Blogging the End of the World™
By Ned Rozell31 December 2012 Anchorage, Alaska (Anchorage Daily News) – In almost every patch of boreal forest in Interior Alaska that Glenn Juday has studied since the 1980s, at least one quarter of the aspen, white spruce, and birch trees are dead. “These are mature forest stands that were established 120 to 200 years […]
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN31 December 2012 KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa (The New York Times) — They definitely did not look like ordinary big-game hunters, the stream of slender young Thai women who showed up on the veld wearing tight bluejeans and sneakers. But the rhinoceros carcasses kept piling up around them, and it was only […]
By FELICITY BARRINGER31 December 2012 (The New York Times) – The record-setting disappearance of Arctic sea ice this fall was an indication to many climate scientists and ice experts that the pace of climate change was outstripping predictions. Now a new study published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters provides a look at […]
Ann Arbor, Michigan, 20 December 2012 (SPX) – A comprehensive map three years in the making is telling the story of humans’ impact on the Great Lakes, identifying how “environmental stressors” stretching from Minnesota to Ontario are shaping the future of an ecosystem that contains 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. In an article […]
Sydney, 27 December 2012 (AFP) – China’s economic boom has seen its coral reefs shrink by at least 80 percent over the past 30 years, a joint Australian study found Thursday, with researchers describing “grim” levels of damage and loss. Scientists from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the […]
By Peter Hannam, Carbon economy editor3 January 2013 AUSTRALIA’S notoriously variable climate is on full display, with parts of the nation about to experience one of the largest heatwaves in territorial extent in decades, after coming off a sharp shift last year from wetter- to drier-than-average conditions. A swath of central Australia stretching from Oodnadatta […]
At some point, the pace of doom will overtake this blog’s capacity to document it. In 2012, Desdemona came pretty close to this threshold, as a burst of extreme weather events battered civilization and illustrated the nature of abrupt climate change to the most obdurate of nation states. “The new normal” is how observers from […]
By Kim Murphy1 January 2013 (Los Angeles Times) – Days of efforts trying to guide a mobile offshore drilling rig through stormy Alaska seas hit a crisis Monday night when crew members were forced to disconnect the rig from its last remaining tow line and the vessel went aground on a small island south of […]
By Dr. Jeff Masters 31 December 2012 The 2012 U.S. fire season was the 3rd worst in U.S. history, with 9.2 million acres burned – an area larger than the state of Maryland. Since the National Interagency Fire Center began keeping records in 1960, only two years have seen more area burned – 2006, when […]
By Andrew Freedman, Michael Lemonick, and Dan Yawitz27 December 2012 (Climate Central) – From unprecedented heat waves that shattered “Dust Bowl” era records from the 1930s, to Hurricane Sandy, which devastated coastal New Jersey and New York, 2012 was the year Mother Nature had it out for the U.S. No country on Earth rivaled the […]
