Blogging the End of the World™
By MATTHEW BROWN and JOSH FUNK22 February 2015 BILLINGS, Montana (AP) – The federal government predicts that trains hauling crude oil or ethanol will derail an average of 10 times a year over the next two decades, causing more than $4 billion in damage and possibly killing hundreds of people if an accident happens in […]
January 2015 (Risky Business Project) – This graph shows the mean number of days in a typical Midwest summer when the temperature and humidity could reach Humid Heat Stroke Index (HHSI) category II, III, or even greater. These are days when the heat and humidity could be so high that it will be dangerous for […]
14 February 2015 (Canada Journal) – A team of British Columbia-led researchers believe banning fishing in international waters would help protect fish stocks and boost coastal economies. The analysis of fisheries data indicates that if increased spillover of fish stocks from protected international waters were to boost coastal catches by 18 per cent, current global […]
By Gillian B. White6 February 2015 (The Atlantic) – Conversations about affordable housing are often dominated by questions of how to get lower-income residents in expensive cities—like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (and their surrounding areas)—into safe, affordable places to live. That makes sense: Often urban hubs are a good bet for jobs […]
15 January 2015 (EPA) – A message in graffiti which reads ‘Welcome to the Cantareira desert’ is written on a car which was once submerged in water, at the Atibainha dam, part of the Cantareira System, which shows lowest levels of water, in Nazare Paulista city, 90km away from Sao Paulo, Brazil, 15 January 2015. […]
By Maria Gallucci23 February 2015 (IBT) – Taylor Shellfish Company was grappling with a crisis in the summer of 2009. Millions of oyster larvae were dying in its Washington hatcheries, and production had dropped by 80 percent. Down the coast, Oregon’s hatcheries faced the same problem. Highly acidic ocean water, it turned out, was dissolving […]
By Julie Makinen17 February 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – Nearly four years after Japan’s massive March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the country has made “significant progress” toward stabilizing and decommissioning the ravaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, international nuclear inspectors said Tuesday. However, the nearly 160 million gallons of contaminated water stored on-site pose massive […]
By Tim Elfrink23 February 2015 (New Times Miami) – Living in Miami in 2015 and harboring any doubts about sea level rise is roughly equivalent to being a volcano truther in Pompeii circa 79 AD. The catastrophe is happening. The only question is just how quickly climate change will sink parts of South Florida. The […]
ABSTRACT: An established rift in the Larsen C Ice Shelf, formerly constrained by a suture zone containing marine ice, grew rapidly during 2014 and is likely in the near future to generate the largest calving event since the 1980s and result in a new minimum area for the ice shelf. Here we investigate the recent […]
By Lourdes Garcia-Navarro10 February 2015 (NPR) – Last Sunday, hundreds of Paulistanos, as the residents of São Paulo are known, dressed up and danced on the streets at one of the dozens of block parties that happen in advance of the annual celebration known as Carnival. Except this year – among the pirates and Viking […]
