Blogging the End of the World™
7 January 2022 (Buenos Aires Times) – An extreme heatwave is expected to hit Argentina, with experts warning temperatures may soar above 40°C in parts of the provinces of Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Santa Fe, Entre Rios and Santiago del Estero. According to a specialist weather company, some of the aforementioned places could become the hottest […]
By Andrew P. Street 1 January 2022 (Independent Australia) – Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s star-studded Netflix satire about scientists desperately (and unsuccessfully) attempting to warn a jaded and deeply compromised world about the imminent arrival of an extinction-level comet, has already garnered a veritable encyclopedia of hot takes. But as best as I can see, […]
By Ed Yong 7 January 2022 (The Atlantic) – When a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like. Much of what’s wrong happens invisibly. At first, there’s just a lot of waiting. Emergency rooms get so full that “you’ll wait hours and hours, and you may not be able to get surgery when […]
By Sarah Kaplan and Andrew Ba Tran 5 January 2022 (The Washington Post) – 2021 ended as it began: with disaster. Twelve months after an atmospheric river deluged California, triggering mudslides in burned landscapes and leaving a half-million people without power, a late-season wildfire destroyed hundreds of homes in the suburbs of Denver. In between, Americans suffered blistering heat […]
By Alfredo Rivera, Shweta Movalia, Hannah Pitt, and Kate Larsen 23 December 2021 (Rhodium Group) – Understanding annual trends in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a critical input for decision-makers in their efforts to reach net-zero emissions, whether is at the national, state, city, or corporate levels. Tracking emissions of the 190+ Parties to the […]
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, 4 January 2022 (AP) – Puerto Rico on Tuesday imposed new measures to fight a surge in COVID-19 cases that has overwhelmed medical staff in the U.S. territory and led to temporary shortages of testing kits. All private businesses that cater to the public must close from midnight to 5 a.m., […]
By Will Sommer 7 January 2022 (The Daily Beast) – A leading QAnon promoter who urged both her followers and strangers she passed on the street not to take the COVID vaccine died Thursday of the coronavirus, making her just the latest vaccine opponent killed by the disease. Cirsten Weldon had amassed tens of thousands […]
5 January 2022 (PROMICE) – GEUS and PROMICE professor Jason Box recently made the front page in Danish national media with testimony of algal blooms and rain on the Greenland ice sheet. PROMICE field work helps quantify the ice algae blooms and their effect on melting. In Autumn 2021, Professor Jason Box and two PROMICE […]
By Raf Casert 6 January 2022 BRUSSELS (AP) – Europe’s sky is filling up with near-empty polluting planes that serve little other purpose than safeguarding airlines’ valuable time slots at some of the world’s most important airports. The highly contagious omicron variant of COVID-19 has put many off flying, and because of it, getting people and goods […]
By Lila Seidman 4 January 2022 (Los Angeles Times) – One of Parsia Jahanbani’s biggest fears was realized when a man calling healthcare workers “murderers” attacked him and other staff members outside a mobile vaccine clinic in Tustin last week, he said. [For context, see Desdemona’s post, Covid and the war on medical expertise. –Des] […]
