Blogging the End of the World™
By Adam Voiland 5 December 2017 (NASA) – Thick smoke streamed from several fires in southern California when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image in the afternoon on 5 December 2017.The largest of the blazes—the fast-moving Thomas fire in Ventura County—had charred more than 65,000 acres (24,000 […]
By Alene Tchekmedyian, Jaclyn Cosgrove, Ruben Vives, and Sonali Kohli 5 December 2017 (Los Angeles Times) – A fast-moving, wind-fueled wildfire swept into the city of Ventura early Tuesday, burning 45,000 acres, destroying homes and forcing 27,000 people to evacuate.At least 150 structures — including at least one large apartment complex and the Vista […]
By Neil Collier, Ora Dekornfeld, and Ben Laffin 30 November 2017(The New York Times) – Hurricane Irma was ruthless to Barbuda. It damaged or destroyed pretty much all the buildings on the island. It left everyone vulnerable, their homes open to the sky. Walls collapsed. Windows shattered. And it opened a door for the government. […]
By Carmen Sesin 30 November 2017 MIAMI (NBC News) – The exodus of Puerto Ricans to Florida following Hurricane Maria has reached a whopping 200,000 in just over two months, obliterating initial conservative estimates that had put the number at 100,000. Maria Teresa Rosado, 37, and her husband Luis Flores, 33, arrived in Miami over […]
By Eric Sørensen 15 November 2017PULLMAN, Washington (WSU News) – The arc of prehistory bends towards economic inequality. In the largest study of its kind, researchers from Washington State University, the Santa Fe Institute, and 12 other institutions saw disparities in wealth mount with the rise of agriculture, specifically the domestication of plants and large […]
By Leyla Santiago, Khushbu Shah, and Rachel Clarke 20 November 2017 San Juan, Puerto Rico (CNN) – Whitefish Energy is stopping its work to restore Puerto Rico’s broken electricity grid because the company says it is owed more than $83 million by the island’s power authority. Whitefish CEO Andy Techmanski told CNN that repeated requests […]
By George Monbiot 22 November 2017(The Guardian) – Everyone wants everything – how is that going to work? The promise of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. […]
By George Dvorsky 22 November 2017 (Gizmodo) – To reduce energy consumption, many jurisdictions around the world are transitioning to outdoor LED lighting. But as new research shows, this solid-state solution hasn’t yielded the expected energy savings, and potentially worse, it’s resulted in more light pollution than ever before.Using satellite-based sensors, an international team of […]
By Doyle Rice 22 November 2017 (USA Today) – For most of humanity’s history, the night has meant darkness. That’s no longer the case. Researchers report the artificially lit nighttime surface of our planet is growing — in both size and brightness — in most of the world’s countries.In a study published Wednesday in the […]
21 November 2017 (United Nations) – Three weeks following the closure of the Manus Island regional processing centre, the situation on the ground is very serious and deteriorates by the day, a senior United Nations official on protection of refugees has said.“Without distribution of food and clean water over the last three weeks [and] significant […]
