Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

14 million people in southern Africa face food crisis as funding shortfall threatens UN efforts to counter El Niño drought

18 January 2016 (UN) – With 14 million people facing hunger in southern Africa as the El Niño weather pattern, the worst in over three decades, exacerbates drought, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today that it faces critical funding challenges in scaling up food and cash-based aid. “The number of people without […]

Australia’s small mining towns are running out of water – ‘It’s a sad situation’

By James Paton  18 January 2016 (Bloomberg) – The Australian mining town of Broken Hill is preparing for a future that doesn’t depend on silver and zinc, but there’s one resource it won’t be able to live without: water. The prospect of that commodity running out has sparked concern in the remote community more than […]

Squirrels are getting fatter than usual because of warmest December on record

By Kate Ng6 January 2016 (Independent) – Grey squirrels in Britain are fatter than usual thanks to an exceptionally warm winter, which has produced an abundance of food for them to help themselves to. Squirrels usually get plump around this time of the year, but the warmest December on record has seen them get even […]

Robert Scribbler: Did a January hurricane just set off a massive Greenland melt event in winter?

18 January 2016 (Robert Scribbler) – This freakish Winter there’s something odd and ominous afoot. We’ve seen unprecedented above-freezing temperatures at the North Pole coincident with record low daily sea ice extents. We’ve seen global temperatures hitting new, very extreme record highs. We’ve seen climate change related storms raging across the globe — flooding both […]

Climate extremes threaten Australia wine industry – ‘The science projections do not point to Australia’s climate getting any more favorable’

By Colin Packham; Editing by Richard Pullin14 January 2016 SYDNEY (Reuters) – Winemakers in Australia’s oldest growing region fear a ruined harvest after heavy rainfall, while vineyards in the country’s west are under threat from bushfires, undermining efforts to recover from a near decade-long run of lower exports. Just weeks out from the 2016 harvest, […]

Chairman of World Economic Forum warns refugee crisis could be precursor to something much bigger – ‘Imagine 1 billion inhabitants, imagine they all move north’

[cf. More displaced people and refugees now than at any other time in recorded history – ‘The global north must be prepared that the entire global south is on the move’] By Joe Weisenthal18 January 2016 (Bloomberg News) – As the crash in commodities prices spreads economic woe across the developing world, Europe could face […]

Is the epoch of habitability on Earth drawing to a close?

The future of life on Earth? Stromatolites growing in Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, Shark Bay in Western Australia. By Jim Galasyn18 January 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – Humans are collecting more biogeophysical data than ever, leading to a potential paradox: are we finally getting the data we need to manage the world, only to find […]

Piers Sellers: Cancer and climate change

By Piers J. Sellers16 January 2016 (The New York Times) – I’m a climate scientist who has just been told I have Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. This diagnosis puts me in an interesting position. I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about the science of climate change, which is best viewed through a multidecadal […]

50 doomiest stories of 2015

Climate change brings world closer to ‘doomsday’, say scientists 2015 was the year that saw the biosphere visibly start to come apart, in many cases much sooner than scientists have predicted. Some people noticed; a new blog appeared in 2015, named “Faster Than Expected”: Search for “faster than expected” in your favorite search engine and […]

Brazil inflames forest fires with pro-deforestation laws

By Jan Rocha in Sao Paulo14 January 2016 (Climate News Network) – Almost a quarter of a million forest fires were detected in Brazil last year – and the main cause of a huge increase is being attributed to climate change that brought about a year-long drought in much of the country. Satellite data revealed […]

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