By Marlowe Hood14 January 2019 (Phys.org) – In a world where climate change, air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, ozone depletion, and other environmental problems overlap, a fix in one arena can cause trouble in another. Here are a few examples of what might be called Earth’s “zero-sum” dilemma in the 21st century. […]
By Dino Grandoni and Juliet Eilperin 13 October 2018 (The Washington Post) – The Environmental Protection Agency moved this week to disband two outside panels of experts charged with advising the agency on limiting harmful emissions of soot and smog-forming pollutants.The agency informed scientists advising the EPA on the health impacts of soot that their […]
By Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, and Chris Mooney 28 September 2018 (The Washington Post) – Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous six degrees by the end of this century.A rise of six degrees Fahrenheit, or […]
By Dan Elliott 31 August 2018 DENVER (AP) – The Trump administration is rolling back some U.S. regulations on climate-changing methane pollution, calling them expensive and burdensome, but Colorado says its rules are working — and they have industry support.Energy companies have found and repaired about 73,000 methane leaks since 2015 under a state-required oil […]
Dr. Jeff Masters 5 August 2018 (Weather Underground) – The future-is-now Northern Hemisphere summer of 2018 roasted a new portion of Europe with all-time record heat over the weekend: Portugal and Spain. Portugal’s capital city Lisbon hit 111.2°F (44°C) on Saturday, its hottest temperature ever recorded. The previous record was 109.4°F (43°C) in 1981. Portugal’s […]
By Nathaniel Rich 1 August 2018 (The New York Times) – The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal, bound in a coal-black cover with beige lettering — one of […]
By Matt McGrath 8 July 2018 (BBC News) – Cut-price Chinese home insulation is being blamed for a massive rise in emissions of a gas, highly damaging to the Earth’s protective ozone layer. The Environmental Investigations Agency (EIA) found widespread use of CFC-11 in China, even though the chemical was fully banned back in 2010. […]
By Bob Henson 29 June 2018 (Weather Underground) – June will segue into July this weekend with much of the central and eastern U.S. enduring a blistering, dangerous heat wave that could extend into the July 4 holiday in some areas. Excessive heat warnings were already in place Friday morning for parts of 11 states […]
30 May 2018 (NOAA) – NOAA’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI), which tracks the warming influence of long-lived greenhouse gases, has increased by 41 percent from 1990 to 2017, up 1 percent from 2016 — with most of that attributable to rising carbon dioxide levels, according to NOAA climate scientists. [cf. NOAA’s greenhouse gas index […]
By Kasha Patel 31 May 2018 (NASA) – The air we breathe today in the United States is much cleaner than it was in the 1960s and 70s. But recent satellite data show that air quality is not improving as quickly as predicted by models.“Air quality is better than it was decades ago, but now […]
