Desdemona Despair: 50 doomiest graphs of 2011

[Barrett808]

2011 saw a spike in climate disasters around the world, with a corresponding spike in global food prices. It’s no exaggeration to attribute the “Arab Spring” to widespread food insecurity caused by rapidly changing climate.

The human perturbation to the carbon cycle increased to nearly 9 gigatons per year, in spite of the global financial collapse – there’s every reason to suspect that nations are switching from the increasingly expensive 20th-century fuel (petroleum) to the still-cheap 19th-century fuel (coal), which means more carbon and mercury emissions. In addition, new studies showed that perturbations to the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles are far beyond levels that cause eutrophication in freshwater and oceans.

Humans continued to wreck the biosphere in numerous other creative ways. Farmers in Brazil used Agent Orange to defoliate the Amazon River basin, but mostly they still used good old slash-and-burn to destroy rainforest illegally. Poaching continued to drive tuna toward extinction, with a reported gap of over 16,000 metric tons between allowed takes and total takes in 2010. Japan used earthquake-relief funds to poach whales in the Southern Ocean.

Financial collapse continued to overtake the developed economies, as the global debt crisis brought closer the inevitable dissolution of the eurozone. Nearly 30 percent of U.S. mortgages slipped underwater, and the wealth gap between rich and poor soared to historic levels. Hunger and poverty stalked the once-affluent U.S. suburbs. The fossil fuel industry continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and propaganda, arguing that we must keep burning oil and coal for jobs.

50 doomiest graphs of 2011

[kristopher]

1. Did you know...

...that there is no expiration on edit time now?

This *is* a better presentation than earlier.

[Barrett808]

2. I didn't know that

Thanks for the 411!

This is a separate post -- it's a Desdemona tradition to collect the 50 doomiest stories, graphs, and images for the year.

"50 doomiest images" will be posted in the next couple of days. ^^