June 2017 (EDGI) – The Trump administration currently poses the greatest threat to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its entire 47-year history. Twice before, presidential administrations in North America have targeted their own environmental agencies with comparable aggression, in the early Reagan administration (1981-1983) and under Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006-2015). Trump’s […]
By Ruthy Munoz and Gary McWilliams 27 August 2017 HOUSTON, Texas (Reuters) – Emergency crews raced to pull people from cars and homes as flood waters rose across southeast Texas on Sunday, rescuing more than 1,000 people in the Houston area as Tropical Storm Harvey pounded the region.Harvey came ashore late Friday as the most […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Dr. Jeff Masters 25 August 2017 (Weather Underground) – Hurricane Harvey is poised to deliver a catastrophic flooding blow to Texas after putting on an impressive round of rapid deepening Friday morning that brought the storm to the verge of Category 3 strength. Harvey passed over a warm ocean eddy with high heat content […]
22 June 2017 (UNODC) – Opium production on the increase In 2016, global opium production increased by one third compared with the previous year. Although there was also an increase in the size of the area under opium poppy cultivation, the major increase in opium production was primarily the result of an improvement in opium […]
8 August 2017 (JRC) – Heatwaves amplified by high humidity can reach above 40°C and may occur as often as every two years, leading to serious risks for human health. If global temperatures rise with 4°C, a new super heatwave of 55°C can hit regularly many parts of the world, including Europe.A recently published study […]
