30 November 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Nearly 150 leaders of 195 countries met today in Paris for the COP21 U.N. climate change conference. It’s the largest climate conference in history and the largest conference ever held in France. Yesterday, more than 700,000 people marched in climate change protests in 175 countries. Longtime Desdemona readers will […]
29 November 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – The COP21 climate conference starts tomorrow, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it will define the human response to abrupt, anthropogenic climate change for decades. Will the world do what’s necessary to minimize the slow-motion technogenic catastrophe that we call “global warming”? Follow the action as it happens: […]
By Juliette Jowit8 November 2015 (The Guardian) – Europe has to step up its effort to combat climate change and wake up to the urgency of the situation, the climate change expert Lord Stern has said before crunch UN talks in Paris. Europeans need to end subsidies for fossil fuels, multiply energy efficiency efforts, improve […]
19 November 2015 (IRIN) – Alarm bells are ringing for a food emergency in Ethiopia. The UN says 15 million people will need help over the coming months. The government, wary of stigma and therefore hesitant to ask for help, has nevertheless said more than eight million Ethiopians need food assistance. Extra imports to stem […]
29 November 2015 (Al Jazeera) – Police have fired teargas and used pepper spray to disperse a group of anti-global warming activists who marched in Paris in defiance of a recent ban on public demonstrations, a day before the start of a key UN summit on climate change in France’s capital. The tough response […]
By Alan Neuhauser 18 November 2015 (U.S. News) – As President Barack Obama and world leaders build momentum toward an international climate agreement next month in Paris, Republican lawmakers are digging in their heels deeper than ever. GOP Senators on Tuesday night voted 52-46 in two largely symbolic, mostly party-line votes to scuttle Obama’s […]
By Matt McGrath 27 November 2015 (BBC News) – Public support for a strong global deal on climate change has declined, according to a poll carried out in 20 countries. Only four now have majorities in favour of their governments setting ambitious targets at a global conference in Paris. In a similar poll before the […]
23 November 2015 – A new report issued today by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) shows that over the last 20 years, 90 per cent of major disasters have been caused by 6,457 recorded floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts and other weather-related events. The report, titled The Human Cost of Weather Related […]
28 October 2015 (UNHCR) – In late 2014, four members of a brutal street gang abducted Norma and took her to a cemetery nearby her home in El Salvador. Three of the four then raped her. She believes she was targeted because she was married to a police officer. “They took their turns … they […]
By Ben Doherty 11 October 2015 (The Guardian) – Two dozen people have already died from hunger and drinking contaminated water in drought-stricken Papua New Guinea, but the looming El Niño crisis could leave more than four million people across the Pacific without enough food or clean water. The El Niño weather pattern – when […]
