Blogging the End of the World™
By Greg Botelho15 September 2012 (CNN) – Well before Hurricane Isaac hit Louisiana and brought localized heavy flooding, the weather story of the summer was not about an abundance of water – it was the lack thereof. And it still is. Farmers and residents in 40 states know this all too well, as this summer’s […]
By Richard Gootee14 September 2012 NEW HARMONY, Indiana – The summer’s extreme drought is on track of being one of the nation’s costliest natural disasters since 1980, according to Chris Hurt, a Purdue University agricultural economist. Speaking to nearly 100 area farmers during a breakfast presentation Thursday at the Posey County 4-H Fairgrounds, Hurt said […]
By Joanna Lillis7 September 2012 President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan has upped his rhetoric against neighboring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, warning that their efforts to build hydroelectric power stations on rivers upstream could spark war. Speaking during an official visit to Astana on September 7, Karimov launched a broadside against Bishkek and Dushanbe, which, he said, […]
By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.com20 August 2012 Latin America lost nearly 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 square miles) of forest — an area larger than the state of Oregon — between 2001 and 2010, finds a new study [pdf] that is the first to assess both net forest loss and regrowth across the Caribbean, Central and […]
By Jon Bardin10 September 2012 (Los Angeles Times) – West Nile virus has caused symptoms in at least 1,993 Americans and killed 87 so far this year. And it’s unlikely that this virus, which humans contract from infected mosquitoes, will be getting any less dangerous in the near future. Though the CDC believes that this […]
By Tsuyoshi Inajima, Takashi Hirokawa, and Yuji Okada14 September 2012 Japan plans to scrap atomic power by the end of the 2030s, bowing to public pressure after the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused mass evacuations and left areas north of Tokyo uninhabitable for decades. The country’s first post-Fukushima energy policy approved today by Prime Minister Yoshihiko […]
Futurist Daniel Rirdan’s passionate appeal to save what’s left of Earth’s biosphere: (www.getreal.info) This is the formation of an action-oriented movement with an actual plan to avert an eventual collapse of the various ecosystems and also, indirectly, the manmade world. Also, check out his well-researched book: The Blueprint: Averting Global Collapse. The most important call […]
[This afternoon, Desdemona wondered why the Seattle sunlight again has that orange, hazy cast. Apparently, reports that Typhoon Bolaven extinguished the Siberia wildfires were premature.] Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from Christine Wiedinmyer, Jon Ranson, and Vyacheslav Kharuk. 13 September 2012 The summer of 2012 has proven to be the most severe wildfire season […]
By Michael D. Lemonick 11 September 2012 The official end of the Arctic Ocean melt season could come any time now, but the sea ice that covers the North Polar region has already smashed the previous record low for end-of-summer ice area set in 2007. Back then, a combination of warm temperatures and ice-dispersing winds […]
By Alister Doyle; Editing by Alison Williams11 September 2012 OSLO (Reuters) – The world needs to find the equivalent of the flow of 20 Nile rivers by 2025 to grow enough food to feed a rising population and help avoid conflicts over water scarcity, a group of former leaders said on Monday. Factors such as […]
