26 December 2016 (Earthy Robot) – Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources has removed “climate change” from its website page that describes the impact of climate change. Contact the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to let them know that science matters and that Governor Scott Walker‘s personal agenda of denial is irrelevant. Luckily, the internet remembers. […]
25 December 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – Ten years ago today, Children of Men, the brilliant, dystopian science fiction film, debuted in the United States. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men portrays Britain in the year 2027 as the last bastion of civilization standing against the imminent extinction of the human species. In 2006, Cuarón […]
By Kevin Kalhoefer and Andrew Seifter16 December 2016 (Media Matters) – Several media outlets reporting on President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state have uncritically described Tillerson as accepting of climate change and supportive of a carbon tax. But these reports ignored scientifically inaccurate claims Tillerson has made about climate change, […]
By Michael Smith and Jonathan Levin16 December 2016 (Bloomberg Businessweek) – Donald Trump shelled out $409,759 for property taxes in 2016 on Mar-a-Lago, his oceanfront club above billionaire’s row in Palm Beach, Florida. Some of those tax dollars will go toward combating the ravages of climate change, a phenomenon the president-elect has dismissed as a […]
By Juliet Eilperin and Carol Morello 20 December 2016 (The Washington Post) – Donald Trump’s presidential transition team has asked State Department officials to disclose how much money it provides each year to international environmental groups. It’s the latest example of how the incoming administration is reassessing the U.S. government’s approach to tackling climate change […]
By Luke Harding and Hannes Munzinger18 December 2016 (The Guardian) – Rex Tillerson, the businessman nominated by Donald Trump to be the next US secretary of state, is the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, leaked documents show. Tillerson – the chief executive of ExxonMobil […]
By Michael E. Mann 16 December 2016 (Washington Post) – My Penn State colleagues looked with horror at the police tape across my office door. I had been opening mail at my desk that afternoon in August 2010 when a dusting of white powder fell from the folds of a letter. I dropped the letter, […]
By Josh Fischman15 December 2016 SAN FRANCISCO (Scientific American) – Anxiety among Earth and climate scientists has been mounting for weeks. The election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. president, a candidate who called human-driven climate change a hoax, was followed by Trump naming more and more climate-change doubters to run the government’s environment and […]
By Ed Yong 2 December 2016 (The Atlantic) – In September, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned 19 common chemicals from common antibacterial washes, because manufacturers hadn’t shown that they were safe in the long run, or any better than plain soap and water. In October, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) updated a rule […]
[Longtime Desdemona readers will recall the ”libricide” against Canadian fisheries science by the Harper government in 2013. –Des] By Brady Dennis 13 December 2016 (Washington Post) – Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent […]