Blogging the End of the World™
By Dr. Jeff Masters28 August 2017(Weather Underground) – The center of Tropical Storm Harvey edged out over the Gulf of Mexico late this morning, and satellite images and radar loops show that Harvey is responding by building new intense thunderstorms near its center. These thunderstorms will bring renewed rounds of torrential rains to Houston through […]
By Matthew Cappucci and Jason Samenow 28 August 2017 (The Washington Post) – The record-shattering rains behind the flood catastrophe in Southeast Texas will continue for several more days and are predicted to expand into southwest Louisiana, where double-digit rainfall totals are likely.As of early Monday, locations near Houston in Harris County had seen up […]
By Phuong Le 28 August 2017 SEATTLE (Associated Press) – A marine net pen holding 305,000 farmed Atlantic salmon collapsed recently, releasing thousands of fish into Puget Sound and renewing concerns that a new proposed salmon farm could harm wild salmon stock and cause other environmental damage. The release at Cooke Aquaculture’s facility comes as […]
By Julia Watson 18 August 2017 (NCMI) – It is well known that the US currently faces an opioid epidemic and according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) since 1999 the rate of overdose death related to opioid, including both heroin and prescription drugs, has quadrupled. According to the National Institute on […]
27 August 2017 (Al Jazeera) – The death toll from monsoon floods in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal has climbed above 1,200, as rescue workers scramble to provide aid to millions of people stranded by the worst such disaster in years. All three countries suffer frequent flooding during the June-September monsoon season, but international aid agencies […]
June 2017 (EDGI) – The Trump administration currently poses the greatest threat to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its entire 47-year history. Twice before, presidential administrations in North America have targeted their own environmental agencies with comparable aggression, in the early Reagan administration (1981-1983) and under Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006-2015). Trump’s […]
By Ruthy Munoz and Gary McWilliams 27 August 2017 HOUSTON, Texas (Reuters) – Emergency crews raced to pull people from cars and homes as flood waters rose across southeast Texas on Sunday, rescuing more than 1,000 people in the Houston area as Tropical Storm Harvey pounded the region.Harvey came ashore late Friday as the most […]
By Matt McGrath 24 August 2017 (BBC News) – A commercial LNG tanker has sailed across the colder, northern route from Europe to Asia without the protection of an ice-breaker for the first time.The specially-built ship completed the crossing in just six-and-a-half days setting a new record, according to the tanker’s Russian owners.The 300-metre-long Sovcomflot […]
GENEVA, 23 August 2017 (United Nations) – The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has called on the Government of the United States of America, as well as high-level politicians and public officials, to unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech and crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country. In […]
26 August 2017 (Desdemona Despair) – How low can Trump go, and how long will it take him to get there? One way to gauge public sentiment is to aggregate data from multiple polls and compute an estimate. Fortunately, the good people at FiveThirtyEight are doing this for us at their excellent site, How popular […]
