Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs – ‘This is how a society destroys itself’

By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy Washington Bureau26 June 2013 BERLIN (McClatchy) – Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in […]

Humans play role in Australia’s ‘angry’ hot summer – ‘Due to greenhouse gas emissions, these types of extreme summers will become even more frequent and more severe in the future’

27 June 2013 (University of Melbourne) – Human influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in Australia’s recent “angry” hot summer, the hottest in Australia’s observational record, new research has found. The research led by the University of Melbourne, has shown that global warming increased the chances of Australians experiencing record […]

India burning coal at fastest pace in 31 years, will eclipse China as world’s coal power

  By Rakteem Katakey28 June 2013 (Bloomberg) – India is burning coal in power plants at the fastest pace in 31 years. At the same time, domestic supplies of natural gas that are the main alternative are falling at the quickest rate in Asia, data from 2012 compiled by BP Plc (BP/) show. Both trends […]

Global food security weakening ‘on a scale we haven’t seen yet’ – ‘Of all the resources we have, time is the scarcest’

By Laurie Goering28 June 2013 LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Population growth, rising affluence, water shortages, and climate change are combining to create unprecedented pressure on the world’s food supply – pressure that is likely to play out both as slow rises in hunger and as famines linked to extreme weather events, a leading agriculture […]

Rotting corpses spark fears of epidemic amid ‘Himalayan tsunami’ – ‘It’s very difficult to know the real figures and the scale of the disaster’

By Nita Bhalla; Editing by Nick Macfie26 June 2013 NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Rotting corpses contaminating water sources and poor sanitation amid devastating floods in northern India could lead to a serious outbreak of diseases such as cholera and dysentery, aid groups warned on Wednesday. The floods, triggered by heavy monsoon rains more than 10 […]

BP challenges settlements in Gulf Oil spill – ‘The litigation over this issue has not in any way changed our commitment to the Gulf’

25 June 2013 NEW ORLEANS (AP) – BP is placing full-page advertisements in three of the nation’s largest newspapers on Wednesday as the company mounts an aggressive campaign to challenge what could be billions of dollars in settlement payouts to businesses after its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The ad, scheduled to […]

Alberta floods: A changing tide? ‘I only hope my city’s nightmare is the climate-change wake-up Alberta, and Canada, needs’

OTTAWA, 26 June 2013 (The Economist) – One of the most divisive debates in Canada during the seven and a half years that Stephen Harper has been prime minister has been about climate change. It has pitted Mr Harper’s Conservative government and the country’s oil industry against the New Democrat and Liberal opposition parties and […]

Sea level along Maryland shorelines could rise two feet by 2050, according to new report

26 June 2013 (PhysOrg) – A new report on sea level rise recommends that the State of Maryland should plan for a rise in sea level of as much as 2 feet by 2050. Led by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the report was prepared by a panel of scientific experts in […]

Transcript of President Obama’s climate change speech – ‘I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing’

By Tom Randall 25 June 2013 (Bloomberg) – Transcript of President Barack Obama’s speech at Georgetown University announcing his new climate-change policy: On Christmas Eve, 1968, the astronauts of Apollo 8 did a live broadcast from lunar orbit. So Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders — the first humans to orbit the moon — described […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of Black Forest fire burn scar, 21 June 2013

By Adam Voiland21 June 2013 (NASA) – The first 911 call for the Black Forest fire came in on 11 June 2013. Nine days later, firefighters had fully contained the blaze, but not before it had devastated Black Forest, a wooded suburb of Colorado Springs, Colorado. In all, the fire charred more than 14,000 acres […]

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