Blogging the End of the World™
By KATRINA STOKES27 January 2015 (The Advertiser) – South Australia is only going to get hotter and drier and more prevalent periods of drought and fire-related conditions will continue to increase, a report released today reveals. The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology report says what climate change experts have been saying for a long time […]
By Fredreka Schouten27 January 2015 WASHINGTON (USA TODAY) – Top officials in the Koch brothers’ political organization Monday released a staggering $889 million budget to fund the activities of the billionaires’ sprawling network ahead of the 2016 presidential contest. The budget, which pays for everything from advertising and data-gathering technology to grass-roots activism, was released […]
By Hannah Osborne 27 January 2015 (IBT) – Winter Storm Juno has been dubbed a “historic” and “once-in-a-century” snowstorm, yet climate scientists say it is completely in line with what we should expect with climate change. Juno is expected to dump two to three feet of snow over an area stretching 250 miles on the […]
(UNDP) – Material living standards can be better monitored, particularly during economic downturns, through measures of household income and consumption rather than GDP (see figure). For example, while GDP fell sharply (by 5.7 percent) in the euro area in 2008 and 2009, household disposable income stayed at precrisis levels. This can be attributed at least […]
By DIONNE SEARCEY and ROBERT GEBELOFF25 January 2015 (The New York Times) – The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century. In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in […]
Update, 6:46 p.m., 26 January 2015: Early Monday evening, Broad Front Party lawmaker Edgardo Araya filed a motion in the Legislative Assembly’s Environmental Commission to call Costa Rica’s Chief Public Prosecutor Jorge Chavarría to testify before the commission regarding “the omissions by the Prosecutor’s Office in the Jairo Mora case,” according to a post on […]
BRASILIA, Brazil, 24 January 2015 (Australian News.Net) – Brazil’s Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira has told the media following a crisis meeting at the presidential palace in Brasilia that the country is experiencing its worst drought since 1930. The states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais are the worst affected, she said after […]
By Damian Carrington7 January 2015 (The Guardian) – Vast amounts of oil in the Middle East, coal in the US, Australia, and China and many other fossil fuel reserves will have to be left in the ground to prevent dangerous climate change, according to the first analysis to identify which existing reserves cannot be burned. […]
By Lyndsey Layton16 January 2015 (Washington Post) – For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation. The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of […]
By Ali Mirchi, Kaveh Madani, and Amir AghaKouchak for Tehran Bureau23 January 2015 (The Guardian) – In the late 1990s, Lake Urmia, in north-western Iran, was twice as large as Luxembourg and the largest salt-water lake in the Middle East. Since then it has shrunk substantially, and was sliced in half in 2008, with consequences […]
