Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

In Norfolk, evidence of global warming is in the streets at high tide – ‘We don’t like being the poster child for climate change’

By Lori Montgomery31 May 2014 NORFOLK (Washington Post) – At high tide on the small inlet next to Norfolk’s most prestigious art museum, the water lapped at the very top of the concrete sea wall that has held it back for 100 years. It seeped up through storm drains, puddled on the promenade and spread, […]

Photo gallery: Life on the tiny island of Kiribati as the sea inexorably engulfs it

29 May 2014 (theguardian.com) – Photographer Mike Bowers spent several weeks on Kiribati documenting life in the central Pacific island nation. It’s a nation with an average height above sea level of just two metres and a population density to rival London. Its future is under threat due to rising sea levels, increasingly saline arable […]

Rising sea level in Miami is an enormous problem

By Chiamaka Nwakeze 30 May 2014 (Science Recorder ) – Eighteen American scientific societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have reached a consensus on global warming, namely that it is occurring and is largely attributable […]

U.S. House Science Committee declares the IPCC report isn’t science, fills agenda with climate science denialists

By Mark Strauss30 May 2014 (io9) – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warned that more intense droughts and heat waves will cause famine and water shortages. But, don’t worry! Yesterday, the GOP held a hearing to tell us the IPCC is, in fact, a global conspiracy to control our lives and “redistribute […]

MIT study: Dangerous storms peaking further north, south than in past

Peter Dizikes 14 May 2014 (MIT News Office) – Powerful, destructive tropical cyclones are now reaching their peak intensity farther from the equator and closer to the poles, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT scientist. The results of the study, published today in the journal Nature, show that over the last 30 […]

Ivory’s curse: The militarization and professionalization of poaching in Africa – 35,000 to 50,000 elephants slaughtered each year

21 April 2014 (Born Free USA) – It has been a quarter century since Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) placed all African elephants on Appendix I, thus eliminating commercial trade in elephant ivory. This uniform global prohibition on ivory commercialization demonstrably reduced elephant poaching, helped elephant populations to stabilize, […]

London nitrogen dioxide pollution worse than Beijing – ‘It’s a public-health catastrophe’

By Per Liljas 28 May 2014 (TIME) – An E.U.-mandated shift to diesel cars has sent London’s NO2 emissions through the roof. “It’s a public-health catastrophe,” says one prominent campaigner British tabloids may lash out at Chinese smog all they want, but when it comes to one important pollution indicator, the U.K. capital actually outpollutes […]

Seafood industry under threat from global warming and ocean acidification – Total loss of landings to fisheries by 2050 ranges from $17 to $41 billion

By  Benjamin Alexander-Bloch28 May 2014 (The Times-Picayune) – The global seafood industry is under threat from climate change and ocean acidification, and reducing CO2 emissions is required to safeguard the industy’s future, according to a report jointly published Wednesday by the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership and Cambridge’s Judge […]

Global warming releases microplastic legacy frozen in Arctic Sea ice – ‘Concentrations of microplastics are at least two orders of magnitude greater than those in highly contaminated surface waters, such as those of the Pacific Gyre’

By Bob Yirka 27 May 2014 (PhysOrg) – A team of researchers with Dartmouth College in the U.S. and the University of Plymouth in the U.K. has found that a massive amount of tiny bits of rayon, plastics and other man-made materials are embedded in Arctic sea ice. In their paper published in the journal […]

The climate context for ‘unprecedented’ Balkans flooding – ‘We can see what is quite obviously a trend of extreme weather’

By Andrea Thompson20 May 2014 (Climate Central) – The torrential rains and catastrophic floods that raged through parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia were unprecedented in the historical record of the region, going back 120 years. But extreme weather events like this one are something communities may have to contend with more and […]

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial