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The Crazy Real-Life Story Of Biosphere 2 In a nutshell, the project was both incredibly simple and insanely
complicated. In an attempt to see if it was possible to build — then
live in — a self-contained, artificial world, eight people headed into
isolation from the rest of humanity. They entered Biosphere 2 on September
26, 1991, and they had signed up for the long haul: two years of trying
to not just live but thrive in their own little man-made world, with
no help from the outside.
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Massive seaweed blooms are choking the Atlantic Ocean, rotting on beaches The massive sargassum blooms are a threat to biodiversity, fisheries and tourism, according to a new report from BBC. Researchers at the University of South Florida have determined that since 2011 the annual bloom has been increasing exponentially. “2011 was a tipping point. Before that we did not see much sargassum.
After that we are seeing recurring, massive sargassum blooms in the
central Atlantic,” Mengqiu Wang, a researcher from the University, told
the news network.
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Atlantic Ocean records hottest decade in nearly 3,000 years This is according to a new study that found recent spikes in temperature go well beyond what is expected from natural patterns. Rising ocean temperatures are bad news for a lot of marine life. Hotter oceans also lead to worrying weather, including increasingly-severe
hurricanes. The Atlantic Ocean flows between the UK and the US and all
the way down to Africa. It’s the second-largest ocean in the world.
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Global species study suggests warming planet will mean an increase in infectious diseases in cooler climates As the planet continues to warm due to human-produced greenhouse gas
emissions, scientists attempt to predict what sorts of impacts warmer
temperatures might bring. In this new effort, the researchers chose
to investigate how the "thermal mismatch" hypothesis might play out.
The theory suggests that as species acclimated to cooler climates face
warming temperatures, their risk of infectious diseases increases; similarly,
as species acclimated to warmer temperatures face cooler conditions,
their risk of disease also rises.
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Crews vacuum ‘murder hornets’ out of Washington nest The state Agriculture Department had spent weeks searching, trapping and using dental floss to tie tracking devices to Asian giant hornets, which can deliver painful stings to people and spit venom but are the biggest threat to honeybees that farmers depend on to pollinate crops. The nest found in the city of Blaine near the Canadian border is about
the size of a basketball and contained an estimated 100 to 200 hornets.
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Quannah Chasinghorse is fighting to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge “Did someone lose their dog?” Quannah Chasinghorse jokes, pointing at a large moose in her neighbor’s snow-covered yard. At -40 degrees Fahrenheit, it is a typical winter’s day in Fairbanks, Alaska. Quannah, an 18-year-old Han Gwich’in and Oglala Lakota youth, is curled up on the couch, wearing a shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Protect the Arctic, Defend the Sacred.” It is a rare moment of rest for Quannah. In the past year she has
traveled coast to coast, advocating to protect her homelands from the
desecration of oil drilling, with her mother, Jody Potts, who is Han
Gwich’in and a tribal member of the Native Village of Eagle. Her mother
also serves as the regional director for Native Movement and is a board
member with the Alaska Wilderness League.
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Cold diggers? UN finds a record low in Greenland ice in 1991 The World Meteorological Organizations publicly confirmed Wednesday the all-time cold reading for the hemisphere: -69.6 Celsius recorded on Dec. 22, 1991 at an automatic weather station in a remote site called Klinck, not far from the highest point on the Greenland Ice Sheet. “In the era of climate change, much attention focuses on new heat
records,” said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas in a statement.
“This newly recognized cold record is an important reminder about the
stark contrasts that exist on this planet.”
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What’s Causing the Mass Bird Die-Off in the Southwest? Flycatchers, swallows, and warblers are among the species “falling
out of the sky” as part of a mass die-off across New Mexico, Colorado,
Texas, Arizona, and farther north into Nebraska, with growing concerns
that there could be hundreds of thousands dead already, said Martha
Desmond, a professor in the Biology Department at New Mexico State University
(NMSU). Many carcasses have little remaining fat reserves or muscle
mass, with some birds appearing to have nose-dived into the ground in
mid-flight.
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Zombie storms are rising from the dead thanks to climate change "Zombie storms," which regain strength after initially petering out, are the newest addition to the year 2020. And these undead weather anomalies are becoming more common thanks to climate change. "Because 2020, we now have Zombie Tropical Storms. Welcome back to the land of the living, Tropical Storm #Paulette,"
the National Weather Service wrote on Twitter on Tuesday (Sept. 22).
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More than 100,000 livestock animals perish as intense snowstorms hit Patagonia Officials conducted the first assessment of losses together with technicians from the Agriculture Technology Institute, covering highlands next to the cordillera. "Anyhow, we are talking of at least 100,000 sheep and 5,000 cattle,"
said provincial livestock secretariat Tabare Bassi this week.
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Climate intervention offers some crop benefits, but abruptly ending it may backfire Moreover, abruptly ending geoengineering might lead to total crop failure faster than if it were not done at all, according to a U.S. National Science Foundation-supported study published in Climatic Change. In a climate emergency, society might decide to spray sulfur dioxide
into the stratosphere (upper atmosphere) to combat warming. Such geoengineering,
or climate intervention, would create a massive cloud that would block
some solar radiation and cool the Earth. But if the spraying were to
suddenly cease, there would be a major impact on animals and plants,
which would be forced to try to move to suitable habitat to survive.
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Lockdown and uneven rainfall hits tea crop, prices firm up at auctions As per the Indian Tea Association (ITA) estimates the production in north India, comprising Assam and north Bengal is down by 40 per cent from January to June as compared to the figures of 2019. ITA secretary general Arijit Raha said: “We are awaiting the figures
for July which will come in a few days.” In Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri
in north Bengal lesser quantity of green leaf is being plucked due to
large scale absenteeism which has affected production, ITA said.
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Mass Die-Offs of Marine Mammals Are on the Rise Reports of disease-induced mass die-offs in marine mammals have been
increasing since at least 1996. This could be due in part to increased
surveillance. However, it’s also likely that scientists are still underestimating
the true numbers of outbreaks in these populations. Marine mammals travel
great distances in remote parts of the oceans, and often the only indication
that something has gone wrong is when carcasses start washing up on
shore.
More
A Climate Migration Pilot Program Could Enhance the Nation’s Resilience and Reduce Federal Fiscal Exposure GAO identified few communities in the United States that have considered
climate migration as a resilience strategy, and two—Newtok, Alaska,
and Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana—that moved forward with relocation.
Newtok, for example, faced imminent danger from shoreline erosion due
to thawing permafrost and storm surge.
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Climate change: Planting new forests 'can do more harm than good' One paper says that financial incentives to plant trees can backfire and reduce biodiversity with little impact on carbon emissions. A separate project found that the amount of carbon that new forests can absorb may be overestimated. The key message from both papers is that planting trees is not a simple
climate solution.
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Environmentalism: a racist ideology In its wake, jealous greens have sought to capture the narrative of racial grievance. But by highlighting what they claim are the racial dimensions of climate change, what greens have instead exposed are their deep contradictions and a callous indifference to the plight of the world’s poor. At the end of May, having only just been reinvented as an expert on
coronavirus, Greta Thunberg tweeted: ‘Centuries of structural and systematic
racism and social injustice won’t go away by itself. We need a global
structural change. The injustices must come to an end.’More
6 ways coronavirus is changing the environment Some of those are positive — a big (albeit likely temporary) drop in CO2 emissions as factories shutter and the economy sputters — while others are negative — growing piles of possibly infected waste like tissues and old face masks. Here are six ways coronavirus is already having an effect.
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Hot weather, low oxygen causes fish kills in Taipei rivers The EPAs tested water and found no evidence of toxicity or pollution, but oxygen levels of 2.47 mg/l. Continuous hot weather and lack of rain has caused levels of dissolved oxygen in the rivers to drop, according to inspectors. Fish kills have been reported in the Dahan, Hsintien, Keelung, and
Danshui Rivers, with an accompanying malodorous stench. In some areas,
tens of thousands of dead fish have accumulated. Large numbers were
seen between Zhongzheng and Huajiang Bridges on the Hsintien River,
the Keelung River at Xizhi, and the Dahan River in Sanxia District.
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Indonesia starts cloud seeding to keep forest fires at bay Last year's fires were the worst since 2015 due to dry weather, with some 1.6 million hectares of land, mostly on Sumatra and Borneo islands, razed by the out-of-control blazes. Authorities deployed tens of thousands of personnel and water-bombing
aircraft to tackle the fires, which are intentionally set to clear land
for agriculture -- including on palm oil and pulp plantations.
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Thousands of wild and domestic rabbits are being killed off by a deadly virus Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease virus type 2 is believed to have spread to the U.S. from Europe, and was first reported to have killed wild rabbits in New Mexico back in March. In the months since, the virus has killed thousands of wild rabbits
and hares in Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado. Last week, the Department
of Fish and Wildlife confirmed that the disease has now spread to California,
after the carcasses of 20 black-tailed jack rabbits were discovered
on a property in Palm Springs.
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Climate change could cause abrupt biodiversity losses this century But what will the world’s biodiversity look like in the future? Projections indicate that unless emissions are rapidly reduced the
climate crisis will get substantially worse. Up to 50% of species are
forecast to lose most of their suitable climate conditions by 2100 under
the highest greenhouse gas emissions scenario.
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Michael Moore climate film snubs solar and urges population control, ruffling mainstream movement Big procreators are culpable, too. That’s the broad take-away from controversial and Oscar-winning documentary
film maker Michael Moore’s latest offering, a screed against the green
movement. Moore, with writer and director Jeff Gibbs, used the 50th
anniversary of Earth Day to take on the mainstream environmental movement
in “Planet of the Humans.” The film streamed on YouTube, with a boost
from promotion by Stephen Colbert and others. It had 1.17 million YouTube
viewers as of Thursday afternoon.
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Scientists Warn Of Potential Whale Die-Off As Spring Migration Begins After spending time in the warm waters of Baja, California, gray whales have now started their long journey to the feeding grounds near Alaska. The migration, which traverses the West Coast, extends from February to June. With a round trip distance of about 10,000 miles, the annual spring
migration of the eastern Pacific gray whales is considered one of the
longest journeys of mammals on Earth. After spending the winter season
in Baja, the whales have already started their long journey to reach
new feeding grounds.
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Ecuador To Sell A Third Of Its Amazon Rainforest To Chinese Oil Companies The report comes as oil pollution forced neighboring Peru to declare an environmental state of emergency in its northern Amazon rainforest. Ecuador owed China more than $7 billion — more than a tenth of its
GDP — as of last summer. In 2009 China began loaning Ecuador billions
of dollars in exchange for oil shipments. It also helped fund two of
the country's biggest hydroelectric infrastructure projects, and China
National Petroleum Corp may soon have a 30 percent stake in a $10 billion
oil refinery in Ecuador.
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Asteroid news: A 4KM rock to make Earth 'close approach' - astronomers can already see it But the space rock is already visible to some telescopes, appearing as a bright dot of light against the starlit sky. Dr Masi will track and stream online the asteroid's flyby next month. He said: "When we imaged it, Asteroid 1998 OR2 was about 25 millions
of kilometres from us. "This 1.8 to 4.1km large asteroid will come as
close as 6.3 millions of kilometres from us next April 29 - more than
16 times the average lunar distance: it will not hit us - becoming bright
enough to be seen with modest optical equipment."
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Amid pandemic, U.N. cancels global climate conference The gathering, scheduled to be hosted by the United Kingdom in November in Glasgow, Scotland, was envisioned as a moment for nations to offer more ambitious plans to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and transition away from reliance on fossil fuels. The arena where the massive event was to take place, the SEC Centre,
is being converted into a field hospital for patients with covid-19,
the disease caused by the novel virus, the Scottish government said
this week.
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Evidence of a Cosmic Impact That Destroyed One of the World’s Earliest Human Settlements A large mound marks the settlement, which now lies under Lake Assad. But before the lake formed, archaeologists were able to carefully
extract and describe much material, including parts of houses, food,
and tools — an abundance of evidence that allowed them to identify the
transition to agriculture nearly 12,800 years ago. It was one of the
most significant events in our Earth’s cultural and environmental history.
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Remote South American Kelp Forests Surveyed for First Time Since 1973 – And They Are “Pristine” Home to some of Earth’s most diverse ecosystems, kelp forests worldwide
face threats from climate change and human activities. These threats
vary depending on distinct regional factors. However, kelp forests in
remote locations are understudied, limiting the availability of knowledge
to inform conservation efforts.
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This Ceramic Artist Survived the Australian Wildfires by Crawling Inside His Kiln “The fire was too big, too hot, too fast,” Harrison wrote on his blog. “I couldn’t get out.” Fortunately, Harrison had built a makeshift kiln from fireproof ceramic
fiber the day before. Faced with no other choice, he crawled inside
with a bag of laptops and hard drives, a fire extinguisher, a fire blanket,
and a bottle of water. The kiln, which keeps heat out, as well as in,
offered lifesaving protection.
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A huge iceberg just broke off West Antarctica’s most endangered glacier And that gateway is shattering before our eyes. Over the weekend, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites
spotted a significant breakup, or calving event, underway on Pine Island
Glacier’s floating ice shelf. A series of rifts that satellites have
been monitoring since early 2019 grew rapidly last week. By Sunday,
a 120 square-mile chunk of ice—a little under three San Franciscos in
size—had broken off the glacier’s front. It quickly shattered into a
constellation of smaller icebergs, the largest of which was big enough
to earn itself a name: B-49.
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Hospitals across the US prepare for coronavirus outbreak to become global pandemic “For instance,” she continued, health-care providers need to plan for a “surge at a hospital, the ability to provide personal protective equipment for your workforce, the administrative controls and so forth that you might put place in a health care setting.” Schuchat’s warning came as U.S. and world health officials increasingly
sound the alarm of a possible pandemic outbreak of the deadly new coronavirus
that has killed more than 2,100 people in China in the last seven weeks.
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Feminist Author Calls on Germans to Stop Having Babies to Save the Planet In an interview with Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, Brunschweiger warns “we are on the brink of ecological collapse” and that the only solution is “the renunciation of one’s own reproduction.” Claiming that this topic is being kept hidden in “pro-natalist Germany,”
Brunschweiger, who herself is childless, remarked, “It is…above all
because of the masses of people that we have such big environmental
problems. We are just too many and hardly anyone wants to limit themselves.
If we were fewer people and restricted ourselves, we could save something.”
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Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs Park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen explained that since the early 2000s scientists have reflected and analyzed data stating glaciers would recede by 2020. She told MTN News that the latest research shows shrinking, but in
ways much more complex than what was predicted. Because of this, the
park must update all signs around the park stating all glaciers will
be melted by 2020.
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Today's Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow's E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn That’s why we badly need to develop better methods for recycling EV
batteries and start scaling up the recycling infrastructure now, a team
led by researchers at the University of Birmingham in the UK argue in
a review paper published today in Nature. As the paper notes, the one
million EVs sold around the world in 2017 will eventually result in
250,000 tons of battery pack waste that the world’s recycling infrastructure
is ill-equipped to handle.
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As the world warms, harmful algal blooms are on the rise A new study shows that the blooms have become larger and more frequent in many of the world’s largest lakes since the 1980s, with lakes that have warmed the least over the past 30 years showing less intense algal blooms. “That suggests that temperature — and therefore climate change — has a role to play in allowing lakes to recover or not” [from algal blooms], said study co-author Anna Michalak, an environmental engineer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. “When temperatures get warmer, it can get in the way of management
strategies that would otherwise have improved conditions in the lake.”
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An India-Pakistan nuclear war could kill millions, threaten global starvation The picture is grim. That level of warfare wouldn't just kill millions
of people locally, said CU Boulder's Brian Toon, who led the research
published today in the journal Science Advances. It might also plunge
the entire planet into a severe cold spell, possibly with temperatures
not seen since the last Ice Age.
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The Case For Leaving City Rats Alone “Once we caught two in a single trap,” she says, peering inside the
cage. She finds a new rat there, and makes a note of it on her clipboard;
she’ll be back for it, to take the animal to her nearby van, which is
parked near (according to Google Maps) an “unfussy” traditional Ethiopian
restaurant. Once inside the van, the rat will be put under anesthesia,
and will then be photographed, brushed for fleas, tested for disease,
fixed with an ear tag, and released back into V6A within 45 minutes.
More
NASA: Ozone layer hole shrinks to smallest size since discovery Yes, but: "It’s not a sign that atmospheric ozone is suddenly on a
fast track to recovery," said Paul Newman, chief scientist for Earth
Sciences at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland,
in the statement. It's important to recognize that what "we’re seeing
this year is is due to warmer stratospheric temperatures," he said.
More
Bill Gates wants to spray millions of tons of dust into the stratosphere to stop global warming In theory, the airborne dust would create a gigantic sunshade, reflecting some of the Sun's rays and heat back into space, dimming those that get through and so protecting Earth from the worsening ravages of climate warming. This is not the crackpot plan of a garden-shed inventor. The project
is being funded by billionaire and Microsoft founder Bill Gates and
pioneered by scientists at Harvard University.
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Monsanto’s “Rain of Death” on Canada’s Forests First Nations have tried to stop this practice since the 1990s through a variety of measures including meetings with logging companies and government officials, protests and reports, but all to no avail. The “rain of death” keeps coming. Now, members of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) Elders
of the North Shore of Lake Huron say they will be going to court to
force the Canadian federal government to live up to Robinson Huron Treaty
of 1850. That treaty guarantees First Nations in the area the right
to hunt, fish, gather berries and use plant medicines in traditional
territories. The TEK Elders say that by allowing the aerial spraying
to continue, the Trudeau government is violating this treaty and the
Constitution Act of 1982, which reaffirms those rights.
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Turns Out E-Scooters Aren’t as Eco-Friendly as Everyone Thought But according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, these two-wheeled contraptions might not be as eco-friendly as their makers claim. The study, which was conducted by researchers at North Carolina State
University, assessed the full “life cycle” of a scooter, tallying up
emissions produced during the production of materials, manufacturing,
shipping, delivery, and collection and charging. In doing so, researchers
discovered that the machines produce more carbon on average than alternative
transit methods like buses, mopeds, e-bikes, regular bikes, and (obviously)
walking.
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Oregon’s Tsunami Risk: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea Keep scaling up the water, and you keep scaling up the trouble. Eight
years ago, a tsunami struck the northeast coast of Japan. A tsunami
is not like a regular wave, and it is not like a rogue wave; it is more
like a rogue ocean. It forms, most often, when an earthquake shifts
the seabed and displaces all of the water above it. That displaced water
does not crest and fall; it simply rises, like an extremely high tide,
until the entire water column is in motion, from seafloor to surface.
Then it rolls inland, with ten or twenty or sixty miles of similar waves
at its back, and demolishes everything in its path.
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Study: Climate Change Skeptics More Eco-Friendly Than Believers But a recent study has found that climate change skeptics are actually
more likely to engage in eco-friendly behaviors in their individual
lives than those who claim to be “highly concerned” about climate change.
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As climate changes, small increases in rainfall may cause widespread road outages "To prepare for climate change, we have to know where flooding leads
to the biggest disruptions in transportation routes. Network science
typically points to the biggest interactions, or the most heavily traveled
routes. That's not what we see here," said Jianxi Gao, an assistant
professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and
lead author of the study. "A little bit of flood-induced damage can
cause abrupt widespread failures."
More
Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems In the state’s interior, rivers should be locked in ice so thick that they double as roads for snowmobiles and trucks. And where I live, near Anchorage in south-central Alaska, the snowpack should be deep enough to support skiing for weeks to come. But this year, a record-breaking heatwave upended norms and had us basking in comfortable—but often unsettling—warmth. Across Alaska, March temperatures averaged 11 degrees Celsius above
normal. The deviation was most extreme in the Arctic where, on March
30, thermometers rose almost 22 degrees Celsius above normal—to 3 degrees.
That still sounds cold, but it was comparatively hot. More
Amount of carbon stored in forests reduced as climate warms The team, led by the University of Cambridge, found that as temperatures increase, trees grow faster, but they also tend to die younger. When these fast-growing trees die, the carbon they store is returned to the carbon cycle. The results, reported in the journal Nature Communications, have implications
for global carbon cycle dynamics. As the Earth's climate continues to
warm, tree growth will continue to accelerate, but the length of time
that trees store carbon, the so-called carbon residence time, will diminish.
More
Indigenous Canadians in Water Crisis as Nestlé Drains a Million Gallons a Day From Their Land But quitting plastic water bottles isn’t only a step in the right
direction for our planet and for your health, it could put pressure
on water bottle corporations like Nestlé to stop taking advantage of
natural resources which many people quite close to home barely get access
to as it is.
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A man took a submarine to the deepest place on Earth — and found trash Victor Vescovo, a retired naval officer, said he made the unsettling discovery as he descended nearly 10,928 metres (more than 10 kilometres) to a point in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench — the deepest place on Earth. His dive took him 16 metres lower than the previous deepest descent in the trench in 1960. On one occasion, he spent hours on the trench floor, viewing sea life
ranging from shrimp-like arthropods with long legs and antennae, to
translucent sea pigs, which are similar to sea cucumbers.
More
Vital penguin breeding site in Antarctica drastically losing mating pairs Halley Bay has historically been the annual mating home to anywhere from 15,000 to 24,000 penguin pairs, but in the past three years almost none of the mates have arrived, according to a study published in Wednesday’s Antarctic Science. “We’ve never seen a breeding failure on a scale like this in 60 years,”
said study author Phil Trathan, head of conservation biology at the
British Antarctic Survey. “It’s unusual to have a complete breeding
failure in such a big colony.”
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White people’s diets are killing the environment Caucasian populations are disproportionately contributing to climate
change through their eating habits, which uses up more food — and emits
more greenhouse gases — than the typical diets of black and Latinx communities,
according to a new report published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.
More
When Ebola and other epidemics strike, a dysfunctional ‘outbreak culture’ hinders adequate response An unruly and potentially fatal disease emerges and sets off a race
against the clock to stop its spread, with limited or no certain treatment.
Less widely known is the shared secret among outbreak responders: Bad
behavior among their own ranks can consume undue energy amid an already
frightening scenario.
More
Avalanches Menace Colorado as Climate Change Raises the Risk In the past week, masses of snow sliding off mountains shut down ski
resorts, damaged gas lines and buried cars on busy highways. Along Interstate
70—a key east-west corridor through the Rocky Mountains—massive clouds
of pulverized snow moving at speeds of up to 200 mph pushed pickup trucks
into the median and left the road covered with piles of compressed frozen
snow as hard as concrete.
More
What Russia's green snow reveals about the rise of pollution A spate of incidents in Russia has grabbed internet attention. Residents of Siberian towns watched with dismay as the snow around them turned green and black, with toxic emissions forcing some to wear masks. These seem to be connected to local factories, with a chrome plant in particular behind the green snow, and, as protests gather pace, the Putin government has come under pressure. Snow pollution is not new. Campaigners have been warning for years
of the dangers of dark snow, – black, brown and grey streaks across
the ice that can be clearly seen from the air above Arctic regions –
because of its effects on climate change.
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Australia doesn’t need to recycle Public anxiety about material waste, it seemed, trumped concerns about wasting taxpayers’ money. In a matter of weeks, Ipswich Council was forced to reverse the decision,
hiring a contractor to sort through tons of assorted pizza boxes, plastic
tubs and beer bottles in the hope that some of it might be born anew.
Good luck. The market for theoretically recyclable material in domestic
waste has hit rock bottom, and is unlikely to recover.
More
New Ocean Measurements Are Bad News The new measurements confirm that oceans could warm 1.5 degrees Celsius
and rise almost a foot by 2100 from warming alone, with melting ice
caps adding more, Scientific American reports. The studies rely on a
network of floats measuring ocean temperatures around the world; the
so-called Argo network, developed in the early 2000s, is considered
better than the old method of ships dropping sensors into the ocean
by copper wire, per the New York Times.
More
Heat Waves Are Causing Mass Fish Deaths in Australia Outbreaks of blue–green algae (cyanobacteria), which thrive in warm
water, are not uncommon during droughts. The algae did not directly
cause the mass die-off; rapid cooling and intense rainfall might have
disrupted the bloom and depleted the amount of dissolved oxygen in the
water, killing the fish, said Anthony Townsend, a senior fisheries manager
at the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, in a statement.
More
The Marshall Islands: A nation that fears it’s on the brink of extinction In a battle between man and nature, officials say climate change is threatening the islands’ existence. The most extreme predictions say that rising sea levels could make the nation uninhabitable as soon as 2030. The capital city of Majuro is only 300 feet wide in most places, yet
the thin strip of land is home to over 27,000 people. Charlotte Jack,
one of the city’s residents, lives just steps from the water’s edge
— her front yard is the ocean. At 16 years old, she has grown up feeling
its fury made worse by unpredictable weather.
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Ancient graveyard of mummified penguins discovered in Antarctica worries scientists These weather conditions, they caution, may become more common as our planet warms. "It is quite likely that global climate warming caused enhanced precipitation,
which led to the tragedy," Liguang Sun of the University of Science
and Technology of China—one of the authors of the research published
in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences—told Live Science.
More
'Hyperalarming' study shows massive insect loss, which could devastate world's food supply The loss of insects and arthropods could further rend the rain forest's food web, causing plant species to go extinct without pollinators. "If the tropical forests go it will be yet another catastrophic failure of the whole Earth system, that will feed back on human beings in an almost unimaginable way," said Brian Lister, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists
realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national
forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest's insect-eating
animals have gone missing, too.
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The Chill of Solar Minimum “We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.” These results come from the SABER instrument onboard NASA’s TIMED
satellite. SABER monitors infrared emissions from carbon dioxide (CO2)
and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a key role in the energy
balance of air 100 to 300 kilometers above our planet’s surface. By
measuring the infrared glow of these molecules, SABER can assess the
thermal state of gas at the very top of the atmosphere–a layer researchers
call “the thermosphere.”
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Is Africa becoming the world's dumping ground for dirty diesel vehicles? According to the World Health Organization, 15,000 children under five died each day in 2016 due to respiratory disease. But the vehicles that contribute a large part of that pollution trace a long path to Africa. As emission regulations become stricter in the European Union, Japan,
and the United States, cars no longer able to meet current standards
are exported to other regions, including Africa.
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In 1973, an MIT computer predicted the end of civilization. So far, it's on target. Why the program was created The prediction, which recently re-appeared in Australian media, was
made by a program dubbed World One. It was originally created by the
computer pioneer Jay Forrester, who was commissioned by the Club of
Rome to model how well the world could sustain its growth. The Club
of Rome is an organization comprised of thinkers, former world heads
of states, scientists, and UN bureaucrats with the mission to “promote
understanding of the global challenges facing humanity and to propose
solutions through scientific analysis, communication, and advocacy.”
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Planet at Risk of Heading Towards Apocalyptic, Irreversible ‘Hothouse Earth’ State Hothouse Earth is an apocalyptic nightmare where the global average
temperatures is 4 to 5 degrees Celsius higher (with regions like the
Arctic averaging 10 degrees C higher) than today, according to the study,
“Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” published Monday
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sea levels would
eventually be 10-60 meters higher as much of the world’s ice melts.
In these conditions, large parts of the Earth would be uninhabitable.
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A dangerous parasitic illness spread by bugs that bite people's faces at night is spreading These bloodsucking bugs, called triatomine bugs, spread a parasitic illness called Chagas disease. Left untreated, Chagas causes serious cardiac or intestinal complications in about 30% of patients, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These complications can lead to heart failure and sudden death. Because many people don't show signs of infection, medical researchers
have described Chagas as a "silent killer."
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Lost extinctions: When animals die off before science finds them Dinosaurs, the most famous of extinct animals, died off around 65 million years ago, before humans evolved and certainly before Linnaeus invented his way of scientifically classifying organisms. According to PBS, of all the organisms that ever ran, gasped, ate or simply grew in the soil, 99.9% are now extinct. Oil spills, global climate change, over hunting, and starved feral
cats have done a lot of damage, but not nearly that much. The fact is,
like every person you now know; every species alive today will someday
be dead. Species, like individuals, have lifespans. Just as we don’t
use the argument, ‘they were eventually going to die anyway’ to justify
the holocaust or school shootings, the rate of modern extinctions is
inexcusable. A vast number of modern extinctions are the fault of humans,
too.
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African activist: Climate change is fueling conflict, extremism Hindou Ibrahim said in a speech to the council that climate change is affecting the daily lives of people in the vast Sahel region who depend on agriculture, fishing and livestock and are struggling to survive. She said the scarcity of resources has fueled internal migration as
well as migration through Africa to Europe, sparked local conflicts
that become national and regional and led to the growth of terrorist
groups.
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Orcas of the Pacific Northwest Are Starving and Disappearing Normally four or five calves would be born each year among this fairly unique urban population of whales — pods named J, K and L. But most recently, the number of orcas here has dwindled to just 75, a 30-year-low in what seems to be an inexorable, perplexing decline. Listed as endangered since 2005, the orcas are essentially starving,
as their primary prey, the Chinook, or king salmon, are dying off. Just
last month, another one of the Southern Resident killer whales — one
nicknamed “Crewser” that hadn’t been seen since last November — was
presumed dead by the Center for Whale Research.
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The Cyclospora Parasite Outbreak: What You Need to Know Salads sold at McDonald's have been linked to 163 cases of cyclosporiasis, the illness caused by the parasite cyclospora, in 10 states, according to the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. McDonald’s said it stopped selling salads at about 3,000 locations, primarily in the Midwest, “out of an abundance of caution.” The fast-food chain also said it was changing its lettuce-blend distributor. Earlier, the agencies reported that 227 people were sickened by the
same parasite. The source was Del Monte vegetable trays sold at Midwestern
gas stations in May and June.
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In a Rare Feat, Scientists Anticipate and Recover an Incoming Asteroid On June 23, a group of international geoscientists discovered a meteorite in Botswana that had been dwelling in space just weeks earlier. The fresh fragment broke off of asteroid 2018 LA as it plummeted to Earth on June 2, turning into a fiery meteor and exploding as it entered our atmosphere. The geoscientists spent five days combing the land beneath the meteor’s
impact area before finding the tiny meteorite — marking only the second
time remnants from a predicted asteroid impact have been recovered.
Since such freshly fallen meteorites are so uncommonly found, researchers
now have the rare opportunity to study its properties and composition
first-hand.
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There Was a Naked Protest Against Chemtrails Chemtrails, they believe are the hidden chemicals and biological agents
in contrails, those white streaks left in the sky by airplanes. Stop
Spray Us believes the government is deliberately spraying the public
with these substances for reasons unknown, but probably really bad.
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American Cities That Will Soon Be Under Water The most recent assessment published this June in the science journal Nature found that Antarctica is melting at triple the rate it did in 2007 and previous projections may have underestimated the continent’s slow disappearance. According to a 2017 study, if rising carbon emissions and ice sheet
loss continue at their current rate, global sea levels could rise by
an estimated 8 feet by the year 2100. And if, in the even more distant
future, all of the Antarctic ice sheet — which comprises the vast majority
of Earth’s freshwater supply — melts, sea levels would rise by approximately
200 feet.
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Flat-Earthers Explain Why We Don't Fall Off the Edge of Our Planet, and It Involves Pac-Man The Earth's glorious globular-ness was proved more than 2,000 years ago by the ancient Greeks, but there's a small subset of people who think the planet is a disk despite enjoying the downward pull of gravity that could only result from living on a sphere. At this conference, they were presenting their scientific evidence
for such a disk. One of the more interesting pieces of evidence came
from speaker Darren Nesbit, who referred to the "Pac-Man effect" as
the reason why planes don't fall off the edge of a flat Earth, according
to the science news website Physics-Astronomy.org. When a plane or other
object reaches the edge of the horizon, such as when Pac-Man reaches
the end of the screen, that object will teleport from one side of the
planet to the other, a la Pac-Man entering from the other side of the
screen.
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Small Asteroid Strikes Africa Just Hours After It Was Spotted NASA tracks 90 percent of near-Earth objects that are larger than 150
meters (~460 feet) in diameter, which means it misses lots of the smaller
ones until they’re close by. This most recent rock, called 2018 LA,
was spotted on June 2 by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. At that
point, the asteroid was almost as near as the moon, according to a release.
Researchers realized it was on a collision course with Earth, and were
able to predict a few locations over a large swath of the planet’s surface.
Followup observations allowed astronomers to pinpoint a probable collision
with southern Africa.
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Hawaiian National Park closed amid volcano eruption fears It is the newest threat from the Kilauea volcano, which began erupting last Thursday on the US state’s Big Island, the National Park Service said. Scientists say lava levels in the crater are going down, meaning it might be clogging and building up for a mighty blast. Movement of the molten rock opened space for lava at the summit to
drain underground, reducing the height of a lava lake at the summit,
according to the US Geological Survey.
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China needs more water. So it's building a rain-making network three times the size of Spain The system, which involves an enormous network of fuel-burning chambers
installed high up on the Tibetan mountains, could increase rainfall
in the region by up to 10 billion cubic metres a year – about 7 per
cent of China’s total water consumption – according to researchers involved
in the project.
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Rise of drug resistant TB cases threatens Europe Overall, the number of cases of the airborne lung disease has fallen in recent years but experts are becoming increasingly alarmed at how it is becoming resistant to many frontline antibiotics. This rise in resistance is worrying, even in countries such as the
UK where infection rates are relatively low, because of the high numbers
of people moving around the region.
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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, full of ocean plastic, keeps growing Arguably more frightening than any shark, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a rapidly growing hot spot for ocean plastic, carrying 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in what is now the largest accumulation of ocean debris in the world, according to a new report Thursday in Scientific Reports. The patch is now two times larger than the size of Texas, with bits
of plastic and debris spread over more than 600,000 square miles of
water, according to the three-year mapping effort from eight different
organizations.
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The Paris Climate Accords Are Looking More and More Like Fantasy This week, the International Energy Agency announced that carbon emissions
grew 1.7 percent in 2017, after an ambiguous couple of years optimists
hoped represented a leveling off, or peak; instead, we’re climbing again.
Even before the new spike, not a single major industrial nation was
on track to fulfill the commitments it made in the Paris treaty. To
keep the planet under two degrees of warming — a level that was, not
all that long ago, defined as the threshold of climate catastrophe —
all signatory nations have to match or better those commitments.
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Once begun, there would be severe consequences to stopping climate intervention / geoengineering A team of researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey explained
that climate geoengineering involved spraying a sulphuric acid cloud
in the upper atmosphere in hopes of countering the effects of global
warming. The researchers conceptualized a scenario where airplanes would
spray five million tons of sulfur dioxide a year into the upper atmosphere
at the Equator from 2020 to 2070. The experts inferred that the activity
would result in an even sulfuric acid cloud distribution between the
Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
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US Navy's new high-speed warship USS Little Rock is FROZEN on the shores of Montreal and unable to set sail until the spring The USS Little Rock was commissioned on December 16 in Buffalo, New York, and scheduled to depart the following day for its home port at Mayport Naval Station in Jacksonville, Florida. A sustained blast of Arctic air that extended from late December into January caused ice to form faster than normal within in the Seaway, according to the St Lawrence Seaway Management Corp. The Seaway closed for the season on January 11 and will open again
in March.
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Warm waters melting Antarctic ice shelves may have appeared for the first time in over 7,000 years Now, for possibly the first time in 7,000 years, a phenomenon known as “upwelling” (the upward flow of warmer ocean water to the surface), is thought to have caused recent ice shelf collapse around the continent – and the glacial thinning associated with it. Ice shelves floating on water are the oceanic extension of land glaciers
and ice sheets, and the primary region for ice loss. As these shelves
break apart, the flow of continental ice held up behind them accelerates.
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Scientists Get Buried In Snow At Davos While Lecturing On Global Warming Climate scientists hope their mock camp illustrates how global warming could impact the Arctic, but the “Gore effect” may make it harder to get the message across. Davos has seen frigid temperatures along with about six feet of snow in the last six days. There was so much snow, authorities evacuated some neighborhoods due
to avalanche concerns. Global elites headed to the conference had to
force their way through heavy snow drifts.
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2017 Was the Hottest Year Yet In the World's Oceans In fact, 2017 was the warmest year on record in the ocean, according to researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Their findings indicate a "long-term warming trend driven by human activities." The study measured the rising temperature of the ocean as a whole, but the Atlantic and Antarctic Oceans, they found, experienced the most warming. The scientists looked at ocean temperature data that researchers from
various institutions, including NOAA in the U.S., began collecting in
the 1950s. Starting in the late 1990s, ocean temperatures began to take
off.
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US cold snap was a freak of nature, quick analysis finds Frigid weather like the two-week cold spell that began around Christmas is 15 times rarer than it was a century ago, according to a team of international scientists who does real-time analyses to see if extreme weather events are natural or more likely to happen because of climate change. The cold snap that gripped the East Coast and Midwest region was a
rarity that bucks the warming trend, said researcher Claudia Tebaldi
of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the private organization
Climate Central.
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Sahara Desert covered in 15 inches of SNOW as freak weather blankets sand dunes It is the second time snow has hit in nearly 40 years, with a dusting also recorded in December 2016. But this snowfall which hit on Sunday, is much deeper than the fleeting shower little more than a year ago. Locals, who endure temperatures of 37C in summer, were stunned as
dense snow settled on the town, known as ‘the gateway to the desert’.
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Massive storm roars into East Coast; record cold to follow Forecasters expected the storm to be followed immediately by a blast of face-stinging cold that could break records in more than two dozen cities and bring wind chills as low as minus 40 degrees this weekend. Blizzard warnings and states of emergency were in wide effect, and
wind gusts hit more than 70 mph in places. In parts of New England,
snow fell as fast as 3 inches per hour.
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The Water Will Come: A Must-Read Book on Sea Level Rise Goodell, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of the excellent 2011 book How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate, argues that there is little we can do to stop the inexorable rise of the world’s oceans due to human-caused global warming--though we may be able to slow the rate of sea level rise later in the century. As one of the experts he interviews puts it, “Sea-level rise is like
aging. You can’t stop it. You can only do it better or worse.”
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Fresh outbreak of bird flu detected in South Korea South Korean authorities said they were carrying out epidemiological investigations in the affected farms, situated some 300 km southwest of Seoul, to determine whether the detected H5 strain was highly pathogenic. The results were expected to come in by Tuesday, Yonhap news agency reported. Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon urged the Ministry to use all available
resources to prevent the spread of the virus, such as implementing a
ban on moving livestock between places and disinfecting farms.
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Asteroid expected to make closest pass by Earth in over 40 years Instead, an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon is projected to come close enough to Earth that it's been classified as "potentially hazardous" by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. The asteroid has a diameter of about 3 miles, according to NASA, making
it the third-largest "potentially hazardous" asteroid to pass by Earth.
NASA expects Phaethon to be the closest to Earth on Dec. 16, when it's
projected to be more than 6.4 million miles away. That's about 27 times
the average distance between Earth and the moon, which is 238,855 miles.
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Red tide causing dead fish to wash up on Sanibel "It smells bad and the water is very murky," said Pam Boardman, who walked along the beach Tuesday. "Lots of dead sea life," she added. People who visited the beach set up their umbrellas and chairs away from the dead fish. "I've been coughing and sneezing a lot," said Julie Stevenson, while
she was on the beach.
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Prince William warns that there are too many people in the world The Duke said that as a result, wildlife was being put under "enormous pressure" and called for the issue to be addressed with renewed vigour. His concerns echo those of his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, who in 2011 advocated “voluntary family limitation" as a means of solving overpopulation, which he described as the biggest challenge in conservation. His grandson, royal patron of the Tusk Trust, told the charity’s gala
dinner in London that measures needed to be taken to save certain animal
populations.
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Greenland ice sheet melting impacts global ocean currents The rate at which Greenland’s ice sheet is melting has more than doubled since 2003. Researchers from Aarhus University set out to determine how the melting
ice affects coastal waters in Northeast Greenland. In coordination with
the “Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring Program,” the researchers took annual
measurements over a time period of 13 years. The measurements showed
that fresh water from the ice sheet had accumulated in the surface layers
of the ocean and flowed into the Greenland fjords.
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As Deadly Wildfires Rage in California, a Look at How Global Warming Fuels Decades of Forest Fires Climate scientists believe human-caused global warming played a major
role in the drought. We speak with Park Williams, bioclimatologist at
Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-author
of a 2016 report showing that global warming is responsible for nearly
half of the forest area burned in the western United States over the
past three decades.
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There’s a Climate Bomb Under Your Feet They broke the land up into six blocks of three squares each. In every block, one square was left alone, one was threaded with heating cables that elevated its temperature 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) above the surrounding area. The third square was threaded with cables but never turned on, as a control. That was 26 years ago. The purpose was to measure how carbon dioxide
may escape from the earth as the atmosphere warms. What they found,
published yesterday in the journal Science, may mean the accelerating
catastrophe of global warming has been fueled in part by warm dirt.
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Asteroid that just passed Earth this week may not miss next time Rolf Densing heads the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. “It’s damn close,” Densing told The Telegraph. “The farthest satellites are 36,000 kilometers (22,400 miles) out, so this is indeed a close miss.” When 2012 TC4 heads back in 2079, scientists have determined there
is a possibly it will hit the Earth and have estimated the chances at
about one in 750 that this collision will happen. While the asteroid
is also set to return in 2019 and 2050, it is predicted to pass safely
by in those years.
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Scientists Track Asteroid Flyby of Earth Set for Oct. 12 Those observations have made it possible to better predict when the
asteroid will make its flyby of Earth, and just how close it will get
to the planet. Observing close flybys like this also helps prepare teams
to detect a near-Earth asteroid whose course might pose a threat to
Earth. 2012 TC4 will fly by Earth on Oct. 12 at a distance of about
27,000 miles (43,500 kilometers), or about one-eighth the distance to
the moon. Previous observations suggested the space rock might come
to within 4,200 miles (6,800 kilometers), according to a statement from
NASA.
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Massive sunspots and huge solar flares mean unexpected space weather for Earth These massive sunspots are regions of intense and complicated magnetic fields that can produce solar flares – bursts of high-energy radiation. You can just make them out with solar viewing glasses, but they’re better viewed through a solar telescope. These two huge sunspots are currently causing quite a bit of consternation
and interest. The solar storms they’ve sent toward Earth may affect
communications and other technologies like GPS and radio signals. They’re
causing amazing displays of the Northern and Southern Lights. And space
weather scientists like us are excited because we wouldn’t normally
expect this much activity from the sun at the moment.
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Hurricane Irma's force sucks shorelines bare, exposes sea beds The hurricane, since downgraded to category one, submerged streets and knocked out power to millions in Miami, and threatened the highly populated Tampa Bay area with dangerous storm surges as it moved north. Irma's powerful winds pulled water away from parts of the coast to
feed the storm surges. Those areas experienced a "bulge" of ocean water
— the low pressure and strong winds at the centre of the storm suck
the air and water inwards, creating a massive build-up of water.
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Do Not Eat, Touch, Or Even Inhale the Air Around the Manchineel Tree You might be tempted to eat the fruit. Do not eat the fruit. You might
want to rest your hand on the trunk, or touch a branch. Do not touch
the tree trunk or any branches. Do not stand under or even near the
tree for any length of time whatsoever. Do not touch your eyes while
near the tree. Do not pick up any of the ominously shiny, tropic-green
leaves. If you want to slowly but firmly back away from this tree, you
would not find any argument from any botanist who has studied it.
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Eclipse 2017: The best and funniest reactions to the super rare phenomenon Anticipation mounted on Monday when the eclipse's totality - the line of shadow created when the sun is completely obscured - hit the shore of Oregon and rapidly moved eastwards to South Carolina. Many observers used high tech camera equipment to record the event.
Others documented the eclipses's unusual effect on shadows and animals.
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Tardigrades: The last survivors on Earth Although much attention has been given to the cataclysmic impact that an astrophysical event would have on human life, very little has been published around what it would take to kill the tardigrade, and wipe out life on this planet. The research implies that life on Earth in general, will extend as long as the Sun keeps shining. It also reveals that once life emerges, it is surprisingly resilient and difficult to destroy, opening the possibility of life on other planets. Tardigrades are the toughest, most resilient form of life on earth,
able to survive for up to 30 years without food or water, and endure
temperature extremes of up to 150 degrees Celsius, the deep sea and
even the frozen vacuum of space. The water-dwelling micro animal can
live for up to 60 years, and grow to a maximum size of 0.5mm, best seen
under a microscope. Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and
Harvard, have found that these life forms will likely survive all astrophysical
calamities, such as an asteroid, since they will never be strong enough
to boil off the world's oceans.
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Al Gore: ‘There’s still time to avoid catastrophe’ Last we saw our former VP he was hawking “An Inconvenient Truth.” Climate change. Energy revolution. Now — with cameras along — Big Daddy circled our globe educating us on oceans rising, Earth heating, politicians snoozing. Al Gore: “Ten years ago we did ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ Its predictions are coming true. Seas overflowing, storm changes, air changes, temperature rising, surges like superstorm Hurricane Sandy. “There’s still time to avoid catastrophe. That means working faster.
Learning. Buy the book. See the movie. Win conversations on the subject.
Accelerate switches to alternate methods.”
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The sun is getting quiet and that could be bad news for Earth
Space scientists reckon we are on the verge of a “deep solar minimum,” which is a period of low activity. Unlike the name suggests, this could cause an outer layer of the atmosphere called the thermosphere to contract — and it’s not entirely clear what the effects of this could be on our planet. Professor Yvonne Elsworth at the University of Birmingham in England
believes that a “fundamental change in the nature of the [sun’s magnetic]
dynamo may be in progress.” It’s backed up by NASA’s Solar Dynamics
Observatory’s daily snaps, which have shown a spotless sun for 44 days
in a row.
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A deadly supervolcano lies under Yellowstone — here's what would happen if it erupted But the national park also sits atop a supervolcano, simmering just under the surface. You can see some of the evidence of its active state in the hydrothermal activity that bubbles up, including Old Faithful, which shoots water every few hours. Between June 12 and June 19, Yellowstone experienced an earthquake
swarm of 464 events, the majority of which were magnitude 1 or below.
The University of Utah, which monitors seismic activity in Yellowstone,
noted that these swarms are common.
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Drugs found in Puget Sound salmon from tainted wastewater Those drugs and dozens of others are showing up in the tissues of juvenile chinook, researchers have found, thanks to tainted wastewater discharge. The estuary waters near the outfalls of sewage-treatment plants, and effluent sampled at the plants, were cocktails of 81 drugs and personal-care products, with levels detected among the highest in the nation. The medicine chest of common drugs also included Flonase, Aleve and
Tylenol. Paxil, Valium and Zoloft. Tagamet, OxyContin and Darvon. Nicotine
and caffeine. Fungicides, antiseptics and anticoagulants. And Cipro
and other antibiotics galore.
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The Science Behind Arizona's Record-Setting Heat Wave By early Monday afternoon, the temperature was 111 degrees in Tucson, the first in a forecasted series of a record-setting seven consecutive days with highs above 110, the longest streak in city history. (The previous record, should it fall, was six days in a row in 1994.) In Phoenix, just to the north, temperatures were even hotter. Meteorologists
there are expecting temperatures to run as high as 120 degrees on Tuesday
and Wednesday, at the apex of the heat wave. The National Weather Service
is calling the heat wave "extreme even by desert standards.".
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Mass Die-Off of Whales in Atlantic Is Being Investigated Forty-one whales have died in the past 15 months along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Maine. In a news conference on Thursday, officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries said that they had not identified the underlying reason for the mass death, but that 10 of the whales are known to have been killed by collisions with ships. The agency is starting a broad inquiry into the deaths.
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Voice of The Southern: Annual flooding — the new normal? That’s really not hyperbole. After torrential rains doused Southern Illinois earlier this month, both the Big Muddy and the Mississippi rivers posted near-record crests. The Big Muddy crested at 40.5 feet, just below the record set in 2011.
In the meantime, the Mississippi crested at 45.99 feet, the sixth highest
level on record. The record was set last year. During 2011, a levee
in Missouri was purposely breached in order to save Cairo from devastating
floods. So, for those keeping score at home, that would be four 100-year
floods in the past six years.
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Monster rats 'the size of cats' discovered on south London housing estate Lord Burr, 36, the self-proclaimed “People’s Lord” of Wimbledon, told the Daily Star were about 2ft in length. He said the supersize rodents could have grown so big by feeding off smaller rats. He told the newspaper: “Rats will eat mice and they will eat each
other as and when they die. “So it’s possible that these rats got so
big by attacking and eating smaller rats.
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Warmer-than-usual ocean waters this spring, tropical storms could come sooner and stronger in South Carolina The waters offshore, and in the Gulf of Mexico, could spur stronger storms during the heart of the summer hurricane season as well. That's the unsettling reality for coastal residents and the entire
state a year after Hurricane Matthew killed at least five people in
South Carolina and caused more than $100 million in damage here.
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The naked sun: No sunspots observed for 15 days, longest streak in years The 15-day spotless streak was the longest in “many years”, NASA said. Sunspot regions can be points of reference for those watching the sun. Without them, NASA said, “any viewer would have a hard time telling that the sun was even rotating.” The present absence of sunspots is happening as their overall numbers
decline in the sun’s approach to its next “solar minimum,” when its
irradiance or brightness reaches its lowest contemporary levels, which
happens in about an 11-year cycle.
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We Now Know Why A Town’s Drinking Water Turned This Alarming Shade Of Pink The town’s residents (who number only 1,029) recently got an unwelcome surprise when they turned on their faucets. The water coming out wasn’t crystal clear as it normally is. In fact,
it was about as colorful as colors can get. As the tweet below notes,
the water coming out wasn’t just pink, but “very, very pink.”
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A Taste For Pork Helped A Deadly Virus Jump To Humans There wasn't time to eat. Chua was chasing a killer. And he thought maybe he had finally tracked it down. He slid the slide under the microscope lens, turned on the scope's light and looked inside. "A chill went down my spine," Chua says. "The slide lit up bright green, like bright green lanterns." Right there, in Chua's hands, was a virus the world had never seen
before. And as he soon learned, it's also one of the most dangerous
ones. Now Chua had enough of the virus to kill everyone in the lab.
Maybe worse.
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In Somalia, Drought Leaves 110 Dead In Last 48 Hours In February, United Nations children's agency UNICEF said the drought in Somalia could lead to up to 270,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition this year. "It is a difficult situation for the pastoralists and their livestock.
Some people have been hit by famine and diarrhoea at the same time.
In the last 48 hours 110 people died due to famine and diarrhoea in
Bay region," Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire's office said in a statement.
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Lake worshipped by Incans now littered with trash These days the shores of South America's largest lake are littered with dead frogs, discarded paint buckets and bags of soggy trash. Less visible threats lurk in the water itself: toxic levels of lead and mercury. The steady deterioration of the prized tourist destination has caused a rash of health problems among the 1.3 million people in Peru and Bolivia living near Lake Titicaca's polluted banks. Untreated sewage water drains from two dozen nearby cities and illegal
gold mines high in the Andes dump up to 15 tons of mercury a year into
a river leading to the lake.
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Skeptical Climate Scientists Coming In From the Cold Researchers who see global warming as something less than a planet-ending calamity believe the incoming Trump administration may allow their views to be developed and heard. This didn’t happen under the Obama administration, which denied that a debate even existed. Now, some scientists say, a more inclusive approach – and the billions of federal dollars that might support it – could be in the offing. “Here’s to hoping the Age of Trump will herald the demise of climate
change dogma, and acceptance of a broader range of perspectives in climate
science and our policy options,” Georgia Tech scientist Judith Curry
wrote this month at her popular Climate Etc. blog.
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Travelling star heading towards Earth could cause DEVASTATING comet strikes as it passes by our sun Detailing their findings in a paper published by the journal Astronomy
& Astrophysics, co-authors Filip Berski and Piotr Dybcznski from Adam
Mickiewicz University in Poland revealed the star's minimum distance
to our solar system will be almost five times closer than previously
thought.
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Scientists say the global ocean circulation may be more vulnerable to shutdown than we thought The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC, is often described as a large oceanic conveyor belt. It’s a system of water currents that transports warm water northward from the Atlantic toward the Arctic, contributing to the mild climate conditions found in places like Western Europe. In the Northern Atlantic, the northward flowing surface water eventually
cools and sinks down toward the bottom of the ocean, and another current
brings that cooler water back down south again. The whole process is
part of a much larger system of overturning currents that circulates
all over the world, from pole to pole.
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2016 was the Hottest Year on Record Measuring global temperatures in slightly different ways, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that last year passed 2015 as the hottest year on record. NOAA calculated that the average 2016 global temperature was 58.69 degrees (14.84 degrees Celsius) - beating the previous year by 0.07 degrees (0.04 Celsius). NASA's figures, which include more of the Arctic, are higher at 0.22
degrees (0.12 Celsius) warmer than 2015. The Arctic "was enormously
warm, like totally off the charts compared to everything else," said
Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies
in New York, where the space agency monitors global temperatures.
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One of Earth's Most Dangerous Supervolcanoes Is Rumbling Based on physical measurements and computer modeling, "we propose
that magma could be approaching the CDP [critical degassing pressure]
at Campi Flegrei, a volcano in the metropolitan area of Naples, one
of the most densely inhabited areas in the world, and where accelerating
deformation and heating are currently being observed," wrote the scientists—who
are led by Giovanni Chiodini of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics
in Rome.
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Sounding the Alarm: Comets Pose Threat to Earth, Too Comets can also deliver a heaping helping of calamity to Earth, and scientists and policymakers alike should start taking measures to combat the threat, said Joseph Nuth, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Comets have largely been ignored by people that are interested in
defending the planet," Nuth said during a news conference at the annual
fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
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World’s last wild frankincense forests are under threat Bracing against high winds, Musse Ismail Hassan climbs with his feet wrapped in cloth to protect against the sticky resin. With a metal scraper, he chips off bark and the tree’s white sap bleeds into the salty air. “My father and grandfather were both doing this job,” said Hassan, who like all around here is Muslim. “We heard that it was with Jesus.” When dried and burned, the sap produces a fragrant smoke which perfumes
churches and mosques around the world. Frankincense, along with gold
and myrrh, was brought by the Three Kings as gifts in the Gospel account
of the birth of Jesus.
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Goodbye World: We’ve Passed the Carbon Tipping Point For Good According to a blog post last Friday from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year—or ever again for the indefinite future.” Their findings are based on weekly observations of carbon dioxide at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, where climate scientists have been measuring CO2 levels since 1958. What’s so terrifying about this number? For several years now, scientists
have been warning us that if atmospheric carbon were allowed to surpass
400 parts per million, it would mark a serious “milestone.” In 2012,
the Arctic was the first region on Earth to cross this red line. Three
years later, for the first time since scientists had begun to record
them, carbon levels remained above 400 parts per million for an entire
month.
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All Queens Must Die The sheep were trickier. There were a lot more of them, something
like 40,000, grazing over 96 square miles of mountainous island covered
in dense chaparral, little oak woodlands, deep canyons, towering cliffs,
and some of the largest sea caves in the world. A great landscape to
hide in. The Nature Conservancy — which owns about three-quarters of
the island — set about eradicating the sheep in 1981. By 1989, the Conservancy
had killed at least 37,000 of them, but some sheep survived on Santa
Cruz into the ‘90s.
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Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun Five hundred miles down the Atlantic Coast, the only road to Tybee Island, Ga., is disappearing beneath the sea several times a year, cutting the town off from the mainland. And another 500 miles on, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., increased tidal flooding is forcing the city to spend millions fixing battered roads and drains — and, at times, to send out giant vacuum trucks to suck saltwater off the streets. For decades, as the global warming created by human emissions caused
land ice to melt and ocean water to expand, scientists warned that the
accelerating rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’
coastline.
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Earth Just Narrowly Missed Getting Hit by an Asteroid The asteroid is called 2016 QA2, and it missed the Earth by less than a quarter of the distance to the moon. That puts it about three times as far away from Earth as our farthest satellites. And we never saw it coming. So how did 2016 QA2 sneak up on us like that? For this particular
asteroid, the answer seems to be that it has a very peculiar orbit.
It's highly elliptical, which means it can usually be found hanging
out by either Mars or Venus, but rarely ends up near Earth.
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Black Lives Matter UK says climate change is racist In Britain on Tuesday, members of Black Lives Matter UK gained access to London City Airport, where they chained themselves together on the runway in protest. Flights into the capital were diverted for several hours. Nine activists were arrested. It followed a similar demonstration on a road outside Heathrow, London’s largest airport, last month. But while the activists at Heathrow emphasized police brutality, the
group at City Airport wanted to highlight something else: climate change.
A statement from the group said climate change has a disproportionate
effect on people of color in the developing world. "Black people are
the first to die, not the first to fly, in this racist climate crisis,"
the group said.
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Louisiana's vanishing island: the climate 'refugees' resettling for $52m “When I was a kid I used to do trapping in the back,” he said, gesturing towards the back of the small, one-story house that stands elevated on stilts to escape the floods that roll in from the bayou after nearly every storm. “You could walk for a long time. Now, nothing but water.” The back balcony overlooks a vast expanse of water leading to Terrebonne Bay and, further, the Gulf of Mexico – that now lies in his backyard. Billiot and his equally sprightly 91-year-old wife, Denecia Naquin,
are among the last remaining residents of this island, which has lost
98% of its land and most of its population to coastal erosion and rising
sea levels since 1955. The population, which peaked at around 400, is
now down to around 85.
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A lightning strike just killed 300 reindeer in Norway While details about the incident are still forthcoming, it’s suspected that the reindeer huddled together in the rain, and when the lightning hit, its energy travelled across the ground and up the animals' legs, killing them where they stood. The victims belonged to Europe’s largest wild reindeer herd, numbering
10,000 or so in Norway's Hardangervidda national park - the largest
high mountain plateau in northern Europe, spanning some 8,000 square
kilometres (3,088 square miles).
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Scientists think they’ve just pinpointed the key driver of ice loss in Antarctica
The Antarctic Peninsula is headed for trouble — that much scientists know. Glaciers on the peninsula, which extends from the increasingly unstable West Antarctic region, have been retreating for decades, and some in the region have undergone particularly accelerated melting since the 1990s. Until recently, many scientists assumed that a steady increase in
air temperature around the peninsula, the product of global warming,
was the primary cause behind most of the ice loss. But new research
looking at the western side of the peninsula suggests that this may
not be the case after all. A study published Thursday in the journal
Science suggests that warm ocean water may be the biggest driver of
glacial retreat in that region — and it’s a problem that may not be
getting enough attention.
More Blastomycosis: Survivors of spore-borne illness tell harrowing tales Following last week’s front page article, the first in a multi-story series on the subject of blastomycosis, Mr. Bowerman reached out to The Expositor, wanting to share the news that numerous dogs have also died as a result of the fungal infection (a fact this newspaper has reported in the past and which will be covered later in this series), noting that he himself is a survivor. He said he did not know how he came in contact with the fungal spores
but said he had helped a neighbour to plane lumber but that the wood
had not been mouldy. This was in 2008.
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Ontario to spend $7-billion on sweeping climate change plan Ontario will begin phasing out natural gas for heating, provide incentives to retrofit buildings and give rebates to drivers who buy electric vehicles. It will also require that gasoline sold in the province contain less
carbon, bring in building code rules requiring all new homes by 2030
to be heated with electricity or geothermal systems, and set a target
for 12 per cent of all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2025.
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Incoming asteroids could crumble harmlessly before they hit us More than 90 per cent of asteroids and comets larger than a kilometre across in Earth’s neighbourhood have already been discovered, and scientists think the region is mostly clear of them. Should one wander near to us, though, it could have devastating results.
Scientists have ideas about how to push it away with thrusters or solar
sails. However, the success of these plans depends on understanding
what the rocks are made of and whether they might break apart. Space
rocks fall to Earth as meteorites all the time, but few are recovered,
so scientists are reluctant to crush them to study their contents and
behaviour. Earth rocks usually serve as models instead.
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Portland Public Schools bans material that is skeptical on climate change Material will also need to present human activity as one of the phenomenon's causes. In testimony to the board, Bill Bigelow, a former Portland teacher, told district officials that "we don't want kids in Portland learning material courtesy of the fossil fuel industry." Bigelow said that material that treats climate change as anything
other than fact is published by companies making concessions for fossil
fuel companies. He pointed to words such as "might," "may" and "could"
in educational materials.
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600 tons of melted radioactive Fukushima fuel still not found, clean-up chief reveals The company hopes to locate and start removing the missing fuel from 2021, the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) chief of decommissioning at Fukushima, Naohiro Masuda, revealed. The fuel extraction technology is yet to be elaborated upon, he added. Following the 2011 meltdown at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant
uranium fuel of three power generating reactors gained critical temperature
and burnt through the respective reactor pressure vessels, concentrating
somewhere on the lower levels of the station currently filled with water.
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Earth Was Struck By A 19-Mile Wide Asteroid That Would Have Caused ‘Cliffs To Crumble’ From the famous Chicxulub asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs to the Ordovician–Silurian extinction which was reportedly caused by a devastating gamma ray burst from a hypernova explosion some 6,000 light years away. The fact that we’ve survived this long then is nothing short of a galactic roll of the dice. New research suggests we’re even luckier than we thought as scientists
are uncovering evidence of what would have been another cataclysmic
event to take place on Earth. Scientists from the Australian National
University have found evidence that around 3.45 billion years ago a
titanic asteroid struck the Earth with enough destructive force that
it would have made cliffs crumble.
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Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating They’re known as pizzlies or grolars, and they’re a fusion of the Arctic white bear and their brown cousins. It’s a blend that’s been turning up more and more in parts of Alaska and Western Canada. Last week, a strange-looking bear was shot by a hunter in Nunavut,
a remote territory that curves around Canada’s Hudson Bay. Its head
was large, like a grizzly’s, but its fur was white. The bear’s genetics
were not tested, but Arctic researchers seem unified in their analysis:
It’s a polar-grizzly mix. A hybrid.
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Changing climate: 10 years after An Inconvenient Truth As research mounted, scientists around the world from fields as diverse
as chemistry and astronomy were coming to grips with a newfound truth:
Carbon dioxide spewed by fossil fuel burning and other greenhouse gases
were warming the world at an alarming rate, potentially threatening
the health and livelihoods of millions of people. Despite the gravity
and urgency of their findings, the scientists’ warnings fell mostly
on deaf ears for years.
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'Scarier than we initially thought': CDC sounds warning on Zika virus "Most of what we've learned is not reassuring," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Everything we look at with this virus seems to be a bit scarier than we initially thought." As summer approaches, officials are warning that mosquito eradication
efforts, lab tests and vaccine research may not be able to catch up.
There are 346 cases of Zika confirmed in the continental United States
— all in people who had recently traveled to Zika-prone countries, according
to the most recent CDC report. Of those, 32 were in pregnant women,
and seven were sexually transmitted.
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Uncertainties for asteroid 2013 TX68 Earth flyby Latest estimates say the asteroid will pass no closer than 19,000 miles (30,000 km). By contrast, the moon’s distance is 250,000 miles (400,000 km). The space rock is currently approaching Earth from the sun’s direction, which makes it difficult to track it – and get a more exact orbital estimate – until it is closer to us and passes to the night sky between late February and early March. Astronomers did make a step forward in refining the asteroid’s orbit
when realized that this object – which was observed only briefly in
2013 before going into a region of the sky lit by the sun’s glare –
was visible on some images a few days before it was officially detected
on October 6, 2013. The new images let scientists roughly refine its
trajectory, but just a bit.
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UN: 420,000 people die annually from foodborne diseases, over a quarter are young children The U.N. health agency says it estimates that about 600 million people fall ill annually after consuming tainted food. The agency said Thursday that a comprehensive review of diseases caused
by 31 types of bacteria, viruses, parasites, toxins or chemicals found
the highest burden in Africa and Southeast Asia.
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Aerosols are causing global warming on JUPITER: 'Fluffy' haze of particles is found to be heating the gas planet's atmosphere Using data from Nasa probes, the planetary scientists have found that the gases in Jupiter's atmosphere alone can't account for the planet's climate. Instead, they now believe a thick haze of low density hydrocarbons
interacts with solar energy in the atmosphere to regulate heat. The
findings mean Jupiter's atmosphere is heated differently to Earth's,
and could help us to understand the climate of other planets in the
solar system, and beyond.
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Zika’s alarming spread: CDC investigates link to paralyzing condition, adds 8 countries to travel warning The agency's initial list contained 14 countries, but the CDC on Friday added eight more -- in South America, the Caribbean and Polynesia -- as places where the reach of the virus is growing. The CDC now is working with authorities in Brazil to study a potential
link between the mosquito-borne virus and a rare syndrome known as Guillain-Barré
that can lead to paralysis. In Brazil, which is currently the epicenter
of Zika, public health officials were already investigating a link between
the virus and a rare birth condition called microcephaly. That country
has seen nearly 3,900 suspected cases since October, with the babies
involved suffering serious brain damage.
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The world faces widespread food shortages due to global warming: Crops will become scarce as droughts ravage Africa and Asia The head of the World Meteorological Society, Michel Jarraud has warned that of all the threats posed by a warming climate, shrinking water supplies are the most serious. It is predicted that by 2025, some 2.8 billion people will live in 'water scarce' areas - a huge rise from the 1.6 billion who do now. Parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia will be worst affected,
with pockets of Australia, the US and southern Europe also predicted
to suffer.
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Higher Levels Of Radiation From 2011 Japan Nuclear Accident Detected Offshore The new report shows the rise of sampling areas where indications of contamination are present. Furthermore, the researchers were able to identify the highest level of radiation ever recorded from a sample obtained in an area 1,600 miles west of San Francisco. Although the amount of radioactive cesium isotopes (approximately
264 gallons) is 50 percent larger than any other sample obtained along
the West Coast, the number is still 500 times smaller than the safety
limits for drinking water set by the government of the United States.
The levels are also significantly lower than the limits that warrant
concern for radiation exposure during water activities such as swimming
and boating, among others.
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Human cases of 'rabbit fever' have jumped to highest mark since 1984, officials say In the last two decades, health officials saw an average of only about 125 cases each year of the illness — known to doctors as tularemia. But there have already been 235 cases this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday. That's the most since 1984. Officials aren't sure why cases are up, but speculate that it may
have to do with weather conditions that likely helped rodents — and
the bacteria — thrive in certain states. At least 100 of this year's
cases have been in four states — Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota and
Wyoming. Among those cases was an elderly man who died.
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Nuclear is not the answer to the climate crisis The academic authors have a fine record in identifying the causes
and consequences of climate change, but their proposed solution simply
doesn’t make sense. The main problem is that, contrary what many think,
nuclear power is a poor method of reducing carbon emissions: its uranium
ore and fuel processes have heavy carbon footprints. Indeed, of the
ways to reduce carbon emissions in the energy sphere, nuclear is by
far the most expensive in terms of pound per tonne of carbon saved.
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Nicaragua refuses to make climate pledge at Paris talks But the Central American state burst on to the world stage at this week’s climate change conference in Paris when it became the first nation to declare it had no intention of publishing a national plan to combat global warming. That would be “a path to failure” said Paul Oquist, Managua’s lead negotiator, explaining his country did not want to be a part of a process dooming the world to “the hell” of dangerous global warming. More than 180 of the 195 countries involved in the Paris talks have
volunteered a plan to combat climate change since March as part of an
effort to forge a new global accord to stop global temperatures rising
more than 2C from pre-industrial times.
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