Blogging the End of the World™
By Jim Salter23 December 2012 ST. LOUIS (AP) – From sunken steamboats to a millennium-old map engraved in rock, the drought-drained rivers of the nation’s midsection are offering a rare and fleeting glimpse into years gone by. Lack of rain has left many rivers at low levels unseen for decades, creating problems for river commerce […]
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, 21 December 2012 (AP) – Two types of ice seals joined polar bears Friday on the list of species threatened by the loss of sea ice, which scientists say reached record low levels this year due to climate warming. Ringed seals, the main prey of polar bears, and bearded seals in the Arctic […]
By Emma Whitford 20 December 2012 Despite the hysteria, it’s safe to say that tomorrow’s Mayan Doomsday will end up as nothing but the latest apocalyptic hype. But even after December 21, Earth will hardly be in the clear. While we may have dodged one gigantic, irreversible blow to humanity (for now, at least), various […]
20 December 2012 (Reuters) – Across the United States, the number of hungry and homeless people is growing, and budget fights at the federal level are threatening the aid many need to survive, the U.S. Conference of Mayors said on Thursday. Amidst the holiday season of family feasts and corporate dinners, the mayors released a […]
By Karin Schulze23 December 2012 (SPIEGEL) – A new exhibition in Hamburg seeks to alert people to the dangers of the plastic in our daily lives, painting a stark picture of how it accumulates in the world’s oceans. It reveals how plastic particles can enter into the food chain and return to us through our […]
By Seth Borenstein20 December 2012 WASHINGTON (MSN News) – As 2012 began, winter in the U.S. went AWOL. Spring and summer arrived early with wildfires, blistering heat, and drought. And fall hit the eastern third of the country with the ferocity of Superstorm Sandy. This past year’s weather was deadly, costly and record-breaking everywhere — […]
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 […]
In 2011, Desdemona experienced déjà vu while collecting doom-laden images, but not so this year. Doom has begun to have a certain characteristic look: the record flooding looks the same, whether it’s in the Philippines or Nigeria; spiderwebs coat the flooded landscape in Pakistan and Australia alike. Mega-fires in Siberia and the U.S. West produce […]
Once again, it’s time for the yearly doom retrospectives, and as usual we’re kicking them off with 2012’s most-viewed stories on Desdemona. There were no appalling technogenic disasters in 2012, like Fukushima or the Deepwater Horizon – but Chevron’s K.S. Endeavor rig fire came close – and no story clearly dominated the year’s coverage. Over […]
By Jack Broom and Alexa Vaughn, Seattle Times staff reporter18 December 2012 Following Monday’s highest tides ever recorded in Seattle, which sent waves spilling onto 100 properties in West Seattle, city climate-change watchers say the area could be in for more of the same — or worse — in years to come. “Yesterday’s tide would […]
