 2018 (Mongabay) – The large-scale expansion of oil palm has been a major driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss in many areas of the tropics. In Malaysia and Indonesia, where 85 percent of the world’s oil palm is cultivated, rampant industry growth over the past several decades has replaced rainforest […]
8 June 2018 (UN News) – After four consecutive poor rainy seasons that brought Somalia to the brink of famine, the country is now seeing near-record rainfall, and with it, flooding that has already displaced hundreds of thousands of people, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday.According to the agency, about 230,000 people, over […]
By Shannon Van Sant 21 June 2018 (NPR) – A Canadian mining firm says it will move forward with plans to mine minerals from land that was previously part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.Last December, President Trump removed nearly half of the Grand Staircase-Escalante from protection, as well as part of the […]
By Kasha Patel 19 June 2018 (NASA) – In a matter of hours on 17 June 2018, torrential rains transformed parts of Michigan into a “state of disaster.” Early morning storms swept through the Upper Midwest, creating flash floods, a few fatalities, and historic property damage.The potent storms developed when moisture in the mid and […]
21 June 2018 (Mongabay) – In July last year, Abdon Nababan, one of Indonesia’s most prominent activists, announced his intention to run for governor in his home province of North Sumatra. During his decade-long tenure as head of AMAN, the country’s main advocacy group for indigenous rights, Abdon led the organization to a series of […]
By Fabiano Maisonnave 20 June 2018(Folha de S. Paulo) – The Jamanxim National Forest (Flona) recorded in two months more than double the amount of deforested area in the last year.Located in the southwest of Pará, Flona lost 57 km2 of vegetation cover between April and May, according to the calculation of the NGO Imazon […]
By Paul Chisholm 23 June 2018 (NPR) – The fact that rural, economically disadvantaged parts of the country broke heavily for the Republican candidate in the 2016 election is well known. But Medicare data indicate that voters in areas that went for Trump weren’t just hurting economically — many of them were receiving prescriptions for […]
By Harry Stevens 23 June 2018 (Axios) – Three decades have passed since then-NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the Senate Energy committee and alerted the country to the arrival of global warming.Why it matters: The predictions of the world’s leading climate scientists have come true, with dire consequence for the planet. In the 30-year […]
