Blogging the End of the World™
4 January 2016 (NIFC) – The official total number of fires and acres burned in 2015 was released by the National Interagency Coordination Center on 4 January 2016. The 2015 fire season set a new record for the number of acres burned in the United States, totaling 10,125,149 acres [4,097,500 hectares]. The previous record was […]
By Mike Gaworecki30 December 2015 (mongabay.com) – As 2015 comes to a close, Mongabay is looking back at the year that was. This year saw President Obama reject the Keystone pipeline as historic droughts and a vicious wildfire season wracked the western US and Canada. The world committed to climate action in Paris as Southeast […]
By Ruxandra Guidi30th December 2015 (mongabay.com) – The year is ending on a grim note in Peru: yet another environmental leader that vocally opposed a dam project has been murdered in his home in the town of Yagen, in the country’s Cajamarca region. Hitler Ananías Rojas Gonzales, 34, was shot five times the morning of […]
By Shreya Dasgupta 29 December 2015 (mongabay.com) – By the end of this century, as climate continues to warm, dry seasons could become longer and more intense in the Amazon region. Droughts could become more commonplace. But the fate of the Amazon forest — home to around 300 billion trees, and crucial to the Earth’s […]
By Jeff Masters1 January 2016 (Weather Underground) – Category Five: the phase evokes an almost reverential awe in novice and seasoned hurricane watchers alike, as one considers the incredible power and majesty of these most perfect but terrifyingly destructive storms on the planet. As we look back on the year in weather, a striking feature […]
20 December 2015 (EDF) – Aerial footage filmed 17 December 2015, shows potent, climate-damaging methane gases escaping from a massive natural gas leak at a storage facility in California’s Aliso Canyon, with the San Fernando valley pictured in the background. The giant methane plumes were made visible by a specialized infrared camera operated by an […]
By Karen Graham 3 December 2015 (Digital Journal) – The southern pine bark beetle is a tenacious critter, native to the forests of the southern United States, Mexico, and Central America. While it’s always been present in Honduran forests, climate change has vastly increased the beetle’s numbers. The sudden explosion of southern pine beetles this […]
By Amy Lieberman and Susanne Rust 31 December 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – A few weeks before seminal climate change talks in Kyoto back in 1997, Mobil Oil took out a bluntly worded advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post. “Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate […]
Number of years of phytomass food potentially available to feed the global human population. Graphic: Schramski, et al., 2015 / PNAS Each year, picking the doomiest graphs gets progressively more difficult as the count approaches 50 – so much doom data, so little space. Usually, picking the doomiest graph taxes Desdemona’s brain too much, but […]
By Hiromi Kumagai26 December 2015 (Asahi Shimbun) – Tokyo Electric Power Co. has unexpectedly been forced to deal with an increasingly large amount radioactive water accumulating at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant after seaside walls to block the flow of groundwater were constructed in October. TEPCO completed the walls on Oct. 26 […]
