Blogging the End of the World™
By Joanna Dodder Nellans, The Daily Courier7/1/2011 June tied the record for being the driest June in recorded history for Prescott, since no rain fell all month. While June traditionally is the driest month of the year, the average precipitation over the past 113 years is 0.39 inches at the official National Weather Service measuring […]
By ERIC TALMADGE and MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press1 July 2011 FUKUSHIMA, Japan – When Unit 2 began to shake, Hiroyuki Kohno’s first hunch was that something was wrong with the turbines. He paused for a moment, then went back to logging the day’s radioactivity readings. He expected it to pass. Until the shakes became jolts. […]
Annual lobbying money spent by the Oil & Gas industry in the U.S., 1998-2010. The highest spending level was in 2009, with a total of $175,414,820, outpacing pro-environmental groups by nearly eight-fold. 2009 Total for Oil & Gas: $175,414,820Total Number of Clients Reported: 197 Total Number of Lobbyists Reported: 805 Total Number of Revolvers: 508 […]
By Stephan Nielsen1 July 2011 SAO PAULO – Deforestation rates in the Amazon, the world’s biggest rain forest, more than doubled in May as Brazilian farmers become more confident they’ll be granted amnesty for illegal logging. Almost 268 square kilometers (66,200 acres) of protected rain forest were cut down in May, up from 110 square […]
By Matt Mushalik30 June 2011 Still looking for a 2nd Sydney airport? Want to spend millions on consultants? You can have it easier than that. Find out about the latest peak oil ignorant airport project by just typing 3 words on the internet: “Ciudad Real Airport”, formerly known as Don Quijote or Madrid South Airport, […]
(CBS) This story was first published on Oct. 21, 2007. It was updated on Sept. 3, 2009. […] 60 Minutes joined up with Tom Boatner, who after 30 years on the fire line, became chief of fire operations for the federal government. “A fire of this size and this intensity in this country would have […]
By Brandon Keim June 30, 2011 The plants and animals of the southwestern United States are adapted to fire, but not to the sort of super-sized, super-intense fires now raging in Arizona. The product of drought and human mismanagement, these so-called megafires may change the southwest’s ecology. Mountainside Ponderosa forests could be erased, possibly forever. […]
[Sadly, the folks at Serengeti Watch were right: The road will be built anyway. From their Stop the Serengeti Highway Facebook page: “AS PREDICTED OUR WORK IS NOT OVER! ‘Construction of a road across Serengeti will go on as planned but the government says more than 120 kilometres cutting across world famous park will not […]
[This one’s for Gail.] ScienceDaily (June 30, 2011) – Ground-level ozone is an air pollutant that harms humans and plants. Both climate and weather play a major role in ozone damage to plants. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have now shown that climate change has the potential to significantly increase the risk of […]
By Pete Wilton June 28, 2011 Half the elephants from West and Central African savannahs have vanished in the past 40 years, scientists report in PLoS One. A team, including Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, estimate that around 7,750 elephants remain in the Sudano-Sahelian zone, which covers 20% of the continent, a […]
