Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Graph of the Day: Observed and modeled September Arctic sea ice extent, 1900-2100

ABSTRACT: The observed rapid loss of thick, multi-year sea ice over the last seven years and September 2012 Arctic sea ice extent reduction of 49% relative to the 1979-2000 climatology are inconsistent with projections of a nearly sea ice free summer Arctic from model estimates of 2070 and beyond made just a few years ago. […]

Barton Paul Levenson: No warming for 15 years!

By Barton Paul Levenson10 April 2013 “There’s been no global warming for fifteen years!” This is the latest cry of the global warming deniers. It’s totally spurious, of course, because you need 30 years to show a climate trend, not 15. But just to prove my point, I’ll show in detail how sample size affects […]

Minnesota Republican on climate change: ‘It’s just a complete United Nations fraud’

By Aaron Rupar 16 May 2013 (City Pages) – Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen, R-Glencoe, is anti-gay and gets his “facts” from materials distributed at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Other than that, we’re sure he’s exactly the sort of elected leader Minnesota needs. During a recent rant on the House floor, Gruenhagen characterized climate change as […]

China ‘will not accept’ EU measures on emissions

By Wang Wen and Zheng Xin 18 May 2013 (China Daily) – A senior official from the Civil Aviation Administration of China said on Friday that the country disapproved and “will not accept any unilateral and compulsory market measures”, after the European Union threatened Chinese carriers with fines for non-compliance with its Emissions Trading System, […]

Displaced by disasters: 32 million people uprooted in both rich and poor countries in 2012

GENEVA, 13 MAY 2013 (IDMC) – A new report released today by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) reveals that 32.4 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2012 by disasters such as floods, storms, and earthquakes.  While Asia and west and central Africa bore the brunt, 1.3 million were displaced in rich […]

Marine who dumped carcinogenic chemical trichloroethylene felt illness was payback – ‘We used to go through 55 gallons in less than a month’

By Allen G. Breed, with additional contributions by Martha Waggoner in Raleigh, N.C. 18 May 2013 CAMP LEJEUNE, North Carolina (AP) – Ron Poirier couldn’t escape the feeling that his cancer was somehow a punishment. As a young Marine electronics technician at Camp Lejeune in the mid-1970s, the Massachusetts man figured he’d dumped hundreds of […]

Michigan district fires all teachers, closes every school

By Suzi Parker13 May 2013 (Take Part) – Summer break has started very early for kids in one Michigan school district. Buena Vista schools have been closed for five days already, and on Monday, the district’s website stated that the school would be closed until further notice. For good reason, this decision has parents, and […]

Vast stretches of Texas and Kansas farmland over the High Plains Aquifer no longer support irrigation – Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains

By MICHAEL WINES 19 May 2013 HASKELL COUNTY, Kansas (The New York Times) – Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute. Last year, Mr. Yost […]

Climate change: human disaster looms, claims new research – Forecast global temperature rise of 4C a calamity for large swaths of planet even if predicted extremes are not reached

By Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent 19 May 2013 (The Guardian) – Some of the most extreme predictions of global warming are unlikely to materialise, new scientific research has suggested, but the world is still likely to be in for a temperature rise of double that regarded as safe. The researchers said warming was most likely […]

New temperature norms under climate change will increase heat-related deaths in metropolitan areas – Heatwave deaths in New York city could rise by up to 22 percent

By Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent 19 May 2013 (The Guardian) – New York city could experience up to 22% more deaths from extreme summertime heat in the coming decade under global warming, according to a study of the impact of climate trends. The higher deaths will be partially offset by a reduction in deaths […]

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