A photograph of a farmer showing his affected plot due to drought in Karnataka, India, 2012.
There is an often stated concern among some of us that climate change will "destroy the planet." That's not quite accurate. The planet will be fine, the Earth has survived huge asteroid impacts and chains of vast, super volcanoes that could boil the Mediterranean. It's the
surface that is affected by human activity and the only real problem is, that's the
part we inhabit:
Global warming caused by human emissions has most likely intensified the drought in California by 15 to 20 percent, scientists said on Thursday, warning that future dry spells in the state are almost certain to be worse than this one as the world continues to heat up. ...
“This would be a drought no matter what,” said A. Park Williams, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the lead author of a paper published by the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “It would be a fairly bad drought no matter what. But it’s definitely made worse by global warming.”
- Maybe the economy is improving slightly. At least this week, I'm enjoying the first paid vacation I've had in years ... although getting online long enough to file this post on the shitty hotel network my fellow guests and I have been saddled with was "challenging" to say the least.
- Cassini is not long for this world, for soon it will be part of another, larger one: the probe will end its historic decade long mission in 2017 with a dramatic dive into Saturn's thick golden cloud tops. But it took a beautiful good-bye pic of Dione, one of Saturn's many sparkling, icy moons.
- Technology marches on! Speaking of which, your best bet for not getting caught with your virtual pants down by hackers of a cheating website isn't prayer after the fact, for God's sake. You'd think self-appointed moral scolds, the kind who trumpet that the best way to avoid an unplanned teen pregnancy is to not have intercourse, would readily grasp that their best bet to avoid a highly publicized, awkward moment is to not frequent that kind of online community:
“Anna will not leave him," the source claimed. "As with her in-laws, she is turning more to her faith than ever. She and Josh are probably praying around the clock right now, I would assume."
- We're number one!
If you’re looking for the world’s top "superpredator," look no further than your own reflection. A new study that examined more than 2,000 predator-prey interactions in populations around the globe has found that humans don’t only kill top carnivores at a rate far higher than all other top predators combined, but that our particular hunting behaviors are so devastating to species on land and sea that they challenge these populations’ ability to recover and alter their evolution.