Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Mudslide fears haunt Los Angeles County neighborhoods burned by huge La Tuna fire

By Anthony Clark Carpio 12 November 2017 (Los Angeles Times) – Los Angeles County and federal officials have been busy preparing Burbank residents who live near the Verdugo Mountains hillside for future heavy rainfall, especially in areas that were adjacent to the La Tuna fire, which scorched more than 7,000 acres over Labor Day weekend.Recently, […]

Trump does not publicly rebuke Duterte for death squads, calls press “spies” – “Trump seems very comfortable with strongmen. It’s not just that he won’t criticize Duterte. I wouldn’t be surprised if he patted him on the back.”

13 November 2017 (AP) – Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has sanctioned a bloody drug war that features extrajudicial killing. He called Barack Obama a “son of a whore.” This week, he boasted that he murdered a man with his own hands. All that went unmentioned in public by President Donald Trump when the leaders held […]

Image of the Day: Satellite of view of smoke blanketing northern India, 8 November 2017

By Adam Voiland 8 November 2017(NASA) – Since mid-October 2017, smoke from crop fires in Punjab and Haryana has blown across northern India and Pakistan. With the arrival of cooler weather in November, the smoke mixed with fog, dust, and industrial pollution to form a particularly thick haze. A lack of wind, which usually helps […]

Just 10 rivers may be to blame for millions of tons of ocean plastic

By Tim Wallace 12 October 2017 (Cosmos) – Just 10 rivers – eight of them in Asia – may be responsible for dumping almost four million tonnes of plastic into the seas every year.Calculating with precision the source and amount of plastic trash in the oceans is difficult; estimates tend to cover wide ranges. Previous […]

U.S. to promote “universal access” to fossil fuels at climate talks

By Valerie Volcovici 12 November 2017 WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States hopes to promote wider use of fossil fuels at a global meeting on climate change next week, a White House official said, reflecting the gaping divide between Washington and the rest of the world on the issue of global warming.President Donald Trump’s administration […]

The Paradise Papers: Leaked records reveal offshore’s role in forest destruction

By Scilla Alecci 8 November 2017 (ICIJ) – On the island of Padang, in the heart of Indonesia’s industrial logging country, a group of teenagers pointed to the charred remains of sago palm trees – the remnants of the fires that have scorched the archipelago nation’s lush forests for two decades. “There’s a sense of […]

From carbon sink to source: Brazil puts Amazon, Paris goals at risk

By Claire Salisbury 9 November 2017 (Mongabay) – In 2012, Brazil celebrated a dramatic reduction in its deforestation rate. A sharp annual decline took forest loss to a record low, down 76 percent from 1990. Accomplishing this milestone — achieved alongside GDP growth and a major financial incentive scheme for reducing deforestation in collaboration with […]

Records from ancient China reveal link between epidemics and climate change

By Chelsea Harvey 7 November 2017 (E&E News) – Scientists are worried about the effects of long-term warming on human health and infectious disease, but a new study finds a link between epidemics and a cold climate.By analyzing Chinese records throughout nearly 2,000 years of history—from between A.D. 1 and 1911—researchers have found that climate-driven […]

Global warming costs a lot more than we recognize, and most estimates ignore the sociopolitical repercussions

By Mark Buchanan 7 November 2017 (Bloomberg) – The latest U.S. government report on climate change illustrates how expensive the phenomenon can be: It estimates that more frequent flooding, more violent hurricanes and more intense wildfires, among other things, have cost the country $1.1 trillion since 1980.What’s particularly striking, though, is how much the report […]

Three quarters of companies worldwide yet to acknowledge global warming as a financial risk – “Even among the world’s largest companies, very few are providing investors with adequate indications of value at risk from climate change”

11 October 2017 (KPMG) – Almost three quarters (72 percent) of large and mid-cap companies worldwide do not acknowledge the financial risks of climate change in their annual financial reports, according to the KPMG Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting 2017 published today.Of the minority that do acknowledge climate-related risk, less than one in 20 (4 […]

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