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“Reflecting a strong U.S. economy, Americans’ policy priorities have changed in recent years. The public now places less priority on economic and job concerns than it did just a few years ago. At the same time, environmental protection and global climate change are rising on the public’s agenda for the president and Congress. For the …
The Verge: “Frustrated tweets led scientists to believe that tidal floods along the East Coast and Gulf Coast of the US are more annoying than official tide gauges suggest. Half a million geotagged tweets showed researchers that people were talking about disruptively high waters even when government gauges hadn’t recorded tide levels high enough to …
WSJ.com – About 80,000 people in three townships outside Philadelphia live in an area where the groundwater has been contaminated by chemicals used for decades in firefighting foam at two nearby decommissioned military bases. The Defense Department has cited 401 bases in the U.S. with a known or suspected release of the firefighting foam containing chemicals …
“The child of a monkey holds on to its mother tightly. A lone straw bale stands in a field prior to being collected. A few rays of sunlight filter into a dark, foreboding cave filled with clear blue water. These are a mere three of the imagination-fueling winners from the international Wiki Loves Earth photography …
Reuters Graphic – A plateful of plastic – Visualising the amount of microplastic we eat – “Microscopic pieces of plastic have been discovered in the most remote locations, from the depths of the ocean to Arctic ice. Another place that plastic is appearing is inside our bodies. We’re breathing microplastic, eating it and drinking plastic-infused …
NeimanLab – Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview – “Human cognition is inseparable from the unconscious emotional responses that go with it.” By Adrian Bardon – “Something is rotten in the state of American political life. The U.S. (among other nations) is increasingly characterized by highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological …
“An unprecedented scientific effort to LiDAR scan the entire surface of the Earth before it’s too late. The climate crisis threatens to destroy our entire cultural & ecological patrimony. We’ve already lost 50% of the world’s rainforests. We’re losing 18 million acres of forest each year. Rising sea levels will make whole cities, countries, and …
engadget: “Google is no stranger to reproducing historical sites online, but it’s now pushing technical boundaries to recreate those sites at risk of vanishing due to the ravages of climate change. It’s launching a “Heritage on the Edge” collection in Arts & Culture that will include over 50 exhibitions illustrating the effect of an evolving …
Deep partisan divisions exist in the news sources Americans trust, distrust and rely on: “As the U.S. enters a heated 2020 presidential election year, a new Pew Research Center report finds that Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments. Overall, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view many heavily relied on …
Casey Trees: “Each fall, members of the Society of Municipal Arborists (SMA) nominate and vote for the SMA Urban Tree of the Year. This tradition dates to 1996 when the urban workhorse ‘Princeton Sentry’ Ginkgo was crowned. And for 2020 the Urban Tree of the Year is none other than the Celtis occidentalis or the …
Bank for International Settlement (BIS) – “Climate change poses new challenges to central banks, regulators and supervisors. This book reviews ways of addressing these new risks within central banks’ financial stability mandate. However, integrating climate-related risk analysis into financial stability monitoring is particularly challenging because of the radical uncertainty associated with a physical, social and economic …
Environmental Working Group – New Detections of ‘Forever Chemicals’ in New York, D.C., Other Major Cities – “New laboratory tests commissioned by EWG have for the first time found the toxic fluorinated chemicals known as PFAS in the drinking water of dozens of U.S. cities, including major metropolitan areas. The results confirm that the number …
