Blogging the End of the World™
By Bill McKibben 5 March 2016 (Boston Globe) – Thursday, while the nation debated the relative size of Republican genitalia, something truly awful happened. Across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in recorded […]
By Don Dahler4 March 2016 (CBS News) – The Arctic Ocean is six million square miles, most of it covered in ice. But last month the top of the world was up to 14 degrees above normal, and broke the record for the lowest amount of ice in February — more than 400,000 square miles […]
By Sally Kettle27 February 2016 Isla Espanola (BBC News) – The Pacific Ocean laps just before me and a warm breeze reminds me I’m in the tropics. But this is no beach holiday and there’s not a tourist in sight – just the raucous barking of a sea lion pup intent on making himself heard […]
By Olga R. Rodriguez5 February 2016 SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – The first West Coast waves of a week of powerful storms arrived to provide strong evidence March will not be as parched as the month that preceded it. Steady rain fell in Northern California on Saturday and was expected to go statewide Sunday. Fresh and […]
By Morgan Erickson-Davis4 March 2016 (mongabay.com) – The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has one of the world’s biggest remaining tracts of rainforest (second only to the Amazon in size), home to unique and threatened species like okapis and bonobos. In effort to protect its forests, the DRC implemented a moratorium in 2002 that […]
By Emmanuel Martinez 29 February 2016 (Reveal) – Reveal reported in early January about the water tank program in Tulare County, California. What began as an emergency response measure to the drought was becoming the norm for hundreds of families who no longer had running water. At the crisis’ peak, Tulare County reported about 1,400 […]
By Stacy Morford1 March 2016 (Earth Institute) – In the years before the Syrian conflict erupted, the region’s worst drought on record set in across the Levant, destroying crops and restricting water supplies in the already water-stressed region. A new study shows that that drought, from 1998-2012, wasn’t just the most severe in a century […]
NEW ORLEANS, 29 February 2016 (Associated Press) – The nation’s boom in cheap natural gas — often viewed as a clean energy source — is spawning a wave of petrochemical plants that, if built, will emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases, an environmental watchdog group warned in a report Monday [Greenhouse Gases from a Growing […]
4 March 2016 (UN) – Warning Europe is running out of time to solve the current refugee situation, the UN refugee chief today outlined a detailed six-point plan ahead of a key meeting of European Union leaders and Turkey in Brussels next week. “This is as much a crisis of European solidarity as it is […]
By Somini Sengupta5 March 2016 (The New York Times) – At no point in recorded history has our world been so demographically lopsided, with old people concentrated in rich countries and the young in not-so-rich countries. Much has been made of the challenges of aging societies. But it’s the youth bulge that stands to put […]
