Blogging the End of the World™
By Carlos Valdez, with additional reporting by Frank Bajak21 January 2016 UNTAVI, Bolivia (AP) – Overturned fishing skiffs lie abandoned on the shores of what was Bolivia’s second-largest lake. Beetles dine on bird carcasses and gulls fight for scraps under a glaring sun in what marshes remain. Lake Poopo was officially declared evaporated last month. […]
21 January 2016 (Business Insider Australia) – More than 30 of the world’s top whale scientists have called on Japan to stop its so-called scientific whaling program. In the correspondence section of the international journal Nature, the experts write a letter to the editor under the headline “Japan’s whaling is unscientific”. The experts are mostly […]
By Lucy Nicholson, with additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Alistair Bell20 January 2016 (Reuters) – Air quality regulators, meeting for the third time this month to address a huge natural gas leak that has forced thousands of Los Angeles residents from their homes, delayed action again on Wednesday on a proposal to curtail […]
20 January 2016 (NASA) – Earth’s 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Globally-averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the previous mark set in 2014 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius). Only once before, in […]
By Rachael Bale10 January 2016 (National Geographic) – Just last week, a friend at the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) emailed me to ask if I’ve ever written about the trafficking of totoaba swim bladders, adding that she’s been working on vaquita conservation in the Gulf of California. Totoaba? Vaquitas? These were […]
By Timmons Roberts13 January 2016 (Brookings) – I spent the past week in Bangladesh, visiting the countryside on a fascinating and heartening trip from the country’s massive capital, Dhaka, to the south, a region being hammered by climate change. I came to give some speeches and took the opportunity to see for myself how foreign […]
By Alan Berube and Natalie Holmes14 January 2015 (Brookings) – The issue of high and rising income inequality continues to influence policy and political debates at all levels of government. Local officials, such as mayors and county executives, are increasingly finding themselves at the center of those debates given a federal government hamstrung by partisan […]
By Emmett Knowlton17 January 2016 (Business Insider) – The 2016 Summer Olympics kicks off on August 5 in Rio de Janeiro — but with less than seven months until the Opening Ceremony, a slew of problems still show no signs of improvement. Will Connors had a good, if troubling, piece in The Wall Street Journal […]
By Kurtis Alexander18 January 2016 (TNS) – The clouds over the Sierra foothills were a welcome sight for Phil Desatoff. As general manager of the Consolidated Irrigation District, which serves parts of Fresno, Tulare and Kings counties in the Central Valley, his job is to supply river water from the mountains to about 5,000 farmers, […]
18 January 2016 (NOAA) – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, working with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and university colleagues, have found that half of the global ocean heat content increase since 1865 has occurred over the past two decades. “In recent decades the ocean has continued to warm substantially, and with time the warming […]
