With the new mask guidelines the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released Thursday, the COVID-19 pandemic feels like it’s nearing an end for many of us. I get my second Moderna shot next week, at which point my transformation into the little-known Batman supervillain Blood Clottus will be complete. (Okay, just...
Methane
Scientists have successfully cloned an endangered black-footed ferret from the genes of an animal named Willa that had died over thirty years ago. After Willa died, her remains were frozen and sent from Wyoming to San Diego Zoo Global that maintains a bank of frozen tissues for over 1,100 endangered and...
I keep vigil. Last summer, record-breaking wildfires in Siberia, “in and around the Arctic circle,” continue to smolder and burn; the fuel feeding the fires is peat, decomposing organic matter that has been stored in the earth for millenniums. According to NASA estimates, at least half of wildfires burned in Siberia in the...
After ignoring or defending Donald Trump’s every shambolic lie and cranial methane blast over the past five years, Fox News has zeroed in on the real crisis of credibility in our currently reeling republic: Whimsical Time magazine cover drawings. TIME's new cover: Day one https://t.co/VazxGDJzZf pic.twitter.com/R6jVrzXXZc — TIME (@TIME) January 21, 2021 Hie...
I often worried about Dr. Anthony Fauci back in the fore-fore times. If people weren’t accusing him of advocating monstrous and/or feckless policy proposals, the so-called president of the United States was only too happy to do so. Donald Trump is so anti-science, he managed to turn a 5-foot, 7-inch,...
In 2019 John Kerry was awarded and accepted the Arctic Circle Prize in a speech to an assembly of climate scientists and other Arctic stakeholders in Reykjavik, Iceland. In his dramatic speech, Kerry, who has been nominated by President-Elect Joe Biden, to be the first ‘Climate Tsar’ in a cabinet-level position, declared a world...
“It’s gotten so out of whack that we are now looking at survival for our children, not survival of our grandchildren.”, Peter Carter, M.D., – reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. Dozens of scientists from Sweden, Russia, China, and seven other countries studied methane emissions...
“It’s gotten so out of whack that we are now looking at survival for our children, not survival of our grandchildren.”, Peter Carter, M.D., – reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. Dozens of scientists from Sweden, Russia, China, and seven other countries studied methane emissions...
“It would only take 22 tank cars to hold the equivalent energy of the Hiroshima bomb,” Jordan Luebkemann, a lawyer for Earth Justice. Florida Bulldog is an investigative news site. In September, they wrote on how a private equity firm forgave an enormous debt of Donald Trump in exchange for federal...
Yale Environment 360 notes “just as global warming has propelled the Arctic Ocean past a tipping point which will lead to a largely ice-free Arctic in summer in the coming decades. Wildfire scientists say that rising global temperatures and worsening droughts mean that the world has entered a new era...
“'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind.” William Shakespeare The evil of science deniers recently has been beyond the pale. Not content with killing the planet over climate change, and sowing doubt over vaccines the far-right conspiracy theorists have a new target to haunt the world with the crazy,...
Due to a buildup in methane in a rapidly heating Siberia, an explosion occurred that tossed boulders of frozen soil and ice “hundreds of metres” into the sky from the epicenter of the blast in the Yamal Penninsula. The powerful blast site was discovered by accident when a TV news crew...
The Huffington Post reports that U.S. Senator Cory Gardner (R. CO) has been boosting a new Facebook ad touting his record being Trump lapdog. But as the article points out that the only place you won’t see it popping up is in Colorado: In theory, the campaign may not have...
Remember when Donald Trump vowed to eliminate the entire national debt in eight years? And when he promised “4, 5, or even 6 percent” GDP growth? Well, keep those promises in your back pocket, because you’re not going to effing believe this. Fox Business: President Trump on Wednesday touted his plan to...
Antarctica is estimated to have a quarter of the world’s marine methane stores. Methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas ( 25% more potent than the greenhouse gas CO2), accelerates global heating, aggravating the planetary climate emergency and collapse of biodiversity. The first methane leak discovered in Antarctica is on the Wilkes Subglacial Basin...
I keep vigil. I wish I knew how to get people to care, but we seem determined to kill ourselves and ignore all of the code red warnings that the science is telling us. I guess it comes down to what outrages folks and it isn’t our survival. Perhaps it is...
Sapiens has trouble with timescales of planetary forces. Greenland Ice Sheet Fossil fuels and agriculture have driven methane emissions to record highs across the globe claim two new studies. Methane is a colorless gas and comes from natural and human-made sources. The gas is a danger to humans because it...
The oceans are really what tells you how fast the Earth is warming. Using the oceans, we see a continued, uninterrupted, and accelerating warming rate of planet Earth. This is dire news.” Professor John Abraham, University of St Thomas, MN There are many complicating factors in our efforts to combat the...
Hiring TV talking head (er, ass) Larry Kudlow as an economic adviser, which Donald Trump (in)famously did, is kind of like hiring a pro bass fisherman to remove your appendix. Correction: It’s like hiring a bad pro bass fisherman to remove your appendix. With a pair of salad tongs and...
I am sharing some of the stories from the Arctic that have not received the media attention that they deserve. We can expect increasing wildfires, a busy and dangerous Atlantic storm season, and rising marine and land temperatures as a result of the incredible speed of the climate crisis. As we...
The Lincoln Project, a partnership of high-profile conservatives who’ve become disaffected with the Republican Party over its uncouth embrace of a suite of IBS symptoms masquerading as a human being, released another scathing ad recently — and right on cue, it released a dense cloud of KFC-redolent methane over the Potomac. And...
Not since the plague, also known as the Black Death, arrived in Europe in the early 1300s has the human population been more vulnerable to exotic disease. Black Death is estimated to have killed 30 to 60% of the population of Europe. With international transport of people and goods, dense...
The massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 was an environmental calamity of epic proportions. Two hundred and five million gallons of crude oil and two hundred and twenty-five tons of methane spilled into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast. Now a new study by...
Rand Paul isn’t too concerned about climate change on Planet Earth, but to his credit he does think we need to start creating livable ecosystems elsewhere. I guess he thinks humanity is on a cosmic pub crawl, and since we’re about to wear out our welcome here, we need to find...
Another day, another Kentucky criminal’s family pays to have them pardoned from prison. GOP prosecutor took donations from sex offender's family, then pressed Bevin for a pardon The elected Republican commonwealth’s attorney in Christian County wrote to Gov. Matt Bevin last month seeking a pardon on behalf of a prominent...
With his nomination of former Raytheon vice president and lobbyist Mark Esper for secretary of defense, Donald Trump essentially chummed the swamp with alligator feed. Of course, it was kind of a joke for Trump to put a defense contractor in charge of the DoD while at the same time...
So many underlings doing their jobs, so much disloyalty. Mr. Trump first expressed his dismay about Michael Atkinson around the time the whistle-blower’s complaint became public in September. In recent weeks, he has continued to raise with aides the possibility of firing him, one of the people said. The president has...
The Arctic is unraveling before our eyes. As our understanding of the changes continues, scientists have been fine-tuning models to give us a sense of how quickly we can expect tipping points to arrive. One of the most terrifying is the permafrost feedback. A new study finds that the feedback...
At some point we have to start checking their basements for pods, right? Can they really be this empty and soulless? Republicans who were once on the right side of history have sworn fealty — in droves — over the past four years to the least admirable man on the...
While the news media is fretting about Joe Biden’s retelling of a war story, the threat of Donald Trump to the health of sick children is moved to the back burner. While the news media frets about a mistake when Biden gave out a campaign text number, Donald Trump is...
As part of the ongoing project to catalog every awful thing the Trump Administration has done as a reference for future political arguments and whatever few posterity survives to see 2020, here’s everything awful the Trump Administration has done this week. 1549. Ramped up the trade war with China by raising...
It’s not just the Daily Kos straw poll that shows Elizabeth Warren surging. At least one poll has her in a statistical dead heat with our ostensible frontrunner, Joe Biden. The Hill: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by just 1 point in a new Economist–YouGov weekly tracking poll. Biden sits...
In solidarity with the planet and humanity in general. Mike Fox for Alan, Dr. Bill, Dan, Janis, Deb, Bryan, Kimberly, Mike H. and Shayna — your PDA National Staff If We Ignore It, It Won’t Go Away. Climate change is the single most important issue impacting national security, and is...
FYI Another sign of abrupt climate change in the far north. The heatwaves in the Arctic are having terrible impacts on the Arctic eco-systems in recent years. Heather Goldstone and Elsa Partan write in WCAI: A team of scientists and students with Woods Hole Research Center’s Polaris Project are just back...
Progressives and a smattering of non-cowardly conservatives have gone on record as saying Donald Trump is a straight-up criminal who is (badly) masquerading as a pr*sident. But because so many Republican members of Congress have bone spurs where their spines should be, the chance of an impeachment and a conviction...
It’s time to tell the full truth. It’s time to pursue hospice, with as much honesty, integrity, and compassion as we can muster. It’s time to admit that ignoring the decades-long warnings about climate change have led directly to the expected outcome. It’s time to comfort the afflicted, which includes...
The climate is extremely complicated and overwhelming for those of us that are not scientists. One thing we know for sure about humanity's massive science project with our atmosphere, however, is that pumping unfathomable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere damages the interconnectivity of Earths ecosystems resulting in a cascading...
I can understand why a U.S. citizen wouldn’t know that the Constitution gives Congress, and not the president, authority to declare war. U.S. presidents have been pushing the envelope vis-à-vis military action for decades now. But Brian Hook is U.S. special representative for Iran and senior policy advisor to Secretary of State...
Donald Trump, write this 100 times on your left moob: China does not pay our tariffs. China does not pay our tariffs. China does not pay our tariffs. x ….of additional goods sent to us by China remain untaxed, but will be shortly, at a rate of 25%. The Tariffs...
Last I checked, Tulsi Gabbard was running for president as a Democrat. But if I didn’t know better, I’d think she was angling for a Trump administration cabinet position. Maybe secretary of the newly created Office of Propaganda. How else do you explain this tweet? x Mueller has not reported...
By Debra Schrishuhn for Mike F., Mike H., Dr. Bill, Janis, Dan, Kimberly, Bryan, Donna, Judy, and Shayna—Your PDA National Team Act Now! Support the Off Fossil Fuels Act! The scientific community agrees that climate change contributes to the frequency and intensity of tropical storms and cyclones. We need to...
It has been longer than that if you include my school years [St George’s Edinburgh, it would be 26] but 20 years a full time expat split between the UK and France, so over half my life. The reason I bring this up? I think that it is really this...
When Rahm Emanuel became mayor, the city of Chicago was making lists of top green cities in America. During the election he pledged support to a community movement aimed at closing the polluting Fisk & Crawford coal plants. But after taking office, Emanuel significantly increased Chicago's use of fossil fuels...
Will the climate movement have a serious contender for President in 2016? Now's the time to find someone strong on the most urgent crisis of our time and serious about winning the White House. Should that candidate be Hillary Clinton? She says the right things. But the most significant actions...
The three Democrats running in Illinois' 13th Congressional district primary recently answered my questions about climate change and energy issues. It's one of the hottest Congressional races in the nation since freshman incumbent Republican Rodney Davis narrowly won with merely 46.5% of the vote in 2012. The central Illinois district...