Blogging the End of the World™
21 December 2015 (Maritime Executive) – A national poll, commissioned by Sea Shepherd Australia and undertaken by Australian market research company Roy Morgan Research, has shown that 76.9 percent of Australians want the Federal Government to send a ship to oppose Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. The poll, involving 1,000 people, was announced by […]
By Bob Henson 18 December 2015 (Weather Underground) – The weather story of this month is the record warmth swaddling much of eastern North America and Europe. We’ll have much more to say about that next week, but keeping with the warm theme for today, I’ll share a couple of melt-related tidbits that drew my […]
By Roz Pidcock18 December 2015 (CarbonBrief) – With the ink only just dry on the agreement signed in Paris to curb global carbon emissions, scientists at this year’s American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco have been reacting to the landmark deal and digesting some of the finer details. Here are a few scientists Carbon […]
9 December 2015 (Pew Research Center) – After more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and […]
By Ian James and Steve Reilly10 December 2015 SUBLETTE, Kansas (USA TODAY) – Just before 3 a.m., Jay Garetson’s phone buzzed on the bedside table. He picked it up and read the text: “Low Pressure Alert.” He felt a jolt of stress and his chest tightened. He dreaded what that automated message probably meant: With […]
By Jeff Masters17 December 2015 (Weather Underground) – November 2015 was Earth’s warmest November on record by a huge margin, according to data released by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) on Thursday. November 2015 also had the second largest positive departure of temperature from average of any month among all 1631 months in […]
14 December 2015 (Climate Interactive) – Negotiations concluded this weekend with the adoption of the Paris Agreement. If all INDCs included in the pact are fully implemented, with no further action, global temperatures are expected to rise 3.5°C (6.3°F) above preindustrial levels. The 5-year review mechanism that was included in the final agreement […]
GENEVA, 18 December 2015 (UNHCR) – With almost a million people having crossed the Mediterranean as refugees and migrants so far this year, and conflicts in Syria and elsewhere continuing to generate staggering levels of human suffering, 2015 is likely to exceed all previous records for global forced displacement, the UN Refugee Agency warned in […]
By Krishna N. Das and Tommy Wilkes; editing by Susan Fenton 14 December 2015 NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India still plans to double coal output by 2020 and rely on the resource for decades afterwards, a senior official said on Monday, days after rich and poor countries agreed in Paris to curb carbon emissions blamed […]
17 December 2015 (University of Utah) – Mathematical simulations at the University of Utah show parasitic flies may spell extinction for Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos Islands, but that pest-control efforts might save the birds that helped inspire the theory of evolution. The new study “shows that the fly has the potential to drive populations […]
