First tanker crosses Arctic sea route without ice breaker

By Matt McGrath 24 August 2017 (BBC News) – A commercial LNG tanker has sailed across the colder, northern route from Europe to Asia without the protection of an ice-breaker for the first time.The specially-built ship completed the crossing in just six-and-a-half days setting a new record, according to the tanker’s Russian owners.The 300-metre-long Sovcomflot […]

U.N. body criticizes U.S. “failure at the highest political level to unequivocally reject racist violent events”

GENEVA, 23 August 2017 (United Nations) – The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has called on the Government of the United States of America, as well as high-level politicians and public officials, to unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech and crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country. In […]

Graph of the Day: Trump approval and disapproval trends, 26 August 2017

26 August 2017 (Desdemona Despair) – How low can Trump go, and how long will it take him to get there? One way to gauge public sentiment is to aggregate data from multiple polls and compute an estimate. Fortunately, the good people at FiveThirtyEight are doing this for us at their excellent site, How popular […]

Tamino: Sea level rise has accelerated

By Tamino 25 July 2017 (Open Mind) – There seems to be some interest in global sea level as estimated by tide gauges. In particular, we have recently been directed to a graph of the data from Church & White, which is the most reputable of the available choices. Alas, the graph we were directed […]

Burning Man Temple being built from trees killed in California drought

By Joe Kukura 24 August 2017 (SFist) – You’ll notice this year’s Burning Man Temple looks a lot different than previous years’ laser cut jigsaw designs of David Best. Best has handed off the task to his previous lead engineers and architects, who’ve come up with a simple but striking concept composed of flat panels. […]

Climate change may shrink the world’s fish

By Craig Welch 21 August 2017 (National Geographic) – Warming temperatures and loss of oxygen in the sea will shrink hundreds of fish species—from tunas and groupers to salmon, thresher sharks, haddock and cod—even more than previously thought, a new study concludes [responding to Models projecting the fate of fish populations under climate change need […]

Hurricane Harvey slams ashore in Texas, catastrophic flood threat still to come – “An area larger than the state of Massachusetts, including Houston and Galveston, can expect more than 20 inches of rain between now and Wednesday”

By Bob Henson 26 August 2017 (Weather Underground) – Hurricane Harvey ripped into the central Texas coast as a Category 4 storm late Friday night. Harvey’s center made landfall just before 10 pm CDT about 4 miles east of Rockport with top sustained winds estimated by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) at 130 mph, which […]

Image of the Day: Hurricane Harvey approaches Texas

By Mike Carlowicz 25 August 2017 (NASA) – Residents along the coast of Texas braced for a potent hurricane to make landfall late on August 25. Forecasters believe the storm will be at major intensity (category 3 or higher) and will be the strongest to make landfall in the United States in 12 years. Hurricane […]

New study finds that climate change costs will hit Trump country hardest – “Unmitigated climate change will be very expensive for huge regions of the United States”

By John Abraham 24 August 2017 (The Guardian) – Humans are causing Earth’s climate to change. We know that. We’ve known it for decades. Okay so what? The follow-up questions should be directed to what the effects of warming will be. What will the costs be to society, to the natural biosystem, and to human […]

Hurricane Harvey upgraded to Category 4, thousands in Texas flee – “We may be looking at unprecedented and major-to-record flooding”

By Brian Thevenot 25 August 2017 CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (Reuters) – Hurricane Harvey moved closer to the Texas coast on Friday and residents were warned to take shelter from 125 mile-per-hour winds and 12-foot ocean surges when the most powerful storm in over a decade slams the mainland United States.Harvey strengthened to a Category 4 […]

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