Blogging the End of the World™
By Chico Harlan 4 March 2016 BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Washington Post) – Already, the state of Louisiana had gutted university spending and depleted its rainy-day funds. It had cut 30,000 employees and furloughed others. It had slashed the number of child services staffers, including those devoted to foster family recruitment, and young abuse victims for […]
By Tara Martin and James Watson 11 February 2016 (The Conversation) – When we think about adapting humanity to the challenges of climate change, it’s tempting to reach for technological solutions. We talk about seeding our oceans and clouds with compounds designed to trigger rain or increasing carbon uptake. We talk about building grand structures […]
4 March 2016 (UN) – The Government of Fiji and the United Nations today launched an appeal for $38.6 million in critical emergency relief to 350,000 people in need after Cyclone Winston’s fury left the island nation “a loss of catastrophic proportions.” “In light of the enormous and long process to recovery and rehabilitation ahead […]
3 March 2016 (ABC News) – Documentary photographer, James Whitlow Delano, seeks to bring awareness to the plight that faces the Batek people of Malaysia today. Taman Negara National Park in Malaysia borders the rainforest and the ancestral home of the Batek people who are believed to have lived there for thousands of years. To […]
By Arthur Neslen29 February 2016 BRUSSELS (Guardian) – The EU is set to emit 2bn tonnes more CO2 than it promised at the Paris climate talks, threatening an agreement to cap global warming at 2C, a note from the European commission has revealed. Carbon prices will rise too slowly to cut industrial emissions as much […]
By Eric Holthaus 1 March 2016 (Slate) – Update, 3 March 2016: Since this post was originally published, the heat wave has continued. As of Thursday morning, it appears that average temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere have breached the 2 degrees Celsius above “normal” mark for the first time in recorded history, and likely the […]
By Laura Bliss2 March 2016 (CityLab) – The Great Salt Lake is drying up, thanks to 150 years of human diversions from the rivers that feed it. That’s the takeaway of a white paper released by a team of Utah biologists and engineers. And if those diversions continue ramping up, as a bill working its […]
1 March 2016 (UN) – Europe faces an imminent humanitarian crisis, largely of its own making, following a rapid build-up of people in already over-stretched Greece, the United Nations refugee agency warned today. “With governments not working together despite having already reached agreements in a number of areas, and country after country imposing new border […]
By John Antczak, with additional reporting by Amanda Lee Myers 3 March 2016 LOS ANGELES (AP) – Ed Heinlein surveys the steep mountainside that has repeatedly unleashed tons of mud into the backyard of his Southern California home since a 2014 wildfire and still hopes the drought-stricken state gets more rain. “We have to have […]
3 March 2016 (ABC) – Nearly two weeks after Cyclone Winston smashed into Fiji, killing 43 people and levelling entire communities, aid agencies are struggling to provide relief to tens of thousands of people without food, water or shelter. The ABC’s Philip Williams and Brant Cumming saw the devastation first-hand in villages and towns on […]