By Scott Higham, Sari Horwitz, and Steven Rich 16 July 2019 (The Washington Post) – America’s largest drug companies saturated the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 through 2012 as the nation’s deadliest drug epidemic spun out of control, according to previously undisclosed company data released as part of the […]
By Brian Kahn 18 July 2019 (Gizmodo) – Vast stretches of Earth’s northern latitudes are on fire right now. Hot weather has engulfed a huge portion of the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to Siberia. That’s helped create conditions ripe for wildfires, including some truly massive ones burning in remote parts of the region that […]
By Bob Weber 15 July 2019 (The Canadian Press) – Weather watchers are focused on the world’s most northerly community, which is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. “It’s really quite spectacular,” said David Phillips, Environment Canada’s chief climatologist. “This is unprecedented.” The weather agency confirmed that Canadian Forces Station Alert hit a record […]
WASHINGTON, 11 July 2019 (Center for Biological Diversity) – Highlighting the need for global action to fight giraffes’ silent extinction, a body of scientific experts today declared giraffes in Kenya and Tanzania — called Masai giraffes — endangered. Masai giraffes, one of nine giraffe subspecies, had long been considered a key population for the species. But […]
By Merrit Kennedy 17 July 2019 (NPR) – Two vital research agencies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are hemorrhaging staff as less than two-thirds of the researchers asked to relocate from Washington to the Kansas City area have agreed to do so. When U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced the planned new location […]
27 June 2019 (Chalmers University of Technology) – The Powering Past Coal Alliance, or PPCA, is a coalition of 30 countries and 22 cities and states that aims to phase out unabated coal power. But analysis led by Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, published in Nature Climate Change, shows that members mainly pledge to close […]
17 July 2019 (AFP) – The concept of a carbon budget is dead simple: figure out how much CO2 humanity can pump into the atmosphere without pushing Earth’s surface temperature beyond a dangerous threshold. [cf. What Counts for Our Climate: Carbon Budgets Untangled and Budgeting for our future climate. –Des] The 2015 Paris climate treaty […]
By Dom Phillips 19 July 2019 BRASÍLIA (The Guardian) – The Amazon belongs to Brazil and European countries can mind their own business because they have already destroyed their own environment, said Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who also described his own government’s satellite data showing an alarming rise in deforestation as “lies”. “You have to understand […]
By Dr. Jeff Masters 18 July 2019 (Weather Underground) – June 2019 was the planet’s warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, said NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) on Tuesday. NASA also rated June 2019 as the warmest June on record, well of ahead of the previous record set in 2015. The global heat in June […]
IRVINE, California, 1 July 2019 (UCI News) – The nations that have signed agreements to stabilize the global mean temperature by 2050 will fail to meet their goals unless existing fossil fuel-burning infrastructure around the world is retired early, according to a study [pdf] – published today in Nature – by researchers at the University […]
