By Jeremy Deaton14 February 2017 (ThinkProgress) – Two years ago this month, in a well-publicized and much lampooned political stunt, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) brought a snowball to the Senate floor to highlight the “unseasonable” cold and cast doubt on climate change. The Republican lawmaker would have been hard-pressed to find a snowball anywhere in […]
By Jonathan Foley12 February 2017 (The Macroscope) – Make no mistake: There is a War on Science in America. The White House not only denies obvious, empirical facts on a regular basis, but they have invented the Orwellian concept of “alternative facts”. In the past, we simply called them “lies”, but now they are used […]
By Kimberlee Kruesi9 February 2017 (The Associated Press) – An Idaho House panel has approved new K-12 science standards, but only after striking key references to climate change caused by human behavior. This is the third year the Idaho Legislature has struggled to agree on science standards for public schools. Previous efforts that included references […]
By Claire Salisbury14 February 2017 (Mongabay) – From the Amazon Basin to boreal forests, and from the Mekong to the Himalayan foothills, rivers worldwide are being targeted for major new dams in a global hydropower boom that also aims to supply drinking water to exploding human populations and to facilitate navigation on the planet’s rivers; […]
Dubai/Rome, 13 February 2017 (United Nations) – Failure to act now to make our food systems more resilient to climate change will “seriously compromise” food production in many regions and could doom to failure international efforts to end hunger and extreme poverty by 2030, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva warned today. “Agriculture holds the […]
By Robin McKie 11 February 2017 (The Observer) – Physicist Steven Desch has come up with a novel solution to the problems that now beset the Arctic. He and a team of colleagues from Arizona State University want to replenish the region’s shrinking sea ice – by building 10 million wind-powered pumps over the Arctic […]
10 February 2017 (Stockholm Resilience Centre) – A paper recently published in the journal The Anthropocene Review puts the current rate of change of Earth’s life support system in the context of the last 4-billion-year evolution of the biosphere. The paper, which is written by the centre’s Owen Gaffney and senior research fellow Will Steffen, […]
By Anna M. Phillips, Matt Hamilton, Paige St. John, and Chris Megerian12 February 2017 (Los Angeles Times) – Residents of Oroville and nearby towns were ordered to immediately evacuate on Sunday afternoon after a “hazardous situation” developed involving an emergency spillway at the Oroville Dam. The National Weather Service said the auxiliary spillway at the […]
By Valerie Volcovici2 February 2017 (Reuters) – Scientists may steal a page from the oil industry’s playbook to stop President Donald Trump rewriting the U.S. position on climate change, by relying on an obscure law meant to ensure federal agencies present accurate information. The 2001 Information Quality Act, passed under Republican President George W. Bush, […]
By Charles P. Pierce8 February 2017 WASHINGTON (Esquire) – The House of Representatives organized its committees on Tuesday, setting up the ground rules for the real mischief to come. One of these committees is the ironically named House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and it is chaired by one Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas. […]
