Blogging the End of the World™
By Jeff Guo 2 December 2014 BERLIN, Maryland (Washington Post) – At the south end of Assateague Island, on a storm-shaped hook called Tom’s Cove, Ishmael Ennis likes to pace the beach. Autumn Sundays are the best time of year, he said, when the dawn chill clears out the crowds. In those solitary moments, the […]
By Louise Dewast3 December 2014 LONDON (ABC News) — Giraffe numbers are dwindling across Africa because of poaching and habitat loss caused by human population growth, according to wildlife experts, and it’s happening largely unnoticed. “It’s a silent extinction,” Dr. Julian Fennessy, Executive Director of the Namibian-based Giraffe Conservation Research group and a leading wildlife […]
By Wendy Frew1 December 2014 (BBC News) – November was the hottest month and ended the hottest spring on record for Australia, meteorologists say. The soaring temperatures are part of a trend putting the world on track for the warmest year on record. Maximum temperatures were warmer than average across nearly the entire continent, according […]
By Adriana Brasileiro29 November 2014 RIO DE JANEIRO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – São Paulo, Brazil’s drought-hit megacity of 20 million, has about two months of guaranteed water supply remaining as it taps into the second of three emergency reserves, officials say. The city began using its second so-called “technical reserve” 10 days ago to prevent […]
(UNDP) – Over the years there has been much debate about what sustainability means and about what measures can track sustainable progress— or the lack of it. In 2012 the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio took a broad view that sustainable progress must cover all three dimensions that affect people’s life chances—social, […]
WASHINGTON, 2 December 2014 (AP) – In the more than two decades since world leaders first got together to try to solve global warming, life on Earth has changed, not just the climate. It’s gotten hotter, more polluted with heat-trapping gases, more crowded and just downright wilder. The numbers are stark. Carbon dioxide emissions: up […]
By Rhett Butler 26 November 2014 (mongabay.com) – Preliminary data released by the Brazilian government suggests that deforestation in Earth’s largest rainforest slowed 18 percent over the past year. Figures published Wednesday by Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE) show that 4,848 square kilometers (1,871 square miles) of forest — an area about the size […]
By DEBORAH SONTAG and ROBERT GEBELOFF 22 November 2014 Williston, North Dakota (The New York Times) — In early August 2013, Arlene Skurupey of Blacksburg, Va., got an animated call from the normally taciturn farmer who rents her family land in Billings County, N.D. There had been an accident at the Skurupey 1-9H oil well. […]
By Ben Guarino 26 November 2014 (The Dodo) – The bodies of more than 1,000 rare sea turtles, collectively weighing nearly 3,000 pounds, were recently seized by Vietnamese officials in a warehouse raid. Conservationists have fingered Vietnam as a hotbed of illegal wildlife trade — a 2006 National Geographic article labeled the country Asia’s illegal […]
By Lauren Walker28 November 2014 (Newsweek) – While the fact that 95.5 million Americans said they would shop on Black Friday is good news for retailers, it is a far less positive figure for the environment. Cheap electronics are one of the biggest draws for shoppers on the day (and indeed the rest of the […]
