Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Researchers find the world’s forests are fragmenting at three times the rate of forest loss as a whole

By Mike Gaworecki 4 February 2016 (mongabay.com) – Recent research by the U.S. Forest Service finds that the world lost interior forest at three times the rate of forest loss as a whole. They write that this fragmentation could severely jeopardize the ability of remaining forests to provide critical wildlife habitat and other ecological functions. […]

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’

[This is a disaster. CSIRO is a world-class research organization for climate science, on par with the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Germany’s Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research. Crippling Australia’s climate science capability deals a significant blow to humanity’s struggle to survive our greatest existential threat: […]

RealClimate: How likely is the observed recent warmth?

By Michael Mann25 January 2016 (RealClimate) – With the official numbers now in 2015 is, by a substantial margin, the new record-holder, the warmest year in recorded history for both the globe and the Northern Hemisphere. The title was sadly short-lived for previous record-holder 2014. And 2016 could be yet warmer if the current global […]

Imperiled Amazon freshwater ecosystems urgently need basin-wide study, management – ‘The consequences are so overwhelming that they are hard to explain’

By Claire Salisbury1 February 2016 (mongabay.com) – The Amazon’s freshwater ecosystems are at risk because current policy and existing protected areas fail to protect the connectivity of the water cycle, scientists warn. The new study, published in Global Change Biology, examines the factors degrading the Amazon basin’s hydrological connectivity: the movement of water — and […]

Ted Cruz’s pseudoscientific claims about climate change

By Vanessa Schipani1 February 2016 (FactCheck.org) – While on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz gave a speech to local residents that contained inaccurate and misleading claims about climate science and its terminology: Cruz claimed “none of the alarmists say ‘global warming’ anymore — now it’s ‘climate change.’ ” That’s […]

Graph of the Day: Winter mean ice cover of Great Lakes, 1973-2011

September 2012 (Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory) – Ice cover on the Great Lakes has been declining since 1973. This figure shows the linear trends for the six lakes. The linear trend was estimated using the least squares regression (LSR). The linear equation is in the form: x=a+bt, where x is the ice cover (in […]

Canada on track to miss carbon reduction targets by wide margin – ‘The data are clear and confirm that more needs to be done’

[Canada must shut down the Athabasca oil sand mines to have any hope of meeting its commitment. “Emissions from oil and gas are projected to increase by 28% (from 159 Mt to 204 Mt) over the 2005 to 2020 time frame. This is due mainly to increases in oil sands production.” See Projected Emissions Trends […]

South Florida mayors to U.S. Presidential candidate: ‘We call on you to acknowledge the reality and urgency of climate change’

By Gina-Marie Cheeseman 29 January 2016 (Triple Pundit) – The mayors of 15 South Florida cities have a message for Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush. They want the Republican presidential candidates to see that climate change is happening and it is already affecting their home state. The 15 mayors sent letters to […]

The climate-change refugee crisis is only just beginning – ‘I’m dead if I stay, so it doesn’t matter if I die on the way’

By Peter Schwartzstein31 January 2016 (Quartz) – The Amhara Plateau is no one’s idea of a gloomy landscape. Rich fields blossom as far as the eye can see; bountiful rivers zigzag through the region’s rolling hills. It isn’t hard to see why local Orthodox Christians believe the Ark of the Covenant was floated down the […]

Recent summer temperatures in Europe are likely the warmest of the last two millennia

1 February 2016 (IOP) – Most of Europe has experienced strong summer warming over the course of the past several decades, accompanied by severe heat waves in 2003, 2010 and 2015. New research now puts the current warmth in a 2100-year historical context using tree ring information and historical documentary evidence to derive a new […]

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