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Category: Environment

Trump administration moves to allow roads and logging in pristine national forests

Trump administration moves to allow roads and logging in pristine national forests

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Tuesday advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century. The proposal by the U.S. Forest Service would repeal the 2001 “roadless rule,” enacted during the Clinton administration to preserve the wild nature of forest land. It comes as President Trump pressures the agency to increase logging and to thin…

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Why rivers are so mathematical

Why rivers are so mathematical

Natalie Wolchover writes: A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in Texas. My maternal ancestors have dipped into its waters for generations, as I have on countless summer days. The Blanco is a tributary of the San Marcos, which flows into the Guadalupe, and on into the Gulf of Mexico. You can probably…

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A ‘super’ El Niño could transform the Amazon. Is the world’s biggest rainforest doomed?

A ‘super’ El Niño could transform the Amazon. Is the world’s biggest rainforest doomed?

Nature reports: El Niño is back with a vengeance. A mammoth patch of warm water is growing in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is giving four-in-five odds that the disruptive climate phenomenon will turn into a “very strong” event by the end of the year. Some forecasters say this El Niño is on track to become the strongest in at least 150 years. For the Amazon rainforest, the timing could hardly be worse….

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Potatoes ‘boil’ in the ground as record heatwave sweeps across swathes of Asia

Potatoes ‘boil’ in the ground as record heatwave sweeps across swathes of Asia

The Guardian reports: In a potato field in Yanggu county, 80 miles (130km) north-east of Seoul, Lee Sang-hyuk dug into the soil and found nothing worth saving. A week earlier the crop, located in Gangwon province, had looked fine. Now the potatoes came up soft and collapsing, “like boiled potatoes”, spoiled by heat that had turned the ground into something closer to an oven. “It’s not just one or two fields like this. How can I even put it into…

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Global warming is triggering earthquakes

Global warming is triggering earthquakes

Science reports: Climate change is worsening many natural hazards, including droughts, heat waves, and storm surges. Now, a new one has joined the list: earthquakes. Researchers have found that as global warming accelerates melting of mountaintop glaciers, the meltwater, percolating underground, increases the risk of damaging earthquakes. The evidence comes from beneath Grandes Jorasses, a glacier-clad peak in the Alps that is part of the Mont Blanc massif, home to Western Europe’s tallest mountains. Precise seismic records show a heat…

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More than half of Earth’s migratory bird species are declining – here’s how we can still save them

More than half of Earth’s migratory bird species are declining – here’s how we can still save them

The spoon-billed sandpiper, a small wading bird, flies nearly 5,000 miles (8,000 km) on its annual migration. Tareq’s Photography/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA By Peter P. Marra, Georgetown University and Nathan W. Cooper, Smithsonian Institution Every year, billions of migratory birds connect the world’s continents, oceans and ecosystems as they undertake epic journeys between their foraging habitats and their breeding grounds. A bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) leaves its breeding grasslands of North America for the Pampas of South America. A Newell’s shearwater (Puffinus…

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This is what happens when the world is on fire

This is what happens when the world is on fire

John Valliant writes: Water bombers, the air cavalry of wildfire fighting, buzz the treetops like air show stunt pilots as they save the day with surgical drops of water or orange retardant. But what happens when those drops have no effect? When, as a pilot working the massive Gironde Fire just west of Bordeaux, France, described it, “The environment above the fire is so hot that my payload of 10,000 liters of water evaporates in the air.”? Mathieu Jomain, a…

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Europe’s summer of reckoning is ‘just the beginning’

Europe’s summer of reckoning is ‘just the beginning’

The New York Times reports: A dense, yellow-orange pall hung over Bordeaux on Sunday, blotting out the sun and blurring the spires of the cathedral in this French city. A swirl of tiny ash particles stung eyes and stuck in throats. Twenty miles west of town, a mammoth forest fire burned so ferociously that it generated its own weather system. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roger Peuron, 89, a retired engineer born before World War II, who was…

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Britain could face food shortages as drought continues, farmers warn

Britain could face food shortages as drought continues, farmers warn

The Guardian reports: Britain could face shortages of certain foods after punishing drought in parts of England, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has warned as a heatwave was forecast to continue into next week. The UK’s Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has issued heat health alerts for eight regions of England, with temperatures set to rise above 30C in parts of the country. UKHSA said rising temperatures may increase health risks, particularly for vulnerable groups. Farms across the country were affected…

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France had never seen a ‘fire cloud’ until this month’s record-smashing blazes

France had never seen a ‘fire cloud’ until this month’s record-smashing blazes

Wired reports: Firefighters in France are confronting a phenomenon never seen in the region before: fire clouds. It’s a sign of the intensity of the blazes burning—and how climate change is upping the odds that they appear. A wave of fires has swept over France and Spain, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing. Firefighters on the frontlines are facing what a spokesperson for the French firefighter association told AFP called an “operational impossibility”—in other words, a “natural force beyond our control.”…

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In Texas, the first U.S. city that’s on track to run out of water

In Texas, the first U.S. city that’s on track to run out of water

Science Alert reports: It seems inconceivable, even if you’re aware of the perilous situation that the world’s water supplies are in, but a developed coastal city in Texas that more than 300,000 people call home is now in serious danger of running out of water. The city is Corpus Christi, and difficulties with water scarcity are now coming to a head after years of concerns over shortages. There are multiple issues combining here, perhaps most importantly the arrival of major…

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Space datacenters proposed by Musk and Bezos will be ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn

Space datacenters proposed by Musk and Bezos will be ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn

The Guardian reports: Space datacenters proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts. Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacenters” and are pressing forward with plans, which require Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Among other issues, pollution from satellites and rockets…

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Wildfires across North America won’t be extinguished with tarrifs

Wildfires across North America won’t be extinguished with tarrifs

The Guardian reports: After days of acrid smoke from northern wildfires choking major US cities and inspiring Donald Trump to threaten Canada with tariffs, officials now say the reverse is also happening as parts of Canada issue air quality warnings caused by American fires to the south. Officials in the Canadian province of British Columbia warned in an alert on Saturday evening that smoke from US fires, spurred on by thousands of lightning strikes in the north-east, was creating smoky…

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In the data-center age, the business of Silicon Valley is more like oil-refining than coding

In the data-center age, the business of Silicon Valley is more like oil-refining than coding

Matteo Wong writes: The AI boom has showered some of the nation’s most prominent companies in market value. OpenAI and Anthropic are now the two most valuable private companies in the world. Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia have become larger than ever. But among the biggest winners has been Caterpillar, a purveyor of yellow trucks and cranes. Caterpillar’s stock has more than doubled in value over the past year, making the company worth six times as much as Nike. Its ascent…

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Data centers have united Americans of both parties in a shared hatred

Data centers have united Americans of both parties in a shared hatred

The Washington Post reports: Kyle Schmidt ticked through what makes him irate about the massive Google data center slated for construction about a mile away from his home near Sand Springs, Oklahoma. He didn’t like that residents were kept in the dark about what would be built on a pristine tract of mostly forested land. He’s worried about the data center’s potential impact on the community’s water supply and on the dream home that his family moved into last year….

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Democrats see an opening in rural states for the first time in decades. In Iowa, it’s about water

Democrats see an opening in rural states for the first time in decades. In Iowa, it’s about water

Tom Philpott and Nina B. Elkadi write: Chris Jones, the 65-year-old Democratic nominee for Iowa secretary of agriculture, stands at the edge of a pond on a 72-acre farm in eastern Iowa. “What you see here is how fertile Iowa is,” he says, looking intently into the water. Massive bluegills dart about in the clear depths. “When we go up to a corn or soy field, we don’t see this anymore.” Jones isn’t just talking about the fish. He means…

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