Blogging the End of the World™
31 December 2023 (Desdemona Despair) – The topline story of 2023 must be that it was the hottest year on record (so far). It was the hottest in 174 years of record-keeping where humans have directly measured the temperature of the planet. It was probably the hottest in the last 125,000 years. Tessa Hill, marine […]
By Bart Meijer 31 December 2023 AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Around 300 climate activists were held by police in Amsterdam on Saturday for blocking a major highway in the Dutch capital for several hours to demand an immediate end to the financing of fossil fuel projects by the country’s largest bank, ING (INGA.AS). Hundreds of activists […]
By Molly Bohannon and Ana Faguy 25 December 2023 (Forbes) – The United States has faced 649 mass shootings so far this year, making it the second-worst year for shootings in the nine years since the Gun Violence Archive began recording data—after a set of brutal mass shootings in Maine, California, Texas and Tennessee took […]
By Adriano Machado 28 December 2023 SUCUNDURI, Brazil (Reuters) – Deep in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil is fighting destructive wildcat gold mining as it spreads from Indigenous lands into government-protected conservation areas. Federal Police have joined the government’s biodiversity conservation agency ICMBio on a series of recent operations to catch illegal gold miners and destroy […]
By Bob Henson and Jeff Masters 26 December 2023 (Yale Climate Connections) – The drumbeat of record weather and climate phenomena — hottest, wettest, fieriest, fiercest, and so on — can sometimes fade into the background, like the repetitive backdrop to a mournful dirge. Then there are those sharp moments, like a cymbal crash, when […]
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. […]