Blogging the End of the World™
By Oliver Wainwright16 December 2014 BEIJING (The Guardian) – The scene could be straight from a science-fiction film: a vision of everyday life, but with one jarring difference that makes you realise you’re on another planet, or in a distant future era. A sports class is in full swing on the outskirts of Beijing. Herds […]
By Jonathan Amos18 December 2014 (BBC News) – NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) has returned its first global maps of the greenhouse gas CO2. The satellite was sent up in July to help pinpoint the key locations on the Earth’s surface where carbon dioxide is being emitted and absorbed. This should help scientists better understand […]
10 December 2014 (RealClimate.org) – Start date: 10 December 2004 Number of posts: 914 Number of comments: ~172,000 Number of comments with inline responses: 14,277 Minimum number of total unique page visits, and unique views, respectively: 19 Million, 35 Million Number of guest posts: 100+ Number of mentions in newspaper sources indexed by LexisNexis: 225 […]
(UNDP) – Over the past few decades the world has suffered deeper and more frequent financial crises that have spread rapidly to other economic sectors, creating uncertainty, affecting livelihoods and threatening social stability. In the most recent crisis global unemployment increased by nearly 30 million between 2007 and 2009, while current unemployment estimates remain far […]
By Oliver Milman10 December 2014 (The Guardian) – More than five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes, are floating in the world’s oceans, causing damage throughout the food chain, new research has found. Data collected by scientists from the US, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand suggests a minimum of 5.25tn plastic […]
10 December 2014 (mongabay.com) – Forest-dependent peoples face grave threats from deforestation and other depredations, warns a new report that urges greater recognition of traditional land use and support of community-led initiatives to fight forest loss. The report, published Monday during climate talks in Lima, is based on research by dozens of indigenous and forest […]
By Michael Mann8 December 2014 (Huffington Post) – Just a couple months ago, I critiqued a pair of studies that disputed any linkage between human-caused climate change and the exceptional 2014 California drought. Now comes yet another study (“Causes and Predictability of the 2011-14 California Drought”) with the imprimatur of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric […]
By Rich Juzwiak and Aleksander Chan8 December 2014 (Gawker) – On Wednesday, after the announcement that NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo would not be indicted for killing Eric Garner, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund Twitter posted a series of tweets naming 76 men and women who were killed in police custody since the 1999 death of […]
By Debarati Guha-Sapir and Frederick M. Burkle Jr2 June 2014 (Journal of Tropical Pediatrics) – With the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the USA and Coalition Forces, U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld assured the removal of military forces within 60 days and, despite pleas from within and outside his own circle of advisors, rejected the possibility […]
By Adam Voiland10 December 2014 (NASA) – About 4.5 million years ago, the Kashmir Valley was at the bottom of a large lake, encircled by a ring of rugged mountains. Much of the lake’s water has long since drained away through an outlet channel on the valley’s west side. However, evidence of the lake remains […]
