Blogging the End of the World™
13 November 2014 (Planet Experts) – To prevent potentially catastrophic climate change, the world’s largest economies agreed to phase out their subsidies for carbon-emitting fossil fuels in 2009. That anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas emissions are influencing the global climate is now almost without dispute. The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate […]
By PHUONG LE16 November 2014 POULSBO, Washington (Associated Press) – Just hours into the experiment, the prognosis was grim for salmon that had been submerged in rain runoff collected from one of Seattle’s busiest highways. One by one, the fish were removed from a tank filled with coffee-colored water and inspected: They were rigid. Their […]
By Reissa Su21 November 2014 (IBT) – Australia will be facing drought as soon as the Bureau of Meteorology forecasts a 70 percent chance of El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. By summer’s end, Australians will see less rainfall as temperatures rise due to warmer weather. The weather bureau has revised its El Niño forecast […]
By John Vidal15 November 2014 (The Observer) – When Botswana’s president, Ian Khama, opened a giant $4.9bn diamond mine in the heart of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in September, there were some notable absentees among the invited guests: the 700 bushmen whose hunter-gatherer families had been the traditional inhabitants of the desert, but who […]
By Matt Townsend 20 November 2014 (Bloomberg) – On a crisp Friday evening in late October, Shannon Rich, 33, is standing in a dying American mall. Three customers wander the aisles in a Sears the size of two football fields. The RadioShack is empty. A woman selling smartphone cases watches “Homeland” on a laptop. “It’s […]
By Rune Likvern 10 October 2014 (Fractional Flow) – […] The Race between Fossil Fuels and Renewables By putting the growth between fossil fuels and renewables into a perspective, it demonstrates how dependent our economies, our wealth and well beings are upon fossil fuels. Looking at the growth in total fossil fuels versus renewables consumption […]
By Michael Casey 17 November 2014 (CBS News) – The never-ending demand for Pacific bluefin tuna among sushi lovers is driving the iconic fish towards extinction, a conservation group said. The Swiss-based International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) upgraded the status of the tuna from “least concern” to “vulnerable,” which means it is now […]
By Lindsay Abrams19 November 2014 (Salon) – Congressional climate wars were dominated Tuesday by the U.S. Senate, which spent the day debating, and ultimately failing to pass, a bill approving the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. While all that was happening, and largely unnoticed, the House was busy doing what it does best: attacking […]
By Dom Phillips 18 November 2014 ATIBAIA, Brazil (Washington Post) – Seen from a micro-light aircraft, flying low near this small town in Brazil’s interior, the scale of the water crisis blighting São Paulo, a megalopolis 40 miles away, was frighteningly clear. Four of the five reservoirs in an interlinked system that supplies 6.5 million […]
By Robert Preidt12 November 2014 (HealthDay News) – Scientists report that they found evidence of six kinds of toxic flame retardants in Americans. The researchers tested urine samples from California residents and found detectable levels of a rarely studied group of flame retardants known as phosphates, and one — tris-(2-chloroethyl) phosphate (TCEP) — has never […]
