Scientists move Doomsday Clock ahead by 30 seconds, closest to apocalypse since 1953 – “As of today, it is two minutes to midnight”

By Lindsey Bever, Sarah Kaplan, and Abby Ohlheiser 25 January 2018(The Washington Post) – Alexa, what time is the apocalypse?Ulp.The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the symbolic Doomsday Clock a notch closer to the end of humanity Thursday, moving it ahead by 30 seconds after what the organization called a “grim assessment” of the […]

50 doomiest stories of 2017

A man burns old palm fruit from a palm oil plantation in Cameroon. Photo: Go Forth FilmsThe big stories of 2017 clustered into five categories: Donald Trump and the capture of the U.S. government by fossil fuel interests; The destruction of Puerto Rico and its subsequent abandonment by the U.S. government [UPDATE: not quite abandoned […]

50 doomiest images of 2017

31 December 2017 (Desdemona Despair) – This photo, by Hal Bernton of The Seattle Times, captures the zeitgeist of 2017: humans blithely golfing while their immediate environment burns. Behind the golfers, the Eagle Creek Fire rages on both sides of the Columbia River Gorge, in Washington and Oregon, on 4 September 2017.You might think this […]

50 doomiest graphs of 2017

23 December 2017 (Desdemona Despair) – In 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a dire “warning to humanity”: Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at […]

Gary Numan: How Trump’s “stupidity” on climate change became my twisted inspiration

By Gary Numan 4 September 17 (The Daily Beast) – Usually when I write songs, I use whatever recent turmoil there has been in my life as the source of inspiration. I’m the first to admit I have no talent for happy or uplifting songs, but I can turn out tunes to darker things with […]

The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition

By David Wallace-Wells14 July 2017(New York Magazine) – We published “The Uninhabitable Earth” on Sunday night, and the response since has been extraordinary — both in volume (it is already the most-read article in New York Magazine’s history) and in kind. Within hours, the article spawned a fleet of commentary across newspapers, magazines, blogs, and […]

Arks of the Apocalypse: All around the world, scientists are building repositories of everything from seeds to corals to mammal milk

By Malia Wollan 18 July 2017 (The New York Times) — It was a freakishly warm evening last October when a maintenance worker first discovered the water — torrents of it, rushing into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug some 400 feet into the side of a mountain […]

Stephen Hawking says Trump’s climate denial could damage Earth – “We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible”

By Pallab Ghosh 2 July 2017 (BBC News) – Stephen Hawking says that US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement could lead to irreversible climate change. Prof Hawking said the action could put Earth onto a path that turns it into a hothouse planet like Venus.He also feared aggression […]

“A reckoning for our species”: Timothy Morton, the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene

15 June 2017 (The Guardian) – A few years ago, Björk began corresponding with a philosopher whose books she admired. “hi timothy,” her first message to him began. “i wanted to write this letter for a long time.” She was trying to give a name to her own singular genre, to label her work for […]

Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts – “This is supposed to last for eternity”

By Damian Carrington19 May 2017 (The Guardian) – It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures […]

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