Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Worst drought in 60 years brings starvation fears to East Africa

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com30 June 2011 A prolonged drought in East Africa is bringing many of the region’s impoverished to their knees: the World Food Program (WFP) is warning that 10 million people in the region are facing severe shortages. While not dubbed a famine yet, experts say it could become one. Meanwhile, a recent […]

Video: Los Alamos Fire Chief: ‘We have seen fire behavior we have never seen down here and it’s really aggressive’ – Even burn scars are burning

June 30 (KOAT) – The Las Conchas Fire is now estimated to be 92,735 acres and a 1/2 of a mile from the closest home. Evacuations Still In Place, Fire Chief Says Technorati Tags: wildfire,forest fire,North America,drought,heat wave,global warming,climate change

Beyond Japan’s Fukushima exclusion zone, children don’t play outside

By Peter Ford, Staff writer, Christian Science Monitor27 June 2011 Ichiro Monakata sits at a small table in his cramped and dusty village store and swats flies all day. Sometimes, for a change, he goes into a backroom to watch the daytime soaps on his television. “You can see nobody comes here,” he laughs ruefully. […]

Report: 25 years since global surface temperature was below average – ‘Unmistakable signal’ of global warming

WASHINGTON, June 28 (MSNBC) – It’s been more than 300 months since the average global average temperature was below average, scientists and the U.S. government said in the annual State of the Climate report released Tuesday. The experts tracked 41 climate indicators during 2010, four more than in the previous year, and “they all show […]

New Mexico fire soon to be largest in state history

By P. SOLOMON BANDA and SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN, Associated Press30 June 2011 LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) – A wildfire that is threatening the nation’s premier nuclear weapons laboratory and a community in northern New Mexico is poised to become the largest fire in state history. The fire near Los Alamos has charred nearly 145 square […]

Jellyfish keep UK nuclear plant shut

By Karolin Schaps; editing by Jason Neely29 Jun 2011 (Reuters) – An invasion of jellyfish into a cooling water pool at a Scottish nuclear power plant kept its nuclear reactors offline on Wednesday, a phenomenon which may grow more common in future, scientists said. Two reactors at EDF Energy’s Torness nuclear power plant on the […]

Feds: All of drought-stricken Texas declared a disaster area

By BETSY BLANEY, Associated Press 28 June 2011 LUBBOCK, Texas — West Texas farmer Billy Brown remembers the devastating drought that spanned the state in the 1950s — and believes this one is worse. […] “The grass just crackles underneath the feet,” Brown, 72, said of walking across his acreage in the town of Panhandle […]

Court hands big victory to Georgia in tri-state water war

By LAWRENCE HURLEY AND PAUL QUINLAN of Greenwire29 June 2011 A federal appeals court handed Georgia an enormous victory in long-running, tri-state water litigation yesterday, overturning a decision by a federal judge that could have sharply curtailed the availability of water in Atlanta beginning next summer. The three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit […]

Ten existential threats to global agriculture

By Steve Savage27 June 2011 I tend to be a “glass half full” sort of person, particularly about the prospects of successfully feeding the 9-10 billion people we expect by 2050.  My optimism is based on daily contact with the innovative public and private entities who develop technology for agriculture.  It is also based on […]

Climate change could double flood risk to central Russia: Emergencies Ministry

MOSCOW, June 29 (RIA Novosti) – The volume of annual runoff of almost all of Russia’s rivers will be substantially affected by global climate change, the Emergencies Ministry’s Natural Disaster Center said on Wednesday. “Owing to the expected shifts in temperature and rainfall amounts, the annual runoff of rivers located in the Central and the […]

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