31 December 2023 (Desdemona Despair) – The topline story of 2023 must be that it was the hottest year on record (so far). It was the hottest in 174 years of record-keeping where humans have directly measured the temperature of the planet. It was probably the hottest in the last 125,000 years. Tessa Hill, marine […]
30 December 2023 (Desdemona Despair) – 2023 was another year of terrifying climate and ecological disasters, and it was another year of human apathy and futility toward averting the worst outcomes. The din and aggressiveness of antiscience forces, emboldened by successful anti-vaccine disinformation campaigns, reached new levels of delusion and penetration into mainstream society. And […]
By Stephen Trimble 3 September 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – Christopher Nolan believes J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. “By unleashing nuclear power,” the film director concludes, “he gave us the power to destroy ourselves.” Nolan might exaggerate, but Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s hit movie, is surely worthy of the […]
By Lois Parshley 20 July 2023 (The Atlantic) – Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a […]
By Corinne Purtill 18 August 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – You are correct. It is, in fact, extremely unusual to be on hurricane watch in Southern California. If Hurricane Hilary continues on the trajectory forecasters are currently predicting, it will be the first tropical storm to make landfall in California since 1939, and only the second one to do […]
By Lois Parshley 20 July 2023 (The Atlantic) – Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a […]
By David Stanway 11 July 2023 (Reuters) – Sediment deposited at Crawford Lake, a small but deep body of water in Canada’s Ontario province, provides unmistakable evidence that Earth entered a new human-driven geological chapter – the Anthropocene epoch – some seven decades ago, a team of scientists said on Tuesday. The members of the […]
By John Mecklin 24 January 2023 (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) – This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds […]
31 December 2022 (Desdemona Despair) – The year 2022 produced the usual terrible images of abrupt climate change, from record-breaking floods in Australia to drought-stricken refugees in Africa. But 2022 had a new subject for doom imagery: large-scale war in Europe, when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. War in Europe Not since the […]
31 December 2022 (Desdemona Despair) – Like the year 2021, 2022 started with Desdemona obsessively tracking statistics on the Covid pandemic. The incredibly contagious Omicron variant was raging throughout the world, dwarfing the scale of the previous waves. Some of Desdemona’s friends fell ill with the disease. Fortunately, none of them died, because they were […]
