Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

How will global warming negatively affect water supplies in the U.S.?

By Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss 15 January 2012 Q: How is it that global warming could negatively impact water supplies in the U.S.? Climate change promises to have a very big impact on water supplies in the United States as well as around the world. A recent study commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense […]

The Limits to Growth at forty: Is collapse now inevitable?

By Mícheál O’Callaghan18 January 2012 Forty years ago, a group of Scientists investigated what the world would look like if we continued on our path of exponential economic growth, with a continued growth in population, pollution and industry. The study resulted in the publishing of the eye opening book, The Limits to Growth, which would […]

Graph of the Day: Area Covered by Temperature Anomalies, 1900-2010

By J. Hansen, M. Sato, and R. Ruedy10 November 2011 Abstract: The “climate dice” describing the chance of an unusually warm or cool season, relative to the climatology of 1951-1980, have progressively become more “loaded” during the past 30 years, coincident with increased global warming. The most dramatic and important change of the climate dice […]

Sea level rise from global warming poses big threat to Washington, D.C.

By Andrew Freedman17 January 2012 Global warming-related sea level rise constitutes a major threat to the nation’s capital, with the potential to inundate national monuments, museums, military bases, and parts of the Metro Rail system during the next several decades and beyond, according to a recent study published in the journal Risk Analysis. The study […]

China report spells out ‘extremely grim’ climate change risks

By Chris Buckley; Editing by David Fogarty17 January 2012 BEIJING (Reuters) – Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods, says the government’s latest assessment of climate change, projecting big shifts in how the nation feeds itself. The warnings are carried in the government’s “Second […]

Risk of extreme climate events is largely underestimated: statisticians

By Nicolas Guérin, Mediacom18 January 2012 EPFL mathematicians have shown that the risk of extreme climate events is largely underestimated. They are developing a model for better understanding the impact of climate change. Remember the 2003 heat wave? According to the standard weather models, it was impossible. Mathematicians from EPFL’s Chair of Statistics, however, say […]

Nearly 7 million bats may have died from white-nose fungus – ‘Regional extinction of multiple species’

By Darryl Fears17 January 2012 More than five years since the deadly white-nose fungus was first detected in a New York cave where bats hibernate, up to 6.7 million of the animals are estimated to have died in 16 states and Canada, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday. The estimate, drawn from surveys […]

Canada government didn’t disclose radioactive iodine in rainwater

By ALEX ROSLIN, The Montreal Gazette14 January 2012 After the Fukushima nuclear accident, Canadian health officials assured a nervous public that virtually no radioactive fallout had drifted to Canada. But last March, a Health Canada monitoring station in Calgary detected an average of 8.18 becquerels per litre of radioactive iodine (an isotope released by the […]

U.N. report: World economy is on the brink of another major downturn

[Executive Summary pdf] The world economy is on the brink of another major downturn. Global economic growth started to decelerate on a broad front in mid-2011 and is estimated to have averaged 2.8 per cent over the last year. This economic slowdown is expected to continue into 2012 and 2013. The United Nations baseline forecast […]

Russia warming at twice the global rate

Moscow, January 17 (IANS/RIA Novosti) – Temperatures in Russia in the past century rose at twice the rate of warming in the rest of the world, the emergencies ministry said. “Despite ongoing discussions in the scientific community about the nature and long-term outlook for global climate change, the fact of global warming itself is uncontroversial,” […]

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial