Blogging the End of the World™
By Philip Jacobson28 July 2016 (mongabay.com) – On July 23 the local police headquarters in the Sumatran province of Riau released SP3 notices related to 15 companies that the Ministry of Environment and Forestry had listed in connection with last year’s fires. A SP3 is an official police document that confirms a case has been […]
28 July 2016, Rome (FAO) – With only a few weeks before land preparation begins for the next main cropping season, some 23 million people in Southern Africa urgently need support to produce enough food to feed themselves and thus avoid being dependent on humanitarian assistance until mid 2018, FAO said today. A FAO-prepared response […]
By Nika Knight1 August 2016 (Common Dreams) – A biology professor has simple advice for athletes and tourists descending on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the Olympics’ start on Friday: “Don’t put your head underwater.” The wire service adds that superbugs—bacteria resistant to most forms of antibiotics—were not the only cause for great concern. Shockingly […]
[cf. Australia climate science to be gutted as CSIRO swings jobs axe – ‘It’s a catastrophic reduction in our capacity to assess present and future climate change’, CSIRO cuts to climate science are against the public good, and An open letter to the Australian Government from more than 2800 climate scientists.] By Andrew P Street […]
By George Monbiot3 August 2016 (The Guardian) – What is salient is not important. What is important is not salient. The media turns us away from the issues that will determine the course of our lives, and towards topics of brain-melting irrelevance. This, on current trends, will be the hottest year ever measured. The previous […]
By Matthew Carney; photography by Wayne McAllister25 July 2016 (ABC News) – Deep in the Himalayas sits a remote research station that is tracking an alarming trend in climate change, with implications that could disrupt the lives of more than one billion people and pitch the most populated region of the world into chaos. The […]
By Linda Koffmar2 June 2016 (Uppsala University) – In a new study, published in Science, researchers from Uppsala University found that larval fish exposed to microplastic particles during development displayed changed behaviors and stunted growth which lead to greatly increased mortality rates. The researchers discovered that larval perch that had access to microplastic particles only […]
By Molly Evans2 August 2016 (KUT) – There are 892 active hate groups in the U.S. In Texas, there are 84 — the most of any other state, according to an interactive U.S. map from Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC gathered the data from hate group publications and websites, citizen and law enforcement reports, field […]
1 August 2016 (Science Blog) – On Monday, sport divers on the M/V Fling, diving in the Gulf of Mexico 100 miles offshore of Texas and Louisiana, were stunned to find green, hazy water, huge patches of ugly white mats coating corals and sponges, and dead animals littering the bottom on the East Flower Garden […]
2 August 2016 (McKinsey) – While it’s broadly assumed that children will grow up to be better off than their parents, the reality is that a new generation of young people in advanced economies risks ending up poorer. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey senior partner Richard Dobbs and McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) […]