Of the many important results published during Desdemona’s second year of blogging, one stood out: a BioScience paper titled “Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?” This question is central to the Desdemona Thesis. Essentially, the authors of this paper (Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, et al.) challenge us to reconcile the […]
By lancefreeman76 April 5, 2010 Americans, I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin. If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in […]
By Staff WritersNov 22, 2010 United Nations (AFP) – United Nations leaders will demand “concrete results” from the looming Cancun climate summit as global warming is accelerating, a top UN organizer of the event said Monday. Robert Orr, UN under secretary general for planning, said the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global […]
Honolulu HI (SPX) Nov 23, 2010 – Current state-of-the-art global climate models predict substantial warming in response to increases in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The models, though, disagree widely in the magnitude of the warming we can expect. The disagreement among models is mainly due to the different representation of clouds. Some models […]
By Steve Bradt, Harvard Staff WriterThursday, November 4, 2010 Researchers at Harvard University say America’s obesity epidemic won’t plateau until at least 42 percent of adults are obese, an estimate derived by applying mathematical modeling to 40 years of Framingham Heart Study data. Their work, published this week in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, runs […]
www.underthemountainbunker.wordpress.comNovember 4, 2010 Basically, the 65-and-older crowd rode their rascal scooters to polling places while the under-30 crowd couldn’t be bothered: Only about one in five people under the age of 30 voted in the mid-term elections Tuesday, says a study based on exit polls… Around one million fewer Americans under the age of 30 […]
The so-called summit in Japan won’t stop anyone trashing the planet. Only economic risks seem to make governments act. By George Monbiot, www.guardian.co.uk Monday, 1 November 2010 21.00 GMT ‘Countries join forces to save life on Earth”, the front page of the Independent told us. “Historic”, “a landmark”, a “much-needed morale booster”, the other papers […]
And you, poor creatures.Who conjured you out of the clay?Is God in show business too? Arthur Frayne, Zardoz 19 September 2010 (Desdemona Despair) – One of Desdemona’s guilty pleasures is Zardoz, the much-maligned 1974 film by John Boorman. Desdemona was going to add a comment to last week’s NPR post, but it ballooned into this […]
Alex Doherty: You have written that: “To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one’s own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse.” Even amongst environmentalists it is rare to describe our situation in such apocalyptic terms. Why do you […]
Failure to act on threats to global sustainability brings the world closer to disaster By Jeffrey D. SachsSeptember 2010 Scientific American Magazine With this final column I will transition Sustainable Developments from Scientific American to the home page of the Earth Institute (ww.earth.columbia.edu). Although I will continue to contribute occasional essays to the magazine, I […]
