Synchronous fireflies light up the Smoky Mountains. In this 345-second time-lapse exposure, fireflies blink through the woods during the Elkmont Fireflies viewing event at Elkmont Campground in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee on Friday, 31 May 2019. The "Photinus carolinus" firefly is the only species in America that can synchronize their light patterns as part of their annual mating ritual. Photo: Calvin Mattheis / News Sentinel

Fireflies are dying out because people are destroying their habitats

By Dan Radel 31 July 2019 (Asbury Park Press) – Blink and you’ll miss one. Collecting fireflies is a childhood memory that many of us share. Their glowing lights begin to appear in the twilight around the time school ends each year, signaling the start of summer vacation.  But is the fire going out?     Researchers and advocates say the insect is […]

Projected share of production from new oil and gas fields, 2020-2029. The majority of the world’s new oil and gas set to come from the U.S. Graphic: Global Witness

U.S. set to drown the world in oil – “The sheer scale of this new production dwarfs that of every other country in the world”

20 August 2019 (Global Witness) – A staggering 61 percent of the world’s new oil and gas production over the next decade is set to come from one country alone: the United States. The sheer scale of this new production dwarfs that of every other country in the world and would spell disaster for the […]

Large rivers of melting water form on an ice sheet in western Greenland on 1 August 2019 and drain into moulin holes that empty into the ocean from underneath the ice. The heat wave that smashed high temperature records in five European countries a passed over Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island's ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic. Photo: Caspar Haarløv / Into the Ice / AP

Bizarre happenings in the Arctic: Lightning, tropical moisture, and more

By Bob Henson 14 August 2019 (Weather Underground) – You’ll have to forgive the Arctic. It’s had a rough summer. Sea ice is running neck and neck with 2012 for the lowest values on record for this time of year. Wildfires are ringing the Arctic, pouring more carbon dioxide into the air than in any comparable period in 17 […]

People watch sockeye salmon it the fish allder at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle, on 23 June 2017 Photo: Hiram M. Chittenden Locks

Lowest sockeye salmon count on record at the Ballard Locks – “The salmon population is just not healthy anymore”

By Meghan Walker 15 August 2019 (My Ballard) – The number of sockeye salmon passing through the Ballard Locks Fish Ladder is at all-time low, according to yearly counts dating back to the 1970s. According to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s daily count, just 18,000 sockeye have been counted at the fish ladder during […]

A crane hoists wind turbine blades. Photo: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg

Wind turbines tossed into dump stirs debate on wind power’s dirty downside

By Chris Martin 31 July 2019 (Bloomberg) – Wind turbines may be carbon-free, but they’re not recyclable. A photograph of dozens of giant turbine blades dumped into a Wyoming landfill touched off a debate Wednesday on Twitter about wind power’s environmental drawbacks. The argument may be only beginning. Fiberglass turbine blades — which in some […]

George Luber spoke at Monsanto Auditorium about the health threats of climate change at the MU Life Sciences & Society Program’s 12th annual symposium, “Confronting Climate Change,” held on 12 March 2016 in the Bond Life Sciences Center. Photo: Bond Life Sciences Center

U.S. scientist to file whistleblower complaint after agency halts his climate work – “As our climate spins out of control, bureaucrats eager to please the Trump administration have worked feverishly to destroy the reputations of climate scientists who stand in its way”

By Timothy Gardner 15 August 2019 WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A climate scientist for the Trump administration’s health protection agency who was ordered to drop work on climate issues will file a whistleblower complaint this week with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, his lawyers said on Wednesday. George Luber, who ran the climate and health […]

Map of world water stress projected to 2020, 2030, and 2040. Data: World Resources Institute; United Nations. Graphic: The New York Times

A quarter of humanity faces looming water crises – “The picture is alarming in many places around the world”

By Somini Sengupta and Weiyi Cai 6 August 2019 BENGALURU, India (The New York Times) – Countries that are home to one-fourth of Earth’s population face an increasingly urgent risk: The prospect of running out of water. From India to Iran to Botswana, 17 countries around the world are currently under extremely high water stress, […]

Media article co-visibility network-individual level. Clustered representation of the co-visibility network: nodes are climate change contrarians (CCCs) and climate change scientists (CCSs) who have at least one media article associated with at least one other individual. Links are colored according to three types: links between members of the CCC (CCS) group are red (blue) and links between groups are black; the percentages of links by type are reported in parentheses (e.g., 52 percent of links are within the CCC group). We used a modularity-maximizing clustering algorithm48 to identify three communities, with nodes ordered along each spine according to its network centrality—as such, the most prominent individuals are located at the apex. Two communities are well mixed, whereas the third represents an extremely polarized echo chamber comprised primarily of CCC. (inset) Magnification of the apex showing the most prominent individuals. Graphic: Peterson, et al., 2019 / Nature Communications

Media coverage creates false balance on climate science, study shows – “Climate change contrarians” receive 49 percent more media coverage than scientists

By Lorena Anderson 13 August 2019 (UC Merced) – The American media lends too much weight to people who dismiss climate change, giving them legitimacy they haven’t earned, posing serious danger to efforts aimed at raising public awareness and motivating rapid action, a new study shows. While it is not uncommon for media outlets to […]

Graphs showing total precipitation averaged across the 48 contiguous U.S. states from January to July, 1895-2019; Statewide rankings for average precipitation for July 2019, as compared to each July since records began in 1895; and Statewide rankings for average temperature for July 2019, as compared to each July since records began in 1895. Graphic: NOAA / NCEI

U.S. racks up wettest calendar year to date in July 2019

By Bob Henson 7 August 2019 (Weather Underground) – The Big U.S. Wet of 2018-19 went on cruise control in July, but the year so far managed to hang on as the nation’s wettest calendar year to date in records going back more than a century, NOAA reported on Wednesday. Averaged across the 48 contiguous states, the […]

A bald eagle, one of the Endangered Species Act’s success stories, near Castle Dale, Utah. Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux / The New York Times

Trump Administration weakens protections for endangered species – “If we make decisions based on short-term economic costs, we’re going to have a whole lot more extinct species”

By Lisa Friedman 12 August 2019 WASHINGTON (The New York Times) – The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law credited with rescuing the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from extinction. The changes could […]

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