Blogging the End of the World™
By Captain Paul Watson3 February 2015 (SSCS) – Since mid-December, 2014, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been engaged in shutting down the illegal operations of four Antarctic toothfish poaching ships. The Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker located the Nigerian-flagged poacher Thunder on December 16th on the Banzare Bank off the coast of Antarctica. The […]
By Warren Cornwall26 January 2015 (National Geographic) – People living around the Pacific Ocean, including in parts of Asia, Australia, and western North and South America, should expect wilder climate swings in the 21st century. Extreme versions of El Niño and La Niña, the sibling Pacific weather patterns that can translate into torrential rains or […]
By Clara Chaisson29 January 2015 (OnEarth) – Increasingly intense storms in the United States might have an unexpected origin: Asian air pollution. Researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have found that aerosols from across the Pacific strengthen extratropical cyclones—a type of storm system that drives much of our country’s weather. Asia is home to the […]
By Apoorva Joshi27 January 2015 (mongabay.com) – Since the 1950s, plantations and second-growth forests in China have been locally managed by village communities as collective forests, which today account for 58 percent of China’s forestland. Many of these collective forests lie within mountainous rural areas, some of which are also home to the 1,600 or […]
27 January 2015 (CSIRO) – The rates of sea level rise are not uniform around Australia. Over the period from 1993 when satellite altimeter data are available, the sea level trends are larger than the GMSL trend in northern Australia and similar to the GMSL trend in southern Australia (Figure 8.1.4; White, et al., 2014). […]
29 January 2015 (Tico Times) – Hundreds of protesters gathered Thursday in front of a court complex in the Costa Rican capital to express outrage over a verdict earlier this week that acquitted seven defendants of the 2013 murder of sea turtle conservationist Jairo Mora, who has quickly become an environmental martyr in this small […]
By Victoria Tang 21 January 2015 (Wired) – United States Senators stood up for what they believed in today—and it wasn’t pretty. During a debate over construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, intended to carry oil from Canada to the United States, the Senate voted on an amendment—just for show, really—on whether climate change “is […]
OL PEJETA CONSERVANCY, 28 January 2015 (AFP) – Conservationists and scientists have held talks in Kenya this week to come up with a last-ditch plan to save the northern white rhinoceros from extinction. There are only five northern whites left on the planet: three live in a 700-acre enclosure on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in […]
São Paulo, January 28, 2015 (Associated Press) – The worst drought to hit Brazil’s biggest city in decades may leave residents with water service only two days a week. São Paulo water utility company Sabesp says a five days-off, two days-on system would be a last-ditch effort to prevent the collapse of the Cantareira water […]
By Jeremy Hance28 January 2015 (mongabay.com) – The world’s migrating monarch butterfly population has bounced back slightly from its record low last year, but the new numbers are still the second smallest on record. According to WWF-Mexico and the Mexican government, butterflies covered 2.79 acres (1.13 hectares) in nine colonies this year in the Mexican […]
