Blogging the End of the World™
By Brittany Patterson18 November 2015 (ClimateWire) – Portland, Oregon, gets it — adapting to climate change, that is. Local decisionmakers in the liberal city, with a bustling population of just over 600,000 people, reported very high levels of concern about climate change and advanced adaptation plans, according to an analysis undertaken by researchers at George […]
BEIJING, 9 December 2015 (AP) – Unhealthy smog hovered over downtown Beijing as limits on cars, factories and construction sites kept pollution from spiking even higher Wednesday, on the second of three days of restrictions triggered by the city’s first red alert for smog. Cars with even-numbered license plates were kept off roads, and schools […]
By Yadigar Sekerci and Sergei Petrovskii12 November 2015 (Bulletin of Mathematical Biology) – We have studied the oxygen–plankton dynamics using a mathematical model that takes into account oxygen production in photosynthesis, plankton respiration, and the effect of zooplankton predation on phytoplankton. The model is described by a system of three coupled ODEs in the nonspatial […]
By Tom Phillips in Beijing7 December 2015 (The Guardian) – Beijing has issued its first pollution red alert as acrid smog enveloped the Chinese capital for the second time this month. The alert will begin at 7am on Tuesday and should see millions of vehicles forced off the roads, factories and construction sites shut down […]
By Nick Mabey7 December 2015 (Huffington Post) – As the Paris climate negotiations move into their climactic second week the focus is shifting from technical to political. The negotiating text has been stripped of (much of) its most baroque complications and duplications. What is left reflects core differences between countries. The second week will demand […]
By Oliver Milman2 December 2015 (The Guardian) – The world has lost a third of its arable land due to erosion or pollution in the past 40 years, with potentially disastrous consequences as global demand for food soars, scientists have warned. New research has calculated that nearly 33% of the world’s adequate or high-quality […]
By Brad Brooks2 December 2015 RIO DE JANEIRO (Associated Press) – Olympic sailor Erik Heil floated a novel idea to protect himself from the sewage-infested waters he and other athletes will compete in during next year’s games: He’d wear plastic overalls and peel them off when he was safely past the contaminated waters nearest shore. […]
1 December 2015 (University of Leicester) – Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to researchers from the University of Leicester. A study led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics from the University of Leicester’s Department of Mathematics, […]
By Arthur Neslen and Emma Howard1 December 2015 (The Guardian) – A survey of 10 sponsors of the Paris climate summit has found that most do not publish data on their CO2 emissions, half don’t track their lifetime carbon footprint, and only one is reducing its emissions in line with the EU’s targets. Full details […]
By Amanda Marcotte30 November 2015 (Salon) – It may not roll off the tongue easily, but it’s time to verb-ify the word “Benghazi.” To Benghazi someone would mean to subject someone who is clearly innocent of wrongdoing to months and even years of punitive “investigation” in the faint hope that you can turn up a […]
