AUSTIN, Texas, 27 April 2018 (AP) – Advocacy groups said Friday that Texas is poised to unfairly distribute billions in federal funding provided for housing repairs following Hurricane Harvey’s devastation — prioritizing wealthy homeowners over poorer victims in ways that could constitute racial discrimination. At issue is a draft state rebuilding plan that says homeowners […]
By Jeremy Berke 25 April 2018 (Business Insider) – President Donald Trump announced the reduction of two national monuments in Utah in December 2017. Bears Ears was reduced by 85 percent in the months that followed, in the largest acreage reduction of a national monument to date. Trump also cut Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in […]
By Jeff Tollefson 19 April 2018 (Nature) – Grasslands in warm and dry climates could grow faster as carbon dioxide levels rise, according to data from a long-term ecological field experiment in Minnesota. The finding, which runs counter to long-established ideas about how plants will respond to the greenhouse gas, suggests that grasslands could provide […]
By John W. Fitzpatrick and Nathan R. Senner 27 April 2018 (The New York Times) – A worldwide catastrophe is underway among an extraordinary group of birds — the marathon migrants we know as shorebirds. Numbers of some species are falling so quickly that many biologists fear an imminent planet-wide wave of extinctions. These declines […]
By Ashley Killough and Deirdre Walsh 26 April 2018 (CNN) – Scott Pruitt’s controversial spending and travel decisions were the subject of a blistering congressional hearing Thursday, where the embattled administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency faced House members amid weeks of scandal. [Of course, his denial of climate and environmental science is not a […]
11 April 2018 (Climate Central) – With flooding in parts of the Mississippi Valley and a strong Pacific storm coming into the Northwest, we examined the trend in the number of days each year with heavy precipitation at 244 individual sites in the U.S. This expands our nationwide-averaged heavy precipitation analysis from earlier this year, […]
By Jason Samenow 19 April 2018 (The Washington Post) – While abnormally cold weather continues to grip the Eastern United States, a full-fledged dose of summer weather has overtaken much of Europe.An enormous heat dome, parked over Germany, has covered a large part of the continent in record or near-record warmth.High temperatures in the 70s […]
19 Apr 2018 (James Cook University) – A new study published online today in Nature shows that corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef experienced a catastrophic die-off following the extended marine heatwave of 2016.“When corals bleach from a heatwave, they can either survive and regain their colour slowly as the temperature drops, or they […]
19 April 2018 (Climate Feedback) – This article in The Australian covers a new study published in Nature that concludes global warming played a key role in the recent large-scale bleaching and mortality of corals in the Great Barrier Reef. Based on the comments of a single oceanographer (Prof. Kaempf), the article was headlined “Not […]
By Patrick Barkham 26 April 2018 (The Guardian) – “We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There […]
