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Category Archives: Climate Change

Use These Apps to Identify Outside Air Quality Index in Your Location

Lifehacker – “…You have plenty of options for finding the Air Quality Index for any particular location. Established weather services like Weather.com should have that number for any location you want. I’ve always been a fan of the Environmental Protection Agency’s PurpleAir, specifically, which gives you a lovely, large map full of dots to show… Continue Reading

Meet the National Parks’ ‘Ranger of the Lost Art’

The New York Times – Doug Leen has made it his life’s work to discover, restore and reproduce W.P.A. renderings of America’s threatened public lands. “Hundreds of thousands of sweaty, athleisure-clad national park visitors have entered the park gift shop after a hike and immediately gravitated toward one particular display: the vintage-looking magnets, postcards and… Continue Reading

Google has retooled its search and maps with vital wildfire information

Fast Company: “As wildfires rage in California, and Colorado reports the second largest wildfire in that state’s history, Google has announced it will be providing near-real-time information about such conflagrations on its search engine and mapping platform. In addition to breaking news from media sources, information from local government offices, and safety tips from the… Continue Reading

PowerOutage.us

“PowerOutage.us is an on going project created to track, record, and aggregate power outages across the United States. Find out more on our About page. Click on a state to see more information.  Data is updated site wide approximately every ten minutes. PowerOutage.US collects, records, and aggregates live power outage data from utilities all over the… Continue Reading

How the pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyond

Nature – This coronavirus is here for the long haul – here’s what scientists predict for the next months and years. “…It is clear now that summer does not uniformly stop the virus, but warm weather might make it easier to contain in temperate regions. In areas that will get colder in the second half… Continue Reading

COVID recovery choices shape future climate

EurekAlert: “A post-lockdown economic recovery plan that incorporates and emphasises climate-friendly choices could help significantly in the battle against global warming, according to a new study. This is despite the sudden reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants during lockdown having a negligible impact on holding down global temperature change. The researchers warn that… Continue Reading

Ocean heatwaves dramatically shift habitats

NOAA – “Thermal displacement” reflects how far species must go to follow preferred temperatures. Marine heat waves across the world’s oceans can displace habitat for sea turtles, whales, and other marine life by 10s to thousands of kilometers. They dramatically shift these animals’ preferred temperatures in a fraction of the time that climate change is… Continue Reading

A small federal agency focused on preventing industrial disasters is on life support

Vox: “That agency, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, investigates accidents and makes recommendations — but it doesn’t regulate the industry. Since 1998, it has looked into some of the nation’s biggest industrial disasters, including the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, which killed 11 workers and dumped an estimated 4 million barrels of oil into… Continue Reading

Major new climate study rules out less severe global warming scenarios

Washington Post: “The current pace of human-caused carbon emissions is increasingly likely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet, according to a comprehensive international study released Wednesday. Researchers studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science — how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to a doubling of the amount of carbon… Continue Reading

Lockdown was the longest period of quiet in recorded human history

MIT Technology Review: “When lockdown started in March, the world went instantly, strangely silent. City streets emptied. Joggers and families disappeared from parks. Construction projects froze. Stores closed. Now a network of seismic monitoring stations around the world has quantified this unprecedented period of quiet. The resulting research into “seismic silence,” published in Science today,… Continue Reading