The future of life on Earth? Stromatolites growing in Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, Shark Bay in Western Australia. By Jim Galasyn18 January 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – Humans are collecting more biogeophysical data than ever, leading to a potential paradox: are we finally getting the data we need to manage the world, only to find […]
Climate change brings world closer to ‘doomsday’, say scientists 2015 was the year that saw the biosphere visibly start to come apart, in many cases much sooner than scientists have predicted. Some people noticed; a new blog appeared in 2015, named “Faster Than Expected”: Search for “faster than expected” in your favorite search engine and […]
Number of years of phytomass food potentially available to feed the global human population. Graphic: Schramski, et al., 2015 / PNAS Each year, picking the doomiest graphs gets progressively more difficult as the count approaches 50 – so much doom data, so little space. Usually, picking the doomiest graph taxes Desdemona’s brain too much, but […]
Drought, forest fires, and rapidly declining oceans; floods, pollution, and mass wildlife mortality: 2015 had it all, as the global phase transitions to unfavorable biogeochemical states accelerated. This year’s photos showed oceans on their way to a euxinic Canfield state, as toxic algae blooms and dead zones appeared globally. And there were lots of photos […]
By Melanie Randle 11 October 2015 (The Conversation) – A new, four-nation study has found people rate the risks of global threats to humanity surprisingly high. These perceptions are likely to be important, socially and politically, in shaping how humanity responds to the threats. The study, of more than 2000 people in the US, UK, […]
7 April 2015 (CIVILIZATION) – The enormous cognitive dissonance between our growing awareness of our civilization’s accelerating collapse, and the ‘news’ in the media and the subjects of most public discourse, continues to baffle me. Though I suspect it shouldn’t. We are all slow learners, preoccupied with the needs of the moment, with a preference […]
(The Misanthropocene) – […] We know more and more in deeper and deeper ways just how screwed we are ecologically. And yet we continue on, dig our heels in and argue that at least some human comfort is reasonable while we watch the world burn. Right? But we’re killing ourselves off in other ways, too. […]
Desdemona defines “the end of the world” as the destruction of the biosphere in which humans evolved. Conversely, “saving the world” would mean preserving at least some of the original biosphere. The human impulse for acquisitiveness drives the accelerating destruction. As the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) observed, “our planet is constantly losing […]
Extreme weather events dominated doom imagery in 2014. The California mega-drought was the big global warming story; assorted record flooding in various locations punctuated the background. The Philippines endured another brutal typhoon season, and Alaska experienced its most powerful storm on record. The usual Desdemona stories rolled on, as humans continued to destroy the natural […]
From charismatic megafauna to insect pollinators, 2014 was a bad year for wildlife. The London Zoological Society updated the Living Planet Index and found that during the 40 years from 1970 to 2010, more than half of vertebrate species, and more than three-quarters of freshwater species, met their end. Stanford biology professor Rodolfo Dirzo calls […]
