Blogging the End of the World™
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 […]
By Gary Stokes, Director, Sea Shepherd Hong Kong18 June 2013 (SeaShepherd.org) – Recently Japan announced that despite the decision to protect five shark species at the CITES CoP16 meeting held in Bangkok this past March, it is entering a “reservation” (i.e., it will be ignoring the ruling) as it does not recognize the United Nations […]
[Desdemona strongly endorses a War on Coal.] By Sean Cockerham and Erika Bolstad26 June 2013 WASHINGTON (McClatchy Newspapers) – President Barack Obama’s plan to curb climate change could transform American energy, potentially dealing a blow to the coal-fired power plants that supply much of the nation’s electricity but also pump planet-warming gases into the atmosphere. […]
PEKANBARU, Indonesia, 25 June 2013 (Associated Press) — Indonesian authorities have arrested eight farmers for setting illegal fires on Sumatra island to clear land after numerous blazes created a thick haze choking parts of Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, police said Tuesday. The farmers were arrested Monday and Tuesday after being caught “red-handed,” said local police […]
By John H. Cushman Jr.24 June 2013 WASHINGTON (InsideClimate News) – A new report from the U.S. Center for Naval Analyses and the London-based Royal United Services Institute, two of the NATO alliance’s front-line strategy centers, recommends putting more effort into fighting global warming than securing reliable supplies of fossil fuels. The authors call the […]
By Danish Siddiqui, with additional writing by Anurag Kotoky in NEW DELHI; Editing by Mayank Bhardwaj and Alison Williams25 June 2013 GAUCHAR, India (Reuters) – A rescue helicopter delivering wood for the mass cremations of the victims of flooding in northern India crashed on Tuesday, killing the eight people on board, the government said. Floods […]
By Andrew Darby, Hobart correspondent for Fairfax Media25 June 2013 (Sydney Morning Herald) – When Australia first went to court against Japan over whaling, it was against clear warnings from anti-whaling allies. The US commissioner at the International Whaling Commission, Monica Medina, called it a ”bet the whales” case – an uncertain gamble on whales’ […]
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor25 June 2013 (NBC News) – Tiny, winged bark beetles have been the ecological bad guys of the West for more than a decade, and rightfully so. They’ve killed off millions of acres’ worth of trees in Colorado. Now all those dead trees are feeding the flames across tens of thousands […]
[Desdemona wonders if the summer sun in Seattle will again be dimmed by smoke from Siberia megafires, as in 2012.] By Robert Scribbler21 June 2013 Today, a heatwave circling the Arctic set its sights on central Siberia. Temperatures soared into the upper 80s to near 90 degrees over a vast region of Siberian tundra, setting […]
22 June 2013 (VNS) – Southernmost Ca Mau Province is in danger of sinking below sea level in the next few decades due to over-exploitation of underground water if something isn’t done urgently. Experts released the warning at a conference held with the co-operation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Norwegian […]