Nearly 200 countries have agreed to rules for how they’ll adhere to the Paris climate agreement. The text of a new “rulebook” was finalized Saturday (Dec. 15) at the 24th Conference of Parties in Katowice, Poland, which went into overtime as countries haggled over wording.
Fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg minced no words at the COP24 climate talks in Katowice, Poland this week. Speaking to the assembled countries Wednesday, at the most important climate negotiating meeting since the Paris talks in 2015, she said:
Ryan Zinke, US president Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior, will resign from office by the end of the year, according to multiple press reports and a tweet from the president. Zinke reportedly handed in his resignation on Saturday.
It’s very possible there are more unpleasant things in your tap water than you realize. Government watchdogs are slow to find them, and even when they do, it’s often too late. Even the fastest municipal responses to a water crisis take time, and by nature only happen once contaminants have been detected in the water, which is to say, likely only after residents have been exposed. For those interested in taking precautions, a water filter is the most direct solution. But not all water filters are created equal—in fact, there’s about a zillion different kinds.
If you thought that because you do not make a habit of eating avocado skins that you therefore needn’t wash avocados before slicing into them, you are incorrect. I know, I know. Take a minute.
The human folly of making ubiquitous a material that can break down into smaller and smaller particles, but never degrade, has reached yet another milestone in its macabre history.
The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than it has at any time in the last four centuries, and possibly faster than it has in the last 8,000 years. That’s according to new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Two common types of paint stripper have caused dozens of deaths in the US, and the chemicals they contain are known to cause asphyxiation, heart failure, nervous system damage. They’ve also been linked to increased cancer risk. But the US Environmental Protection Agency still hasn’t banned them.
California’s 2018 fire season, including the largest fire in state history, released nearly as much climate-warming and air-polluting emissions as a year’s worth of electricity use there.
As the Woolsey fire tore through more than 90,000 acres of Southern California over the weekend, it scorched land at a closed-down lab where the US government and private companies tested nuclear weapons and rocket engines for decades beginning in the 1940s.
The Camp wildfire in Northern California has burned 70,000 acres and killed five people as of Friday morning (Nov. 9). It is also producing massive amounts of dangerous smoke. In some parts of the state, breathing the air today is the equivalent of smoking multiple cigarettes—as many as 13.
In the near future, it’s likely that mosquito-borne diseases like Zika, dengue and yellow fever will be fought using mosquitoes themselves. Scientists have already piloted a method of releasing sterilized male mosquitoes, which don’t bite, into the population. The sterile mosquitoes “mate” with females, who then bear no offspring and die, causing mosquito populations to quickly decline.
The US government released the final conclusions today (Nov. 1) of a pair of federal studies that show “clear evidence” that cell-phone radiation is linked to heart cancer in male rats.
Jair Bolsonaro, the president-elect of Brazil, might be the biggest single-person threat the Amazon rainforest has seen in a generation. He has likened indigenous reserves in the Amazon to “chickenpox” on the land, and promised that “there won’t be a square centimeter demarcated as an indigenous reserve” under his leadership.
It’s hard to overstate the influence air pollution has on human health. We all breathe air, and much of the world population breathes air that hurts their health in some way; air pollution causes an estimated 7 million premature deaths per year. Even air that meets national pollution standards is often still harmful to human health. Babies and children are particularly susceptible; air pollution can impair immune-system development in utero and impede children’s cognitive development.
Seven years after the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, families are moving back to the devastated region, because the Japanese government says it is safe.
One month after the Trump administration signaled it would consider approving “new uses” of asbestos in the US, imports of the cancer-causing mineral skyrocketed, increasing by 2,000% between July and August.
East Island is gone.
In the US, the Trump administration is considering ways to erase trans people from federal law.
At some point someone said, “there are no right angles in nature,” and then everyone believed that person. Precise right angles might be hard to come by, but approximate right angles are everywhere. Salt crystals are cubic in nature. Many trees form approximate right angles with the ground. And recently NASA found an Antarctic iceberg that’s absurdly rectangular—or possibly square, it’s hard to tell from the photo. Either way, it would like to request a referendum on this notion of impossible natural geometry.
There’s microplastic in that table salt.
When we think about losing a species to extinction, we rarely think about the millions of years of evolution that went into creating the species in the first place. A study published yesterday (Oct. 15) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences set out to calculate that measure, figuring out exactly how many years of evolution have been negated by the mammalian species that have gone extinct since the rise of humans. The research puts the sixth mass extinction—and the devastation humanity has wrought—in clear terms.
If TV personality Piers Morgan were a gorilla, he would probably be less successful at procreating than other gorillas, according to new research and leaps in logic I am willing to make for this post.
In 2014, the writer and critic Zadie Smith published an essay in the New York Review of Books that drew a word-map around the perimeter of a feeling for which she felt we lacked language. “There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words,” she wrote. Amid abstract global temperature trends and unfathomable volumes of melted sea ice, the everyday intimacy of climate change goes under-acknowledged.
