Mainly bad news

A few things our new government largely ignores*

Total disaster: "Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago. [...] The loss of biodiversity compounds poverty. Destroy your nature and you increase poverty and insecurity."

Big coal gets bigger: a bet that there will be no serious cost placed on carbon emissions.

Mangrove losses worse than thought. Less than 7% of remaining mangroves are protected.

Antarctica ought to be World Heritage listed.

Conservative conservation in the UK: a false dawn?

Mackerel wars: and Mackerel are often considered something a "success story" in the prevention of overfishing.

Scientists claim almost 80% of Gulf spill is still in the water, contradicting the government claim that most has been skimmed, burned, collected, evaporated or digested by microbes. See also here.

Corals dying: coral reefs are among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. Rising ocean temperatures, falling oxygen levels, rising acidity, falling fisheries, rising plastics - the bad news is pretty bad for corals.

Consumerism means "Earth Overshoot Day" arrives earlier every year. This year, the date on which we use all the resources that can be replenished in a year will be 27th September.

Desertification: "An area the size of Greece, or of Nepal, is lost every year to desertification and soil erosion, the world body said, equivalent to $42-billion in annual income."

The wake-up call: when my alarm goes, I usually hit snooze and roll over.

Now here's one biofuel I can get behind: made from whisky byproducts, it reduces the ecological footprint of water of life by reusing waste materials.

A small piece of "good" news: plummeting levels of phytoplankton might inhibit hurricane formation.

Priceless collection of crop biodiversity "saved" by Twitter. I'm not entirely sure whether this is good news (Russians are considering a halt to gross stupidity) or bad news (it took Twitter to achieve this).
*This post was scheduled a few days ago and this claim is more or less true on either outcome.

Link love

John wonders whether it might not be better to start a sermon with application.

Failure to understand Black Swans leads to fallacious thinking (Black Swans are the low probability, high impact events that are excluded by most forecasting models).

"12 million hectares of arable land – roughly the size of Greece or Nepal, enough to harvest 20 million tonnes of grain and feed six million people per annum – are lost to desertification each year."

Painting your roof white to cool the planet. Crazy? Not entirely.

Jason ponders forgiveness and eucharist with Williams and loneliness and prayer with Stringfellow.

Sisyphus revisited.

The Jordan river is too polluted for baptisms. The Nile isn't looking so great either.

Climate science in 1979.