31 December 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – In 2019, the climate data show Earth’s climate system unraveling mostly as predicted, although faster than expected by some. But the really scary chart was penned by none other than the President of the United States himself. Trump would not be gainsayed by the National Weather Service and insisted […]
31 December 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – Australia is on the front line of global warming, so it’s perhaps no surprise that many of the doomiest images of 2019 capture climate catastrophes in Australia, from flooding to bushfires. But 2019 was also the year that educated young people mobilized to push back against inaction on climate […]
By Jonathan Franzen 8 September 2019 (The New Yorker) – “There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our […]
By Caitlin Johnstone 27 March 2019 (Medium) – All the old ideas for uprooting the status quo have failed. I point this out not to depress people, but to persuade them to stop twisting on locked doorknobs. The old ideas don’t work, so we need new ones. The political process has failed. Capitalism has failed. […]
By Blanche Verlie 14 March 2019 (The Conversation) – Today, at least 50 rallies planned across Australia are expected to draw thousands of students who are walking out of school to protest climate change inaction. These Australian students join children from over 82 countries who are striking to highlight systemic failure to address climate change. […]
By Zing Tsjeng 27 February 2019 (Vice) – What if I told you there was a paper on climate change that was so uniquely catastrophic, so perspective-altering, and so absolutely depressing that it’s sent people to support groups and encouraged them to quit their jobs and move to the countryside? Good news: there is. It’s […]
18 February 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – Blogger, the venerable blogging platform, has been Desdemona’s home since the first post, in November 2008: Rising CO2 accelerates coral bleaching. Blogger has been a good and faithful host of Desdemona’s content for more than ten years. But due to a confluence of technical issues, Desdemona has decided that […]
By David Wallace-Wells 2 February 2019 (The Guardian) – I have never been an environmentalist. I don’t even think of myself as a nature person. I’ve lived my whole life in cities, enjoying gadgets built by industrial supply chains I hardly think twice about. I’ve never gone camping, not willingly anyway, and while I always […]
1 January 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – Nothing captured the madness of 2018 better than the record-breaking California fire season. Along with the fire tornado near Redding and the incineration of Paradise, the global trend toward burn-it-all populism and political dissolution felt like a conflagration consuming the world. White supremacists stalked people of color in east […]
31 December 2018 (Desdemona Despair) – At the end of every year since 2010, Des reviews all of the year’s posts and picks a few that are the “doomiest”. Because there are nearly 1,000 posts in a typical year, this is a time-intensive – and depressing – project. In November 2018, after trolling through all […]
