By Elizabeth Chuck 11 September 2017 (NBC News) – Add this to the list of what makes Hurricane Irma an unprecedented storm: Its strength literally changed the shape of the ocean.Before making landfall in Florida on Sunday, the most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record sucked water inward away from shorelines, leaving bays along the Gulf […]
By Christine Todd Whitman 8 September 2017 (The New York Times) – I have been worried about how the Environmental Protection Agency would be run ever since President Trump appointed Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, to oversee it. The past few months have confirmed my fears. The agency created by a Republican […]
By David Smiley 8 September 2017 (Miami Herald) – Miami’s Republican mayor called on President Donald Trump and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency Friday to acknowledge that climate change is playing a role in the extreme weather that has slammed his city and the continental U.S. this summer. Speaking from Miami’s Emergency Operations […]
By David Wallace-Wells 9 September 2017 (New York Magazine) – For decades, a kind of market logic has governed the way we talk about global warming, emanating from the moderate right: Climate change may well be real, the Chamber of Commerce types say, but the need for economic growth is much more urgent and climate […]
By Hal Bernton 9 September 2017 BEACON ROCK STATE PARK, Skamania County (The Seattle Times) – As night fell last Monday in the Columbia River Gorge, the Oregon slopes burned as if carpet-bombed from above. Winds acted like bellows in a hearth to supercharge the flames spread by embers flying from ridge to ridge. Stands […]
By Anthony Faiola 10 September 2017 PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (The Washington Post) – The storm-stricken Caribbean took on the feel of a sprawling disaster zone Sunday, with Cuban first responders using inflatable rafts to navigate flooded streets as panicked families sent up social-media pleas in search of loved ones on hard-hit islands further east.In St. John […]
By Devin Henry 9 September 2017 (The Hill) – President Trump has stacked his administration with officials who doubt the scientific consensus behind man-made climate change, underscoring a growing divide within the Republican party. Even as leading scientists, environmentalists and most Democrats accept research that shows climate change accelerating — and as some see it […]
By Robinson Meyer 7 September 2017 (The Atlantic) – This wasn’t supposed to be a bad year for Western wildfires.Last winter, a weak La Niña bloomed across the Pacific. It sent flume after flume of rain to North America and irrigated half the continent. Water penetrated deep into the soil of Western forests, and mammoth […]
By Jeffry Bartash 9 September 2017 (MarketWatch) – Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have upended the lives of millions of Americans, but the aftereffects will also linger in much smaller way for those entrusted with keeping the U.S. economy safe and sound. The storms caused tremendous damage, forced thousands of businesses to close and compelled millions […]
By Rebecca Leber 8 September 2017 (Mother Jones) – Three weeks ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that reversed an Obama-era requirement that future construction in areas likely to flood need to be built at a higher elevation [cf. Trump signs order to end Obama-era flood risk building standards]. But after the devastation […]
