Blogging the End of the World™
[cf. Peak Coal in China? Not so fast –Des] By Tom Phillips, with additional reporting by Luna Lin 4 November 2015 (Beijing) – China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, has been dramatically underreporting the amount of coal it consumes each year, it has been claimed ahead of key climate talks in Paris. Official Chinese data, […]
By Hannah Waters8 October 2015 (Audobon) – The winter of 2011 was a bad one for seabirds nesting at Midway Atoll, a remote spread of islands in the central Pacific. First, two big storms, hit, in January and February, causing large waves to flood the islands. Then in March the islands were washed over by […]
[The interesting thing about this story is that it never mentions global warming, even though we know that there’s a strong correlation between rising temperatures and wildfires, e.g., Study finds climate change is increasing length of wildfire seasons across globe. –Des] By Bill Theobald6 November 2015 WASHINGTON (USA TODAY) – The damage caused by the […]
[cf. 60,000 antelopes died in 4 days, and no one knows why and Saiga antelope population declines 95% in 15 years] By Emma Howard3 November 2015 (The Guardian) – More than half of the world’s population of an endangered antelope died within two weeks earlier this year, in a phenomenon that scientists are unable to […]
By David F. Ruccio5 November 2015 (Real-World Economics Review) – We already knew that the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed over the past three decades. But the usual response was that they are gaming the system, claiming disabilities that “lend themselves to subjective manipulation” and being encouraged to do so by […]
21 October 2015 (The Siberian Times) – Border guards seize 14 birds, as FSB lead search for criminals behind cruelty. The tethered peregrine falcons were hidden in two bags on a freight train bound from Russia to Kazakhstan, said border guards in Altai region. Shocking pictures show how the birds – the fastest flyers in […]
[cf. Toxic algae bloom may be largest ever off U.S. West Coast – ‘We’ve never had to close essentially half our coast’, and Scientists fear toxic algae bloom spreading on Pacific coast – Stretching from southern California to Alaska, this year’s blooms thought to be the largest ever recorded] By Lisa Fernandez5 November 2015 (NBC […]
By Amanda Cabrejo le Roux3 November 2015 (The Conversation) – A court in São Tomé and Príncipe, a small oceanic island off the African west coast, recently delivered an historical verdict in the fight against the transnational criminal syndicates involved in fisheries crime. The court convicted the Chilean captain and two Spanish officials of the […]
[cf. Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean – ‘The fact that a record-hot planet Earth coincides with a record-cold northern Atlantic is quite stunning’] By Lisa Sorg4 November 2015 (Coastal Review) – There it is, hanging out in the northern Atlantic Ocean, off the southern tip […]
By Hannah Osborne 3 November 2015 (IBT) – Customs officials in China have seized 2,674 pangolin carcasses in the biggest trafficking case involving the species in five years. Authorities intercepted the haul on a fishing boat in September. They found thousands of dead pangolin stuffed inside 414 cool boxes weighing 11.5 tonnes, China’s Xinhua news […]
