Desdemona Despair – Page 41 – Blogging the End of the World™

A graveyard that has been washed into the sea due to coastal erosion at Monkey River, a coastal village in south-east Belize. Photo: Andrea Ocampo / UN Video

January 30, 2023

Saving a Belize village from man-made erosion – “I don’t want to see more graves go to the sea”

8 January 2023 (UN News) – “My grandma and my grandfather are now washed out in the sea,” says Mario Muschamp, gazing out at the coast near his close-knit Creole community. “You know, their graves are gone. That really hurts.” This is the reality for the inhabitants of Monkey River, who have watched on, powerless, […]

Map showing 28-day COVID-19 cases in U.S. counties on 26 January 2023. Graphic: Johns Hopkins University

January 26, 2023

Greg Olear: The Plague turns three – More than a million Americans are dead of COVID-19. Where is the outrage? “U.S. performance at the level of South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, or Japan in containing the pandemic would have saved over 300,000 American lives in 2020 alone”

By Greg Olear 24 January 2023 (Substack) – Three years ago today, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed a second travel-related infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the United States, this time in Illinois. The Illinois case was the epidemiological equivalent of the second airplane hitting the World Trade Center. It meant that the first U.S. […]

Map showing significant economic loss events in 2022. Direct economic losses resulting from natural disasters in 2022 are estimated at $313 billion. This is close to the 21st century average, after adjusting actual incurred damage to today’s dollars using the U.S. Consumer Price Index. Though 2022 was far from record-breaking in terms of overall losses, it saw many impactful and costly events across the globe. Visualizing the geographic distribution of 2022 events allows for distinguishing certain patterns, including higher frequency of medium-sized Severe Convective Storm (SCS) events in the U.S. and Europe, and the prevalence of flooding events in Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania. The map primarily shows the economic impact, which to some extent correlates with concentration of wealth — this is not a result of a reporting bias. What this map does not highlight is the humanitarian crises and displaced communities, as many events with significant human impacts do not necessarily translate into a high financial toll in terms of direct damage. Note that significant price inflation throughout the year already resulted in notable increases of per-event losses. Graphic: Aon

January 25, 2023

Aon: Global insured losses from natural disasters exceeded $130 billion In 2022, driven by second-costliest event on record – More than 19,000 heat-related deaths in Europe

CHICAGO, 25 January 2023 (PRNewswire) – Aon plc (NYSE: AON), a leading global professional services firm, today published its 2023 Weather, Climate and Catastrophe Insight report, which identifies global natural disaster and climate trends to help make better decisions to manage volatility and enhance global resilience. The report reveals that natural disasters caused a $313 billion global economic loss […]

The Doomsday Clock in 2023. In 2023, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the clock to 90 seconds from midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. Graphic: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

January 25, 2023

2023 Doomsday Clock statement: A time of unprecedented danger – It is 90 seconds to midnight

By John Mecklin 24 January 2023 (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) – This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds […]

Network map showing followers for key amplifiers of climate disinformation during COP27, grouped by common traits or identifying factors. Network mapping around COP26 showed that, among accounts following key climate misinformers on Twitter, 7.5 percent were primarily focused on climate - for COP27 the cluster constitutes a mere 0.33 percent. The shift reveals how right-wing ‘culture war’ influencers are becoming the most prominent voices in spreading climate misinformation. Such content drives an ecosystem in which environmental issues, including COP summits, can more easily be framed and amplified as a polarising topic - a trend covered in depth by a recent peer-reviewed paper in Nature Climate Change. Overall, the audience for key misinformation influencers has a similar composition to last year’s COP26 network. Accounts in the ‘U.S. Conservative’ cluster comprise the largest portion of the map, including highly influential pundits like Dinesh D’Souza (2.9m followers) and Tom Fitton (1.9m followers) alongside elected officials like House Rep. Lauren Boebert (2m followers) who focus on broadly right-wing “culture war” issues. Taken together, the US, UK, and Canada Conservative clusters make up 72.25 percent of the overall network. While climate issues do not dominate their content strategy, these accounts do share related misinformation during key climate-related events, including COP, or as part of wider outputs. Climate content regularly features alongside other misleading, disproven and/or unsubstantiated claims on an array of topics, including around electoral fraud, vaccinations, the COVID-19 pandemic, migration, and child trafficking rings run by so-called ‘elites’ Graphic: Climate Action Against Disinformation / Graphika

January 22, 2023

Climate crisis misinformation is thriving on Elon Musk’s Twitter, research shows

By Beatrice Nolan 20 January 2023 (Insider) – Misinformation about the climate crisis is flourishing on Elon Musk’s Twitter, according to a study: Deny, Deceive, Delay Vol. 2: Exposing New Trends in Climate Mis- and Disinformation at COP27.[pdf]. The study, published on 19 January 2023 by Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), said Twitter was recommending the […]

John Hornewer sets alarms on his phone in two-minute intervals, after which he puts a quarter in the fill station, as he fills up his 6,000-gallon tanker to haul water from Apache Junction to Rio Verde Foothills. Photo: Caitlin O'Hara / The Washington Post

January 22, 2023

Arizona city cuts off a neighborhood’s water supply amid drought – “There is no Santa Claus. The megadrought tells us all: water is not a compassion game.”

By Joshua Partlow 16 January 2023 SCOTTSDALE, Arizona (The Washington Post) – The survival — or at least the basic sustenance — of hundreds in a desert community amid the horse ranches and golf courses outside Phoenix now rests on a 54-year-old man with a plastic bucket of quarters. John Hornewer picked up a quarter […]

Percentage of OECD countries experiencing higher-than-average inflation, 1970-2022. The global inflation shock that began in the United States in 2021 and took hold worldwide in 2022 will have powerful economic and political ripple effects in 2023. It will be the principal driver of global recession, add to financial stress, and stoke social discontent and political instability everywhere. Today’s historically high inflation comes from multiple sources. First was the Covid-19 pandemic, which prompted governments to cushion the fall in incomes with extraordinary fiscal and monetary stimulus at the same time that it disrupted global supply. Then, just as the United States and Europe were coming out of the pandemic thanks to vaccines, China doubled down on its zero-Covid policy, locking down the global economy’s most important manufacturing and shipping hubs. Finally, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s sanctions in response put a strain on the global supply of energy, food, and fertilizer. This unprecedented confluence of overlapping shocks pushed inflation to levels most countries hadn’t seen in nearly 50 years. Graphic: Eurasia Group

January 22, 2023

Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2023 – “The risks this year are the most dangerous we’ve encountered in the 25 years since we started Eurasia Group”

By Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan 3 January 2023 (Eurasia Group) – Russia has no way to win in Ukraine. The European Union is stronger than ever. NATO rediscovered its reason for being. The G7 is strengthening. Renewables are becoming dirt cheap. American hard power remains unrivaled. Midterms in the United States were decidedly normal […]

Estimated ocean parasite populations in the Puget Sound, 1880-2019. The count per host of ocean parasites that obligately require three or more hosts declined through time, while that of two- and one-host parasites remained stable. Shown are model predictions between the years 1880 and 2019 from phase 1 analysis. Predictions are for the “average” parasite species within each group (i.e., within 1-host parasites, 2-host parasites, and 3+-host parasites) where average is defined as “the parasite species with the abundance that is closest to the average abundance of all parasite species.” Graphic: Wood, et al., 2023 / PNAS

January 22, 2023

Warming oceans have decimated marine parasites, and that’s not a good thing – “If this can happen unnoticed in an ecosystem as well studied as this one, where else might it be happening?”

By Hannah Hickey 9 January 2023 (UW News) – More than a century of preserved fish specimens offer a rare glimpse into long-term trends in parasite populations. New research from the University of Washington shows that fish parasites plummeted from 1880 to 2019, a 140-year stretch when Puget Sound — their habitat and the second […]

Aerial view of a flooded home that is partially underwater in Gilroy, California, on 9 January 2023. Photo: Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images

January 22, 2023

California storms leave billions of dollars in damage to businesses, homes, and infrastructure – Few homeowners have flood insurance – Total costs associated with storms estimated at $31 billion to $34 billion

By Jim Carlton 21 January 2023 ANTIOCH, California (The Wall Street Journal) – Paradise Skate Roller Rink was preparing to host a New Year’s Eve bash when floodwaters poured in from a nearby creek, destroying the wooden floor and leaving the decades-old business in this San Francisco Bay Area suburb out of commission for months. […]

Cognitive differences between groups of people who were directly exposed to the Camp Fire in 2018, people who were indirectly exposed (who witnessed the fire but were not directly impacted), and age- and gender-matched non-exposed controls. Event-related potential responses (ERPs) elicited on the interference processing task and their relationship to behavior. (A) Group averaged ERPs ± standard error are shown at frontal (F3, F4) and parietal (P3, P4) channels corresponding to the directly exposed (red), indirectly exposed (blue) and unexposed control (green) groups. Red and orange bars depict significant peak amplitude differences between the directly exposed vs. control group, and the directly exposed vs. indirectly exposed group (p

January 21, 2023

Climate trauma: people exposed to the deadly Camp Fire in 2018 displayed altered cognitive function months later

By Scott LaFee 18 January 2023 (UC San Diego Today) – In November 2018, the Camp Fire burned a total of 239 square miles, destroyed 18,804 structures and killed 85 people, making it the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. Three years later, researchers at University of California San Diego, published a novel study that […]