Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

40,000 gallons of water stolen from Humboldt County school and town – ‘It’s disturbing that someone would put their own water needs before children’

By Catherine Wong5 September 2013 (The Times-Standard) – Bridgeville Elementary School was reopened Wednesday after being forced to close for a day when staff discovered up to 20,000 gallons of water had been stolen from an onsite water tank during the Labor Day weekend. ”There were tire tracks in the field on the south side […]

Graph of the Day: Annual groundwater withdrawal estimates by water-use class from the Death Valley regional flow system, 1913-1998

Groundwater pumpage within the Death Valley area began around 1913 in Pahrump Valley. Pumpage began mainly to support rising agricultural interests, but also supplied mining, industry, rural, and urban growth. The number of pumping wells in the region had increased from three in 1913 to over 9,300 in 1998. Pumpage for irrigation in the DVRFS […]

Drilling in wild Arctic seas threatens cultural traditions and marine life

By Frances Beinecke28 August 2013 (NRDC) – Earlier this summer, I walked along the spit of land where the Chukchi Sea meets the Beaufort Sea at the top of Alaska. As our group looked out at pack-ice sculpted by wind and water currents, our local guide told us about the Inupiat whaling crew captained by […]

Details emerge on murder of turtle conservationist Jairo Mora in Costa Rica

By Lindsay Fendt 3 September 2013 (Tico Times) – Hours before his murder, sea turtle conservationist Jairo Mora came upon poachers digging up turtle eggs at the notoriously dangerous Moín Beach, near Limón on Costa Rica’s northern Caribbean coast. Mora reasoned with the poachers, perhaps explaining that leatherbacks – enormous, prehistoric-looking turtles – are endangered. […]

Finnish study on climate change shows procrastination over mitigation measures could prove costly

September 04, 2013 (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland) – Forecasts about global warming and its consequences are shrouded in uncertainty. Research scientists maintain that the risks associated with climate change are high, but are unable to estimate accurately how easily temperature reacts to changes in the levels of carbon dioxide. According to Tommi Ekholm, […]

Giant fish kill along 19-mile stretch of central China river caused by ammonia release from chemical plant

By NEIL GOUGH4 September 2013 HONG KONG (The New York Times) – Thousands of dead fish floating along a 19-mile stretch of a river in Hubei Province in central China were killed by pollutants emitted by a local chemical plant, provincial environmental officials said Wednesday. Environmental protection officials said tests on water taken from the […]

Web of life unraveling, wildlife biologist says – ‘Everything is worse and we’re still doing the same things’

By Brian Wilford  29 August 2013 (Oceanside Star) – Wildlife biologist Neil Dawe says he wouldn’t be surprised if the generation after him witnesses the extinction of humanity. All around him, even in a place as beautiful as the Little Qualicum River estuary, his office for 30 years as a biologist for the Canadian Wildlife […]

Floods in India leave devastation akin to an inland tsunami – The government ‘angered Lord Shiva, and a few hours later there was cloudburst and floods’

[Somehow missed posting this back in July, but Des definitely wants to keep this story.] By Dr. Manpreet Bajwa and Dr. Harman Boparai 6 July 2013 LACHMOLI, India (Global Post) – Ninety-year-old Sarita’s sunken eyes stared into the damp earth that had flooded into the terrace of her one bedroom house. Her two grandchildren played […]

A warmer world will mean more pests and pathogens for crops – ‘Crop pests continue to march polewards as the earth warms’

By Bryan Walsh2 September 2013 (TIME) – When we talk about the challenge of ending hunger and feeding a growing global population, most of the focus is put on increasing production. That’s not surprising — “more” is our solution to most social problems. But some of the hunger gap could be closed by making better […]

Deforestation surges as Ecuador kills Amazon protection plan

By Rhett A. Butler4 September 2013 (mongabay.com) – Data released this week by Terra-i, a collaborative mapping initiative, shows that deforestation in Ecuador for the first three months of 2013 was pacing more than 300 percent ahead of last year’s rate. The report comes shortly after Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa killed off a proposed plan […]

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