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 world assiduously: poaching rates of charismatic megafauna, like African elephants and rhinos, skyrocketed, leaving both species with only a few years to extinction; overfishing accelerated to the point that even Japan called for a 50% reduction in bluefin tuna catch (too little, too late); poachers continued to take huge quantities of endangered sea turtle eggs, one year after the murder of turtle conservation activist Jairo Mora.
The most surprising image of 2014 came with the discovery of large craters in the Yamal peninsula in Siberia, caused by sudden releases of methane as the permafrost thaws and collapses. This image captures a bit of the profound change that humans have precipitated in the great biogeochemical cycles of the planet, to the doom of all.
Check out Desdemona’s doomiest posts of previous years:
2013 doomiest graphs, images, and stories
2012 doomiest graphs, images, and stories
2011 doomiest graphs, images, and stories
2010 doomiest graphs, images, and stories
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HURON, California, 30 May 2014 (Los Angeles Times) – The two fieldworkers scraped hoes over weeds that weren't there.
"Let us pretend we see many weeds," Francisco Galvez told his friend Rafael. That way, maybe they'd get a full week's work. […]
The slowly unfurling disaster of California's drought is catching up to him. Each day more families are leaving for Salinas, Arizona, Washington — anywhere they heard there were jobs.
Even in years when rain falls and the Sierra mountains hold a snowpack that will water almonds and onions, cattle and cantaloupes, Huron's population swells and withers with the season.
These days in Huron — and Mendota and Wasco and Firebagh and all the other farmworker communities on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley — even the permanent populations are packing up.
"The house across the street from us — they all left yesterday," Galvez said. "Maybe this town won't be here anymore?" […]
Huron already whispered of the ghost town it could soon be: It has a $2-million deficit. Only about 1,000 people in a town with a permanent population of 7,000 are registered to vote, and of those, only some 200 actually do. No one has declared for the two open City Council seats — including the incumbents. Each week at school, Galvez's children have fewer classmates.
California drought yields only desperation – ‘It’s going to get worse. They’re not planting. Think what it will be like at harvest.’
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The bed of the Almaden Reservoir in San Jose was cracked-dry in early February. By the end of April 2014, 100 percent of the state of California was in a drought. Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
Drought worsens in western U.S. – All of California now in drought, cost estimated to be at least $7.48 billion
California drought: 17 communities at risk of running dry
Why California could run out of water in two years if the drought continues – ‘Pray for rain’
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Folsom Lake, 20 June 2011
Folsom Lake, 16 January 2014
25 February 2014 (NBC News) – Northern California's Folsom Lake on 16 January 2014.
The reservoir, 25 miles northeast of Sacramento, has shrunk from 97 percent capacity in 2011, to just 17 percent capacity this past January, according to a news release from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR).
NASA is combining forces with DWR to combat and understand future droughts.
Image of the Day: Folsom Lake at 17 percent of capacity, 16 January 2014
Photo gallery: Drought in California
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Cachuma Lake, the source of drinking water for 200,000 people on the southern coast of Santa Barbara County, California, is disappearing. In the past, rain would always come to the rescue. But that’s not on the horizon now. This map shows land areas exposed in 2013 by California's record drought. Graphic: Los Angeles Times
Record drought withers California’s Cachuma Lake
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Image of the Day: California’s Folsom Lake reservoir before and during record drought
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Jaguari Reservoir, 16 August 2013
Jaguari Reservoir, 3 August 2014
23 October 2014 (NASA) – Southeastern Brazil is suffering through one of its worst droughts in decades. The situation is worst near the city of São Paulo (home to about 20 million people) and in São Paulo state. Rainfall totals for the year are 300 to 400 millimeters (12 to 16 inches) below normal, and reservoirs have dwindled to 3 to 5 percent of storage capacity.
The Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite acquired these two natural-color views of the Jaguari Reservoir in Brazil. The bottom image shows the area on 3 August 2014 (the most recent cloud-free view of Jaguari); the top image shows the same area on 16 August 2013, before the recent drought began. Jaguari is one of five reservoirs in the Cantareira System, which supplies water to roughly half of the people in the São Paulo metropolitan area.
The largest city in Brazil is running dangerously low on water – São Paulo reservoirs at less than 5 percent of capacity, 13 million people face water outages
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A Sao Paulo state worker stands next to water markers at Jaguari dam, 100km from Sao Paulo, 28 October 2014. Photo: Reuters
Biggest Brazil metro area desperate for water – ‘If deforestation in the Amazon continues, São Paulo will probably dry up’
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A resident looks out of her apartment in a building painted with a drought-related mural, painted by Brazilian artist Mundano, depicting a man getting water from a cactus plant, in Sao Paulo, 25 November 2014. Photo: Nacho Doce / Reuters
São Paulo taps emergency water reserves which may last for two months – ‘If it doesn’t rain, we won’t have an alternative but to get water from the mud’
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4 March 2014 (Climate Progress) – The Iditarod, the annual sled-dog race across 975 miles of Alaska, started in earnest on Sunday. While much of the local buzz is on whether the usual strong slate of Alaskan mushers can hold off the Norwegians, much of the attention has turned to how the race will be affected by the warm weather Alaska experienced earlier this year.
“It’s a minefield out there,” said former Yukon Quest champion Hugh Neff. “It’s the roughest I’ve ever seen,” said Jeff King, a 22-time race finisher. Aliy Zirkle reported “No snow. Zip. Zero. None.” Many suffered crashes, busted knees, bruises, and sprained ankles. Several are out of the race already.
The abnormally warm weather melted snow in Alaska, which made a return toward more normal cooler temperatures in much of February create a different kind of dangerous condition: ice, and hard debris.
“The problem has been frequent mild days, which have been knocking down the snowcover,” said AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Jack Boston.
Warm winter turns Iditarod trail into ‘minefield’ with ‘no snow’
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Researcher Claude Duguay stands on the cracked ice of an Arctic lake. Arctic lakes have been freezing up later in the year and thawing earlier, creating a winter ice season about 24 days shorter than it was in 1950, a University of Waterloo study has found. Photo: Claude Duguay / University of Waterloo
Global warming cuts winter ice season by 24 days, thinning Arctic lake ice – ‘We were stunned to observe such a dramatic ice decline during a period of only 20 years’
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6 April 2014 (The Siberian Times) – The past week saw record warm weather in western Siberian cities including Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Kemerovo, Barnaul, and Gorno-Altaisk.
Natural Resources Minister Sergei Donskoi warned a conference chaired by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev: “The forest fire situation is tense in Russia this year. Due to a shortage of precipitation the forest fire season has begun almost one and a half months ahead of the norm.”
By 2 April, 17 forest fires had been registered across 2,000 hectares. Among the areas now at risk after a faster-than-usual snow melt are the south of Siberia to the territory of the Far Eastern Federal District, to Baikal and the Amur regions.
“It was the hottest April 1 on record for several western Siberian cities, including Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Kemerovo, Barnaul, and Gorno-Altaysk,' said Renad Yagudin, of the Novosibirsk meteorological service. 'The average temperature in Russia increased 0.4 degrees every ten years. Overall, the temperature in the area is 6.5-16.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2-9 Celsius) higher than the record set in 1989.”
Some parts of Russia have shown even more extreme warming. In the Arctic, south Chukotka and Kamchatka regions temperatures rose 150 to 200 per cent more than in the rest of the country, reported RIA Novosti.
Forest fires arrive early as Siberia sees record high temperatures – ‘Due to a shortage of precipitation the forest fire season has begun almost one and a half months ahead of the norm’
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska, 30 September 2014 (Associated Press) – Pacific walrus that can't find sea ice for resting in Arctic waters are coming ashore in record numbers on a beach in northwest Alaska.
An estimated 35,000 walrus were photographed Saturday about 5 miles north of Point Lay, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The gathering of walrus on shore is a phenomenon that has accompanied the loss of summer sea ice as the climate has warmed.
Pacific walrus spend winters in the Bering Sea. Females give birth on sea ice and use ice as a diving platform to reach snails, clams and worms on the shallow continental shelf.
Unlike seals, walrus cannot swim indefinitely and must rest. They use their tusks to "haul out," or pull themselves onto ice or rocks.
In recent years, sea ice has receded north beyond shallow continental shelf waters and into Arctic Ocean water, where depths exceed 2 miles and walrus cannot dive to the bottom.
Image of the Day: 35,000 walrus haul out in northwest Alaska
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A man watches fires burn out of control in Valparaiso on Saturday, 12 April 2014. 'It's been one of the worst fires in history,' said Fernando Reseio, the fire superintendent in Vina del Mar. The fires were worsened by heavy winds and unusually high temperatures in the zone for this time of year, the Southern Hemisphere's autumn. Photo: Felipe Gamboa / AFP / Getty Images
Death toll in Valparaiso wildfire rises to 16 – 10,000 residents evacuated, 500 homes consumed – ‘It’s been one of the worst fires in history’
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15 May 2014 (Los Angeles Times) – "May Gray" and "June Gloom" usually offer a cool respite for firefighters as they prepare for the summer and fall's hot weather and heavy winds..
But for much of this month, May Gray has failed to materialize. Instead of the low clouds and chill common to Southern California around this time, May has brought heat waves and blistering Santa Ana winds. And that has sparked fires like the ones in San Diego County that are considered highly unusual for the month.
"Poor May Gray. Everybody whines about it, but they are pining for it now," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
So far this year, California has seen double the number of brush fires than average. Because there was so little rain this year, the moisture level in the brush is incredibly low.
Fire officials said the conditions are the byproduct of three years of bone-dry winters.
Photo gallery: Ash is the new ‘May Gray’ in Southern California
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A sculpture titled 'We're fryin' out here' at a beach in Sydney, Australia, during the hottest spring on record in 2014. Photo: Getty Images
Australia has hottest spring on record as temperatures soar – Australian Open changes 2015 heat policy to avert ‘inhumane’ conditions for players
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Aerial view of flooding along the Thames River, 10 February 2014. Flooded homes along the River Thames were evacuated and thousands more were at risk, with water levels rising for the next 24 hours. Several Thames gauges showed their highest levels since being installed in the 1980s and 90s. Photo: BBC News
Homes evacuated as swollen Thames keeps rising – UK Environment Agency has never issued so many severe flood warnings – Many areas have seen more than double their average rainfall
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18 May 2014 (Associated Press) – Floodwaters triggered more than 3,000 landslides across the Balkans on Sunday, laying waste to entire towns and villages and disturbing land mines leftover from the region's 1990s war, along with warning signs that marked the unexploded weapons.
The Balkans' worst flooding since record keeping began forced tens of thousands of people from their homes and threatened to inundate Serbia's main power plant, which supplies electricity to a third of the country and most of the capital, Belgrade.
Three months' worth of rain fell on the region in three days, producing the worst floods since rainfall measurements began 120 years ago. At least two dozen people have died, with more casualties expected.
Flooding in Serbia and Bosnia triggers more than 3,000 landslides, wiping out whole villages – Floods disturb land mines from region’s 1990s war – ‘The situation is catastrophic’
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MAGLAJ, Bosnia, 17 May 2014 (AP) – Packed into buses, boats and helicopters, carrying nothing but a handful of belongings, tens of thousands fled their homes Saturday in Bosnia and Serbia, seeking to escape the worst flooding in a century.
Authorities said 20 people have died but warned the death toll could rise further.
Three months' worth of rain has fallen on the region in just three days, creating floods that meteorologists say are the worst since records began 120 years ago.
Observed from the air, almost a third of Bosnia, mostly its northeast corner, resembled a huge muddy lake, with houses, roads and rail lines submerged under water. Admir Malagic, a spokesman for Bosnia's Security Ministry, said about a million people, or over a quarter of the country's population, live in the affected area.
Thousands flee, 20 die in worst floods ever recorded in Balkans – Bosnia and Serbia get three months’ worth of rain in three days
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9 September 2014 (BBC News) – Tens of thousands of people are still stranded in Indian-administered Kashmir after the worst floods in half a century. With road and communication links cut off, the Indian military is using helicopters and boats to reach those in distress.
Worst floods in 50 years hit Kashmir – Relief operation a major challenge
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26 March 2014 (Slate) – The death toll from this weekend’s mudslide through Oso, Washington, is still climbing, with more than 100 still listed as missing.
The stories emerging are the definition of heart-rending. Here’s one, from the Seattle Times:
“It’s much worse than everyone’s been saying,” said the firefighter, who did not want to be named. “The slide is about a mile wide. Entire neighborhoods are just gone. When the slide hit the river, it was like a tsunami.”
The most immediate cause of the mudslide is a near-record pace of rainfall for the area so far in the month of March.
The Pacific Northwest has had an exceptionally wet finish to its rainy season, as storms that historically would have hit California were re-routed northward by a semi-permanent dome of high pressure that’s been mostly responsible for the intensifying drought there.
Climate change may make terrible mudslides more common – ‘The slide is about a mile wide. Entire neighborhoods are just gone. When the slide hit the river, it was like a tsunami.’
Seattle smashes record for all-time wettest March
Photo gallery: Building toward disaster – Aerial photographs from 1933 to 2014 show how development contributed to deadliest landslide event in U.S. history
Image of the Day: Satellite view of landslide and barrier lake near Oso, Washington
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20 August 2014 (Associated Press) – At least six people were confirmed dead and 22 were missing after rain-soaked hills in the outskirts of Hiroshima gave way early on Wednesday in several landslides.
Damage from land and mudslides has increased over the past few decades due to more frequent heavy rains, despite extensive work on stabilising slopes. In the past decade there have been nearly 1,200 landslides a year, according to the land ministry, up from an average of about 770 a year in the previous decade.
In October 2013 multiple mudslides on Izu-Oshima, an island south of Tokyo, killed 35 people, four of whose bodies were never recovered. Those slides followed a typhoon that dumped a record 824mm (more than 32 inches) of rain in a single day.
Search and rescue effort underway on outskirts of Hiroshima city, after rain-soaked hillsides give way – Japan landslides have increased by 64 percent over previous decade
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20 April 2014 (AP) – Political and military elites are seizing protected areas in one of Africa's last bastions for elephants, putting broad swaths of Zimbabwe at risk of becoming fronts for ivory poaching, according to a non-profit research group's report that examines government collusion in wildlife trafficking.
The report describes a toxic combination of conflict, crime, and failures of governance throughout Africa that threatens to wipe out the continent's dwindling elephant herds.
China, the world's largest market for ivory, is compounding the threat, the report said.
Chinese companies have won lucrative contracts in Zimbabwe for mining and construction projects near remote elephant habitats, bringing waves of workers and new roads that can be exploited by East Asian crime organizations, the report said.
Land grabs threaten last elephant bastions
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10 June 2014 (The Huffington Post) – At least 442 rhinos have been slaughtered in South Africa this year, hunted for their horns that can often be worth more than their weight in gold. Despite ongoing attempts to save this endangered species, poachers are killing these animals in record numbers, leaving many newborns to fend for themselves, including a 4-month old rhino named Gertjie.
Rescuer workers at South Africa's Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre have been rehabilitating the little fellow since May after he was found next to his dead mother, who had been killed by poachers.
“It was a devastating sight, as the tiny animal would not leave her side, and was crying inconsolably for her," the group wrote in a blog post.”
Orphaned baby rhino scared to sleep alone at night after mother killed by poachers
With death of rhino, only six northern white rhinos left on the planet – ‘Consequently the species now stands at the brink of complete extinction, a sorry testament to the greed of the human race’
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18 May 2014 (Sea Shepherd Operation Grindstop 2014) – Latest report of today’s appalling slaughter is that 25 to 30 beautiful pilot whales have been massacred.
Pilot whales slaughtered in Faroes ‘Grind’ hunt
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10 September 2014 (takepart.com) – While the world’s attention focuses on Japan’s annual dolphin-killing season under way in Taiji, Iceland has been quietly escalating the hunting of endangered fin whales.
But no one seems to be paying much attention, according to a report released Wednesday on the eve of the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which enforces an international ban on the commercial hunting of whales.
“Iceland’s escalating whale hunts are clear and willful abuses of the IWC’s moratorium as well as the ban on international commercial trade in whale products,” states the report issued by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC).
Why is the world ignoring Iceland’s growing slaughter of endangered whales? – ‘This is really the biggest abuse of the IWC’s moratorium on whaling’
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7 February 2014 (mongabay.com) – Last month scientists released a study warning that one quarter of all sharks and rays are threatened with extinction.
The research, published in the open-access journal eLife on January 21, was the result of collaboration between 300 scientists from 64 countries. It concluded that overfishing is the biggest threat to the most number of species, noting that up to 73 million sharks are killed each year for their fins alone.
"Fins, in particular, have become one of the most valuable seafood commodities," the authors write, "It is estimated that the fins of between 26 and 73 million individuals, worth US$400-550 million, are traded each year."
35 pictures of the sharkfin trade that will shock and dismay you
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27 August 2014 (euronews) – Is the sun setting on Japan’s tuna fishing industry? Faced with a recent report that the bluefin tuna population is close to collapse, Tokyo has done an about-turn and decided to slash catches by half.
Video: Japan sounds bluefin tuna warning, calls for 50 percent catch reduction
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September 2014 (Tico Times) – Costa Rica’s National Police have seized what is likely the biggest illegal stash of poached sea turtle eggs this year, just outside of Nicoya, Guanacaste.
In a separate incident, two women, including a 15-year-old girl, were caught with 223 illegal turtle eggs on Tuesday afternoon at Playa Bejuco, on the central Pacific coast.
National Police spokesman Jesús Ureña said the eggs likely are from olive ridley sea turtles, which come ashore to nest this time of year. Ureña told The Tico Times the eggs probably would be destroyed due to their poor condition.
Police find 9,400 endangered sea turtle eggs in car trunk outside Nicoya, Costa Rica
Little has changed 1 year after slaying of Costa Rica conservationist Jairo Mora
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LIMA, Peru, 3 February 2014 (AP) – More than 400 dead dolphins were found last month on the Pacific Ocean beaches of northern Peru where twice that amount were encountered in 2012, officials said Monday.
Authorities never established the cause of the deaths in 2012. They are doing autopsies on the latest dolphins found during January in the Lambayeque region on the northern coast.
Autopsies of some of the more than 870 dolphins found in 2012 were inconclusive. Speculation ranged from biotoxins in the sea to seismic testing to an unknown ailment.
More than 400 dead dolphins found on north Peru coast
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30 September 2014 (Duke Environment) – Pollution in urban and farm runoff in Hawaii is causing tumors in endangered sea turtles, a new study finds.
The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed open-access journal PeerJ, shows that nitrogen in the runoff ends up in algae that the turtles eat, promoting the formation of tumors on the animals’ eyes, flippers and internal organs.
“We’re drawing direct lines from human nutrient inputs to the reef ecosystem, and how it affects wildlife,” said Van Houtan, who is also a scientist in NOAA’s Turtle Research Program.
Nitrogen runoff from Hawaii cities and farms causing lethal sea turtle tumors – ‘We’re drawing direct lines from human nutrient inputs to the reef ecosystem, and how they affect wildlife’
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Sea star disease epidemic surges in Oregon, now present on entire U.S. West Coast, local extinctions expected – ‘This is an unprecedented event’
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(NASA) – Satellite view of river delta changes in China. China's Huang He (Yellow) River is the most sediment-filled river on Earth. Each year, it transports millions of tons of soil from a plateau it crosses to a delta it has built in the Bohai Sea. These images show the delta's growth from 1985 to 2014. The latter image also shows another change: ponds that hold shrimp and other seafood (seen here as dark geometric shapes along the coastline) were built on what were once tidal flats.
Image of the Day: Satellite view of tidal flat destruction on China’s Huang He River
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2 April 2014 (CNN) – Another debris field, another new and so-far futile focus in the search for Flight MH370.
More than three weeks after the Malaysia Airlines jet disappeared, one thing has been made clear: the ocean is full of garbage, literally.
"It isn't like looking for a needle in a haystack," Conservation International senior scientist M. Sanjayan said of the difficulty in finding the Boeing 777 aircraft. "It's like looking for a needle in a needle factory. It is one piece of debris among billions floating in the ocean."
Environmentalists like Sanjayan have warned for years that human abuse of the planet's largest ecosystem causes major problems for ocean life and people that depend on it.
With the world's eyes now scouring Asian waters for any trace of the plane that was more than 240 feet long and weighed more than 700,000 pounds, the magnitude of the ocean debris problem has become evident.
Two objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean, including one nearly 80 feet long, initially were called the best lead to date when a satellite detected them last week.
So far, though, search planes have yet to find them or any other plane debris, with speculation mounting that the larger item was a shipping container lost at sea.
Search for Flight MH370 hampered by ocean garbage problem – ‘The world does use the ocean as its toilet, and then expects that toilet to feed it’
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<img title="Wildlife biologist Terry Hines stands next to a poached