Peak Humanitarian Aid: The period during which accelerating climate crises overwhelm the capacity of industrial civilization to handle them. Has this peak arrived, along with the others? The July 2010 flood catastrophe in Pakistan suggests that it has. The United Nations reports that the scale of the flood damage is larger than the combined damage […]
By Heidi Cullen and Claudia TebaldiOctober 27th, 2010 The summer of 2010 brought intensely hot weather to large portions of the northeastern U.S., central Europe, and Russia. Russia was especially hard hit as a heat wave — with daily high temperatures hitting 100°F — contributing to the deaths of as many as 15,000 people in […]
By RUSSELL GOLD And BEN CASSELMANDecember 8, 2010 The oil industry has said the Deepwater Horizon rig catastrophe was a unique event, the result of an unprecedented series of missteps that are unlikely to be repeated. The recent history of offshore drilling suggests otherwise. In the months before and after the rig exploded and sank, […]
By Christopher Buckley; editing by Cynthia OstermanTue Dec 7, 2010 3:23pm EST CANCUN, Mexico (Reuters) – Residents of the Himalayas and other mountain areas face a “tough and unpredictable future” as global warming melts glaciers and threatens worse floods and water loss, officials said during U.N. climate talks on Tuesday. A study said that glaciers […]
CONTACT: Contact EWG Public Affairs 202-667-698212-07-2010 WASHINGTON – For more than thirty years, contamination from high-intensity farming has been adding to the pollution that fouls Chesapeake Bay, one of America’s most storied waterways. A new report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) shows that weakly regulated agricultural practices in the six states of the Chesapeake […]
Average of annual maximum thermal stress, measured in Degree Heating Weeks (DHW), during 1985–2006. Significant coral bleaching was reported during periods with average thermal stress above 0.5°C-weeks, and was especially widespread in 1995, 1998, and 2005. Thermal stress during the 2005 event exceeded any observed from the Caribbean in the prior 20 years, and […]
By Allan Dowd; editing by Peter GallowayThu Dec 2, 2010 5:50pm EST VANCOUVER (Reuters) – The world’s fishing industry is fast running out of new ocean fishing grounds to exploit as it depletes existing areas through unsustainable harvesting practices, according to a study published Thursday. Expansion into unexploited fishing grounds allowed global catches to increase […]
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 […]
Sea surface and air temperature records for the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Sea surface temperature averages for the Gulf of St. Lawrence from May to November, from 1 km2 resolution NOAA AVHRR imagery, are available since 1985 (blue line) and show a 2ºC warming trend between a cooler and a warmer period centered around 1993. […]
By Joe Romm November 26, 2010 We know from simple on-the-ground knowledge that the 2010 drought was extreme, leading to record lows on some major rivers in the Amazon region and an upsurge in the number of forest fires. Preliminary analyses suggest that the 2010 drought was more widespread and severe than the 2005 event. […]
