Blogging the End of the World™
By Paul Shively23 March 2015 (Pew Charitable Trusts) – Here on the West Coast, sea lions evoke plenty of emotions. Some people love them, while others see them as a nuisance. Whatever your view, it’s unsettling to see hundreds of emaciated sea lion pups turning up along the California coast in what could be one […]
By Lynne Peeples23 March 2015 (Huffington Post) – Scientists are looking for — and finding — little bits of plastic in a lot of places lately: ice cores, deep sea sediments, coral reefs, crab gills, the digestive system of mussels, even German beer. Now, new research suggests they need not actually be searching for the […]
By Gregg Levine24 March 2015 (Al Jazeera) – More than a half-billion dollars (nearly 200 billion yen) of Japanese taxpayer money has been wasted in the struggle to contain and cleanup the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster, according to a government audit. Japan’s Board of Audit reported that TEPCO, the company nominally in charge of the […]
25 March 2015 (Associated Press) – Despite mounting protests, Japan continues to finance the building of coal-fired power plants with money earmarked for fighting climate change, with two new projects underway in India and Bangladesh, The Associated Press has found. Japan had counted $1 billion in loans for coal plants in Indonesia as climate finance, […]
19 March 2015 (IUCN) – The first-ever assessment of all European wild bee species shows that 9.2% are threatened with extinction, while 5.2% are considered likely to be threatened in the near future. A total of 56.7% of the species are classified as Data Deficient, as lack of experts, data and funding has made it […]
By Almuth Ernsting 17 March 2015 (The Ecologist) – A new coal and biomass-fired power station could soon be built at Drax in Yorkshire, already the UK’s biggest coal burner, writes Almuth Ernsting. It comes with a weak promise of possible ‘carbon capture and storage’ – an expensive, inefficient technology shunned elsewhere. As the Government’s […]
By Tisha Wardlow 18 March 2015 (The Dodo) – Plan A was to make conditions as perfect as possible to breed the last remaining northern white rhinos. Ol Pejeta did everything they could to make that a possibility. Plan B was to cross-breed the northern whites with the southern whites to at least perpetuate this […]
21 March 2015 (The Guardian) – Roundup, the world’s most widely used weedkiller, “probably” causes cancer, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – WHO’s cancer agency – said that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide made by agriculture company Monsanto, was “classified as probably carcinogenic […]
20 MARCH 2015, NEW DELHI (AP) – The world could suffer a 40 percent shortfall in water in just 15 years unless countries dramatically change their use of the resource, a U.N. report warned Friday [The United Nations World Water Development Report 2015]. Many underground water reserves are already running low, while rainfall patterns are […]
22 March 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – You may have noticed the ongoing mass-starvation event among California sea lions. (“Why are California sea lion pups starving?”; “Sick sea lions flood shelters in California – Pups wash ashore all along the coast amid what scientists say are strains on the ocean”) The sea lions are starving because […]
