[Here’s a Desdemona-approved doom essay, via Guy McPherson.] By John Rember14 January 2012 […] I’ve decided it’s better to be an honest observer of a dark world than to make up cheery lies for people desperate to spend their lives in culturally-prescribed illusion. If I wanted to make up lies I would have gone into […]
CONTACT: Patrick Mitchell, (703) 276-3266, or pmitchell@hastingsgroup.com10 January 2012 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Faced with inadequate progress on nuclear weapons reduction and proliferation, and continuing inaction on climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) announced today that it has moved the hands of its famous “Doomsday Clock” to five minutes to midnight. The last […]
Tamino poses the question: What’s the chance that if we continue with business-as-usual, man-made global warming will lead to disastrous climate change? It isn’t zero. It isn’t one. What is epsilon? Although one could quibble with the assumption that it isn’t 1 – why wouldn’t it be? – here’s what Des wrote in comments: Assumptions […]
Game on, Desdemona readers. If you’d like to nominate Desdemona Despair, please scroll down to “Best Science or Technology Weblog” and add “Desdemona Despair” and “https://desdemonadespair.net//////” in the two conjoined text boxes. Add two other scientifical blogs of your choice, perhaps from the “Des Links” list to the right. Then scroll down to the bottom […]
While collecting doom-laden images for 2011, Desdemona experienced a bit of déjà vu: another year of record flooding in the Philippines, and another year of record flooding in Pakistan. The Texas drought stretched on through all of 2011, causing record agricultural losses and depopulating the center of the state. Again, record-breaking wildfires swept through North […]
2011 saw a spike in climate disasters around the world, with a corresponding spike in global food prices. It’s no exaggeration to attribute the “Arab Spring” to widespread food insecurity caused by rapidly changing climate. The human perturbation to the carbon cycle increased to nearly 9 gigatons per year, in spite of the global financial […]
Here are 2011’s most profoundly doom-laden stories, chosen arbitrarily by Des. Last year, this feature was The Twelve Doomiest Stories of 2010, to evoke “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, but twelve stories just aren’t enough to capture the zeitgeist of doom that permeated the year. Nuclear meltdowns at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant and the resulting […]
The economy’s bust, the climate’s on the brink and even the arts are full of gloom. Has there ever been an era so bleak? By Andy Beckettm www.guardian.co.uk 18 December 2011 It is a crisp bright winter morning, but in a windowless basement gallery at Tate Britain, minutes after opening time, there is already quite […]
December 16 (Maritime Executive) – At the end of October, the STS Pallada discovered a 20-million-ton mass of tsunami debris from the mega 9.0 magnitude earthquake off Sendai, Japan in March. Since this discovery, scientists have been studying, and tracking the contents of the giant floating mass, and now, they are inviting the public on […]
By Steve Connor14 December 2011 Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head […]
