6 May 2019 (IPBES) – Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the summary of which was […]
18 April 2019 (Gallup) – Gallup’s Positive and Negative Experience Indexes measure life’s intangibles — feelings and emotions — that traditional economic indicators such as GDP were never intended to capture. Each index provides a real-time snapshot of people’s daily experiences, offering leaders insights into the health of their societies that they cannot gather from […]
By James Temple1 May 2019 (Technology Review) – Climate change is clearly making some regions wetter and others drier. But it’s been difficult for scientists to detect a clear, consistent human role in increasing the frequency and severity of global droughts given natural climate variability, regional differences, and limited data. A new report in Nature adds evidence […]
2 May 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – Everybody knows the “American Dream” of upward class mobility is a shining artifact of the past, to borrow the words of Leonard Cohen. But how fast is the dream dying? Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights project seeks to answer this question and hopes to prescribe remedies. They’ve collected a great […]
By Naveena Sadasivam 17 April 2019 (Grist) – For more than a decade, indigenous communities in Alaska have been fighting to prevent the mining of copper and gold at Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and a crucial source of sustenance. The proposed mine, blocked under the Obama […]
30 April 2019 (University of Guelph) – A “sleeping giant” hidden in permafrost soils in Canada and other northern regions worldwide will have important consequences for global warming, says a new report led by University of Guelph scientist Merritt Turetsky. Scientists have long studied how gradual permafrost thaw occurring over decades in centimetres of surface […]
By Maayan Lubell; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Gareth Jones1 May 2019 JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Anti-Semitic attacks worldwide rose 13 percent in 2018 from the previous year, with the highest number of incidents reported in major Western democracies including the United States, France, Britain and Germany, an annual study showed on Wednesday. Those incidents included […]
By Lena H. Sun 25 April 2019 (The Washington Post) – Measles cases in the United States have now exceeded the highest number on record in a single year since the disease was eliminated in 2000. Nationwide, 695 cases of the vaccine-preventable illness had been reported in 22 states this year, as of 3 p.m. Wednesday […]
By Rafi Letzter 23 April 2019 (Live Science) – Greenland’s ice sheet is melting six times faster than it was in the 1980s. And all that meltwater is directly raising sea levels. That’s all according to a new study, published yesterday (22 April 2019) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that […]
By Matthew Cappucci 22 April 2019 (The Washington Post) – Vietnam broke its national high temperature record Saturday, the latest in a mounting list of records to fall as the world continues to warm. The scorcher set the mercury thermometer soaring to 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.4 Celsius) in the community of Huong Khe, a rural district in […]
