Blogging the End of the World™
10 July 2016 (BBC News) – Thousands of people have crossed to Colombia after Venezuela opened their common border to allow its people to buy food and medicine, officials say. The frontier, closed by Venezuela last August as part of a crime crackdown, was to open for 12 hours. Venezuela is going through a deep […]
8 July 2016 (University of Western Australia) – A team of marine scientists led by The University of Western Australia have uncovered the extinction of a kelp forest ecosystem along 100 kilometres of Western Australia’s coastline, following a heatwave that occurred in 2011. Kelp forests in Western Australia have not experienced a heatwave of this […]
[Every fucking year. –Des] 6 July 2016 (Sea Shepherd Global) – Today, at approximately 1200 local time, a pod of 30-50 pilot whales was slaughtered in the first grindadráp (grind) of the year, on the island of Viðoy in the Danish Faroe Islands archipelago. The ordeal began this morning when locals spotted a pod of […]
By Ian Urbina5 July 2016 DE KALB, Mississippi (The New York Times) – The fortress of steel and concrete towering above the pine forest here is a first-of-its-kind power plant that was supposed to prove that “clean coal” was not an oxymoron — that it was possible to produce electricity from coal in a way […]
By Michael Edison Hayden3 July 2016 (ABC News) – The devastation the California drought has caused to conifer trees in the Sierra Nevadas over the last couple of years “is far greater than previously observed,” NASA scientists said in announcement of the publication of new map of the region. David Schimel, a senior research scientist […]
By Megan Darby29 June 2016 (Climate Change News) – Scientists have bad news for people on the front line of climate change impacts. The 1.5C global warming limit vulnerable countries fought hard to include in the Paris Agreement may already be out of reach. There is slim chance of stabilising temperature rise at that level […]
By Katy Daigle1 July 2016 (PhysOrg) – Each year as temperatures rise across India, farmers look to the sky and pray for rain. The all-important monsoon forecast becomes a national priority, with more than 70 percent of India’s 1.25 billion citizens engaged in agriculture and relying on weather predictions to decide when they will sow […]
By Joshua Partlow and Mariana Zuñiga 28 June 2016 CARACAS, Venezuela (Washington Post) – In the darkness the warehouse looks like any other, a metal-roofed hangar next to a clattering overpass, with homeless people sleeping nearby in the shadows. But inside, workers quietly unload black plastic crates filled with merchandise so valuable that mobs have […]
By Jane Qiu 20 June 2016 (Nature) – Toxic chemicals are accumulating in marine creatures in Earth’s deepest oceanic trenches, the first measurements of organic pollutants in these regions have revealed. “We often think deep-sea trenches are remote and pristine, untouched by humans,” says Alan Jamieson, a deep-ocean researcher at the University of Aberdeen, UK. […]
[The situation with global warming is bad enough; no need to make up a disaster where none exists. –Des] [UPDATE: See Paul Beckwith’s rebuttal here, via Robin Westenra. –Des] [UPDATE2: Climate Feedback gives the original claim a scientific credibility rating of “low”: Analysis of Gabriel Samuels’ “Scientists warn of ‘global climate emergency’ over shifting jet […]
