Blogging the End of the World™
By Jeff Burnside8 May 2013 SEATTLE (KOMO News) – A chemical threat lies hidden in millions of American homes, and top government scientists believe it could be killing cats. Right now in the special session of the state legislature, lawmakers are fighting powerful interests to ban versions of the chemical. Dr. Dennis Wackerbarth is a […]
By Robin McKie, science editor 11 May 2013 (The Observer) – It is increasingly likely that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homelands in the near future as a result of global warming. That is the stark warning of economist and climate change expert Lord Stern following the news last week […]
By Alex Kirby10 May 2013 LONDON (Climate News Network) – Researchers see no winners if agriculture made possible by widespread felling in the Amazon continues to expand. Large-scale expansion of agriculture at the expense of the forest could entail the loss of almost two-thirds of the Amazon’s terrestrial biomass by later this century, with grave […]
By Roxana Hegeman11 May 2013 (AP) – The winter wheat crop is expected to be far smaller this season compared to last, particularly for hard red varieties used in bread, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported Friday. In the first government projection on the harvest’s anticipated size, the National Agricultural Statistics Service estimated winter wheat […]
By Matt McGrath, Environment correspondent12 May 2013 (BBC News) – More than half of common plant species and a third of animals could see a serious decline in their habitat range because of climate change. New research suggests that biodiversity around the globe will be significantly impacted if temperatures rise more than 2C. But the […]
By Timothy B. Wheeler10 May 2013 (The Baltimore Sun) – Summer is almost here, and with it likely some blistering hot days. A recent study suggests the elderly should beware when the temperature spikes, because they face an increased risk of winding up in the emergency room short of breath on those days. And that’s […]
27 March 2013 (IMF) – Global pre-tax energy subsidies are significant. The subsidy estimates capture both those that are explicitly recorded in the budget and those that are implicit and off-budget. The evolution of energy subsidies closely mimics that of international energy prices (Figure 2). Although subsidies declined with the collapse of international energy prices, […]
By Eric W. Dolan8 May 2013 (Raw Story) – In a nearly 17-minute speech on Wednesday evening, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) blasted an unnamed senator for saying God would protect the Earth from climate change. “I was recently at a Senate hearing where I heard a member of our Senate community say, ‘God won’t allow […]
By KARIN LAUB 11 May 2013 SOUK AL-JUMMA, Tunisia (Associated Press) – On the day he chose to die, Adel Khedri woke up at 6:30 a.m., took his black backpack and headed down to the busy boulevard where he worked as a cigarette peddler. It was the last in a series of odd jobs that […]
By Jonathon Gatehouse3 May 2013 (Maclean’s) – As far as the government scientist was concerned, it was a bit of fluff: an early morning interview about great white sharks last summer with Canada AM, the kind of innocuous and totally apolitical media commentary the man used to deliver 30 times or more each year as […]
