Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Report: 800K residents and fourth of New York City could be in flood zone by 2050s due to global warming

By Jennifer Peltz, with additional writing by Meghan Barr10 June 2013 NEW YORK (Associated Press) – By the 2050s, more than 800,000 New York City residents could be living in a flood zone that would cover a quarter of the city’s land and New Yorkers could sweat out as many 90-degree days as is now […]

‘No Nile, no Egypt’, Cairo warns over Ethiopia dam

By Shadia Nasralla; Editing by Alastair Macdonald, Tom Pfeiffer, and Kevin Liffey9 June 2013 CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt’s foreign minister, vowing not to give up “a single drop of water from the Nile”, said on Sunday he would go to Addis Ababa to discuss a giant dam that Ethiopia has begun building in defiance of […]

IEA: Carbon emissions from fuel usage hit new global record

10 June 2013 (Deutsche Welle) – The International Energy Agency (IEA) says the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel usage have risen to a record level. It warns that despite increased renewables usage climate change will “not go away.” Global carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record in 2012, standing at 31.6 billion tons, […]

Land degradation threatens food security

By MD. ASADULLAH KHAN8 June 2013 (The Daily Star) – With two centuries of an unprecedented population boom, likely to reach 9 billion by 2050, land degradation by human activities and climatic upheavals poses a threat to food security, especially in a land-scarce country like Bangladesh. Historically known, it took the human species about 150,000 […]

Tough spot for farmers: Adapting to change you don’t believe in

By Nathanael Johnson7 Jun 2013 (Grist) – Even the farmers who think climate change is a hoax have to adapt to it. Agriculture depends profoundly on the weather, and yesterday Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a suite of new government programs to help farmers adjust to a more extreme climate. “The bottom line is […]

IUCN Red List: Moving the focus from species to ecosystems

[Guest blogger Melissa Hathaway discusses the IUCN Red List of Threatened Ecosystems, which Desdemona was unaware of. Thanks for the 411, Melissa!] By Melissa Hathaway9 June 2013 The focus on environmental conservation is expanding from the need to conserve individual species of flora and fauna to encompass entire ecosystems. DesdemonaDespair.net is dedicated to comprehensive and […]

Record floods in central Europe continue to create havoc – Hungary PM Viktor Orban says ‘It is now clear that we are facing the worst floods of all time’

By Kirsten Grieshaber 8 June 2013 BERLIN (AP) – About 120,000 emergency personnel including firefighters and soldiers were on duty Saturday, working aggressively to contain the most dramatic floods in Germany in a decade. Thousands of residents were still unable to return to their homes, and bridges and streets were impassable in many regions of […]

Get used to killer heat waves, CDC warns – ‘The sheer magnitude of these weather events are a challenge to public health’

By Maggie Fox, Senior Writer, NBC News6 Jun 2013 (NBC News) – Think last summer was bad? You better get used to it, federal health officials warned Thursday. Climate change means hotter summers and more intense storms that could knock power out for days — and kill people. New data on heat-related deaths suggest that […]

Another contaminated water leak at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant

By Mari Saito, Risa Maeda, and Kenichiro Hamada; Editing by Ron Popeski5 June 2013 TOKYO (Reuters) – The operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant said it had found another leak of contaminated water on Wednesday, piling pressure on the utility to curb the problem as it seeks permission to release water to the sea. […]

Rising sea levels, stronger storms fueled by climate change will threaten us through end of century, coastal panelists say

By  Mark Schleifstein4 June 2013 (The Times-Picayune) – With the United States coastline, its residents and businesses vulnerable to trillions of dollars of losses from catastrophic storms during the next 75 years, in part fueled by climate change, it’s time for the nation to focus on coastal resiliency, according to Lindene Patton, a risk management […]

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