Scientists: ‘Look, one-third of the human race has to die for civilization to be sustainable, so how do we want to do this?’

[This is Desdemona’s kind of satire.] WASHINGTON, 26 January 2012 (The Onion) – Saying there’s no way around it at this point, a coalition of scientists announced Thursday that one-third of the world population must die to prevent wide-scale depletion of the planet’s resources—and that humankind needs to figure out immediately how it wants to […]

Last Days, Last Words

[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 […]

‘Doomsday Clock’ moves one minute closer to midnight due to continuing inaction on climate change

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: What’s the probability that man-made global warming will lead to disastrous climate change?

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 […]

Nominations open for 2012 weblog awards

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 […]

50 doomiest images of 2011

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 […]

50 doomiest graphs of 2011

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 […]

50 doomiest stories of 2011

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 news is terrible. Is the world really doomed?

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 […]

Japan’s tsunami debris attracts travelers in new yacht cruise

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 […]

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