Blogging the End of the World™
By Richard Martin16 October 2014 (The Atlantic) – Scotty Lucas is the former mayor of a town that no longer exists. This double obsolescence seems to faze him little, which is not all that surprising considering that he has outlived his wife, one of his children, and the town he spent most of his 81 […]
By Gary Chittim and Elizabeth Wiley21 October 2014 SEATTLE (KING 5 News) – The death of a baby southern resident orca is part of a trend that doesn’t bode well for survival of the endangered pods. On the same day the “L” pod thrilled whale watchers with a late season visit to the waters near […]
By David Fogarty20 October 2014 (mongabay.com) – Global miner BHP Billiton and Indonesian partner PT Adaro are developing what could become the single largest mine in Indonesia in terms of land area, with BHP owning 75 percent. The IndoMet mine complex in Central and East Kalimantan provinces on Borneo comprises seven coal concessions, which cover […]
By Michael Mann, John Abraham, Dr. Peter Gleick, Scott Mandia, Richard C.J. Somerville20 October 2014 (EcoWatch) – Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry has authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that “there is less urgency to phase out greenhouse gas emissions now” than in the past. This could not be further from the […]
By Keith M. Parsons15 October 2014 (Huffington Post) – I grew up in the heroic age of American science and engineering. In my lifetime, the space program put men on the moon, the interstate highway system connected the continent, Salk and Sabin conquered polio, and computers went from room-sized behemoths to hand-held wonders. In my […]
By Jeremy Hance20 October 2014 (mongabay.com) – Rhino conservation suffered another tragic setback this weekend with the sudden death of Suni, a male northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Suni’s passing means there are only six northern white rhinos left in the world, and only one breeding male. […]
By Jonathan Watts 19 October 2014 Rio de Janeiro (The Guardian) – The deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has accelerated rapidly in the past two months, underscoring the shortcomings of the government’s environmental policies. Satellite data indicates a 190% surge in land clearance in August and September compared with the same period last year as […]
ABSTRACT: Wildfire activity in boreal forests is anticipated to increase dramatically, with far-reaching ecological and socioeconomic consequences. Paleorecords are indispensible for elucidating boreal fire regime dynamics under changing climate, because fire return intervals and successional cycles in these ecosystems occur over decadal to centennial timescales. We present charcoal records from 14 lakes in the Yukon […]
By Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara10 October 2014 (ProPublica) – Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater – according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings. The 1,217 […]
By Amelia Urry13 October 2014 (Grist) – Perhaps you have heard about Ebola, otherwise known as The Most Terrifying Disease Of Our Modern Times (Sorry, MERs; panic is a fickle friend). But you might not have heard that Ebola’s origin story also features a favorite environmental arch-villain? And by “favorite,” I mean “actually the worst”: […]
