Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Calls to cull 7,000 Lake Baikal seals – Poachers slaughter more than a dozen

By Olga Gertcyk9 October 2015 (Siberian Times) – The controversial demand to end a total ban on hunting Baikal’s indigenous seals came from Arnold Tulokhonov, who both senator for the Republic of Buryatia in the upper house of the Russian parliament and director  of the Baikal Institute of Natural Resources. The seals need to be […]

Study shows extensive coral damage related to BP oil spill – ‘The area we have looked at so far is only the tip of the iceberg’

By Cain Burdeau27 October 2015 (Associated Press) – Gulf coral damage from the massive BP oil spill is more extensive than previously thought, according to a new study that revealed sick and dying corals in the rich, deep-water environment off the coasts of Alabama and Mississippi known as the Pinnacles. Using remotely operated submarines, researchers […]

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 Rod Nordland31 October 2015 SID, Serbia (The New York Times) – They arrived in an unceasing stream, 10,000 a day at the height, as many as a million migrants heading for Europe this year, pushing infants in strollers and elderly parents in wheelchairs, carrying children on their shoulders and life savings in their socks. […]

Photo gallery: Satellite views of smoke and fires in Indonesia, October 2015

By Adam Voiland19 October 2015 (NASA) – Heavy smoke continued to pour from peat fires in Borneo, Indonesia, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image on 19 October 2015. Red outlines indicate hot spots where the sensor detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires. Gray smoke hovers […]

Malaysia environment minister: ‘Unless there is rain, there is no way human intervention can put out the Indonesia fires’

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, 19 October 2015 (AFP) – International efforts to douse raging Indonesia fires will fail and Southeast Asia could face several more weeks of choking smoke until the rainy season starts, Malaysia’s environment minister warned on Monday, October 19. Facing growing pressure, Indonesia earlier this month agreed to accept international help after failing […]

Endangered orangutans are dying as Indonesia burns – ‘This is catastrophic. When these fires finally end, that’s when we’ll see the bodies’

By John R. Platt22 October 2015 (takepart.com) – Indonesia is on fire. Right now, tens of thousands of small forest fires are burning across the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, the only habitats for orangutans and other rare species. Many of the fires appear to have been intentionally set by palm oil companies, which employ […]

Vast Amazon wildfire destroys forest in Brazil and threatens uncontacted tribe – ‘We will suffer greatly without our forest’

By Jonathan Watts30 October 2015 (Rio de Janeiro) – Brazilian rangers, firefighters and indigenous communities are battling against a wildfire that has blazed for two months and devastated some of the last Amazonian forest in the northern state of Maranhão, including part of the territory of an uncontacted tribe. The fire – which has spread […]

New England cod fishery collapses as rapidly warming water and overfishing take toll – ‘The Gulf of Maine cod stock is in the worst shape we have seen in the 40 years that we have been monitoring it’

By Chris Mooney 29 October 2015 (Washington Post) – A new scientific study says that rapidly warming waters off the New England coast have had a severe consequence — the collapse of a cod fishery that saw too many catches even as overall cod numbers declined due to warmer seas. It’s just the latest in […]

Russian media take climate cue from skeptical Putin – ‘There is no global warming, this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries, including Russia

By Andrey Kuzmin, with additional reporting by Alister Doyle; Editing by Bruce Wallace and Kevin Liffey29 October 2015 MOSCOW (Reuters) – Wildfires crackled across Siberia this summer, turning skies ochre and sending up enough smoke from burning pines to blot out satellite views of the 400-mile-long Lake Baikal. To many climate scientists, the worsening fires […]

Video: Persian Gulf could experience deadly heat

By David L. Chandler26 October 2015 (MIT News) – Within this century, parts of the Persian Gulf region could be hit with unprecedented events of deadly heat as a result of climate change, according to a study of high-resolution climate models. The research reveals details of a business-as-usual scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, but also […]

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