Blogging the End of the World™
By Sue Palminteri 1 October 2013 (mongabay.com) – Forests are increasingly limited to steep slopes as mankind continues to clear lowland areas suitable for agriculture and urban areas, finds a new study published in Nature Communications. The trend has significant implications for global biodiversity. As human societies have expanded, they have been remarkably efficient at […]
By Phil Plait26 September 2013 (Slate) – As I predicted, with the advent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report due tomorrow, the noise machine is out in full force. Still, when I saw that James Delingpole had written yet another climate change denial piece for The Telegraph, I dithered. After all, in my […]
By Bryan Walsh 1 October 2013 (TIME) – Thousands of homeowners in flood-prone parts of the country are going to be in for a rude awakening. On Oct. 1, new changes to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which offers government-subsidized policies for households and businesses threatened by floods, mean that businesses in flood zones […]
By Gary Peach1 October 2013 (AP) – Marine biologists say that the wave of jellyfish that caused a Swedish nuclear plant to shut down a reactor is going to become a more common occurrence. It wasn’t a tsunami but it had the same effect: A huge cluster of jellyfish forced one of the world’s largest […]
By DAN JOLING, Associated Press 1 October 2013 ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – An estimated 10,000 walrus unable to find sea ice over shallow Arctic Ocean water have come ashore on Alaska’s northwest coast. Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Friday photographed walrus packed onto a beach on a barrier island near Point […]
By Holli Riebeek27 September 2013 (NASA) – The waters of Lake Erie seem to glow green in this image taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on 26 September 2013. The color comes from a toxic algae bloom, which has been growing in the lake since mid July. The algae […]
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 30, 2013 (FEMA) – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that federal disaster aid has been made available to the State of New Mexico to supplement state, local and tribal recovery efforts in the area affected by severe storms and flooding during the period of 23-28 July […]
By Marcela Valdes 30 September 2013 (NPR) – If you think kids are too young to worry about unemployment numbers, consider this: Some of our most popular young adult novels fairly shiver with economic anxiety. Take Veronica Roth’s Divergent, this week’s top New York Times Young Adult best-seller and a perennial on the list since […]
By Claire Salisbury 27 September 2013 (mongabay.com) – Tropical tree communities are moving up mountainsides to cooler habitats as temperatures rise, a new study in Global Change Biology has found. By examining the tree species present in ten one-hectare plots at various intervals over a decade, researchers found that the proportion of lowland species increased […]
27 September 2013 (IPCC) – [This graph shows a] comparison of observed and simulated climate change based on three large-scale indicators in the atmosphere, the cryosphere and the ocean: change in continental land surface air temperatures (yellow panels), Arctic and Antarctic September sea ice extent (white panels), and upper ocean heat content in the major […]
