Free Republic

Connecticut schools will soon be required to teach climate change as a part of the science curriculum, a move state legislators and advocates say will mean changes at a small percentage of schools that aren’t yet bringing the subject to the classroom. Close to 90 percent of schools already teach about climate change, but it will be required by state law beginning in July 2023, said Rep. Bobby Sanchez, co-chairman of the Education Committee. “We heard from teachers and from students that were concerned that climate change wasn’t being taught,” said Sanchez, D-New Britain. The bill passed the Education Committee...

Pollution cuts more lives short worldwide than war, terrorism, malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, drugs or alcohol.That's the takeaway of a report published Tuesday in The Lancet Planetary Health, which analyzed the combined health risks of air, water and toxic chemical pollution in 2019. The results show that pollution is responsible for around 9 million premature deaths each year, or one in six globally. That puts its toll on par with smoking."We haven't been yelling from the top of the streets, saying, 'Look at this!' loud enough,'" said Richard Fuller, the report's lead author and the founder and CEO of the nonprofit...

The study, released earlier in May, also noted an uptick in air pollution elsewhere in the world was producing a decline in the number of tropical cyclones over the past 40 years. Researchers examined how particulate air pollution, or aerosols, and climate change have affected tropical cyclones across the planet over the past 40 years in a new study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that was recently published in the journal Science Advances, and the results are surprising. “Air pollution is a big environmental risk to human health, and we have made great strides in reducing health...

Last week I discussed propaganda from a theoretical standpoint. This week I wish to outline one prominent example, narrowing my focus to propaganda used for political ends. Those ends are essentially two: to upset the existing order, or to enforce conformity to the new order. To review, five factors must be present in effective propaganda. First, some kernel of truth must be present. Objective facts, albeit highly selective, must be asserted. Second, some level of discontent must be present. Third, the propaganda must fall on fertile soil. Seeds do not sprout otherwise. Fourth, the propagandists must continuously use all means...

Canada is hot and getting hotter. Irreversible Extreme Heat: Protecting Canadians and Communities from a Lethal Future, from geoscientist Joanna Eyquem and Blair Feltmate, is a new study from the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation (a research facility at the University of Waterloo) that projects a roasty future in Canadian cities as temperatures continue to rise. Cities are the focus because urban areas are the hotspots of global warming, as they’re hotter than surrounding countryside, with heat trapped and reflected by roads, paved areas and other surfaces. This is the urban-heat-island effect. The extreme heat coming our way carries with...

Kamala Harris makes incoherent call to work together and work together and work together What on earth is Kamala Harris trying to say? Maybe her and Joe Biden get their speeches written by the same person, since neither one makes any coherent sense. Spewing word salad as she apparently discusses the climate, Kamala Harris mentions the phrase “work together” five times in less than thirty seconds. “That is especially true when it comes to the climate crisis. Which is why we will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work...

Cleaner air in United States and Europe is brewing more Atlantic hurricanes, a new U.S. government study found. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study links changes in regionalized air pollution across the globe to storm activity going both up and down. A 50% decrease in pollution particles and droplets in Europe and the U.S. is linked to a 33% increase in Atlantic storm formation in the past couple decades, while the opposite is happening in the Pacific with more pollution and fewer typhoons, according to the study published in Wednesday’s Science Advances. NOAA hurricane scientist Hiroyuki Murakami ran numerous...

James Cromwell took a dramatic stand for PETA Tuesday morning by supergluing his hand to a Starbucks counter in protest of the coffee chain’s up-charge for vegan milks. Appearing on a Facebook livestream, the “Succession” star, 82, rattled off facts about the cons of producing dairy milk from cows as he remained stuck to the Midtown Manhattan shop’s counter alongside other PETA members. Despite advocating for inclusivity, Starbucks “still discriminates against those who can’t have dairy” by making customers “pay more” for vegan options such as almond milk and oat milk, Cromwell claimed. “My friends at PETA and I are...

A record-breaking heat wave is sweeping South Asia, threatening hundreds of millions of people with deadly temperatures well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. As the world heats up, billions of people need air-conditioning. This 120-year-old technology used to be considered a luxury, but in the age of climate change, it is a necessity for human survival. Understandably, this has created anxiety over the climate threat of a world overrun with ACs. But the coming boom in air-conditioning is an essential shift toward reducing the enormous gap in cooling availability that exists between rich and poor people and nations—and toward producing a...

The likelihood of crossing a key global warming threshold has risen significantly, according to a new analysis. UK Met Office researchers say that there's now around a fifty-fifty chance that the world will warm by more than 1.5C over the next five years. The Met Office researchers predict that for any one year in the period, the likelihood of breaching the 1.5C level is around 48%, or close to 50:50. “The basic thing that's changing is that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, are slowly creeping up," said Dr Leon Hermanson from the Met Office, the lead author of...

When UNLV senior Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio looked out the window of her Airbnb in Irvine, Calif., she saw flames rising in the nearby mountains and scorch marks on the ground. A wildfire was approaching the apartment, where she had moved from Las Vegas during the pandemic to be closer to family. Driving alone, she zig-zagged through fallen trees and weaved around traffic in the city, hoping she would make it to her family friend’s house in Fullerton, about 20 miles away. She worried about her family situated throughout Southern California. “All while seeing the flames in my rearview mirror,”...

America’s disturbing supply chain problems aren’t near to being fixed. America’s disturbing supply chain problems aren’t near to being fixed. On the news we hear of store shelves not having baby formula. At the center of such breakdowns is trucking. Everything but everything is transported to stores by trucks, semi-trucks. Semi-trucks run on diesel, not petrol (gasoline), and the price of diesel is much higher than the price of petrol. Some truckers are reportedly at the point where they may have to shut down due to the price of diesel. On May 7 at LewRockwell, James Howard Kunstler wrote: The...

Spain is expected to produce its lowest volume of fruit in the last 40 years due to frost that hit its fruit-production regions in early April1, 2, especially the Ebro Valley – one of Europe’s most important producing areas of sweet fruit. Manel Simon, the general director of the Catalan fruit association – Afrucat, said producers must plan their summer very well in the face of this decrease in production, adding that he hoped Spanish companies would prioritize exporting their production to the closest destinations and that there would be a significant decrease in exports to the third countries.3 Expectations...

The looming closure of the Palisades nuclear power plant at month’s end may push Michigan’s short-term climate goals out of reach, both industry experts and energy regulators agreed. The loss of 800 megawatts of carbon-free energy from the nuclear plant along Lake Michigan near South Haven is likely to result in more greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere as the electric sector pivots to natural gas while more solar and wind generation comes online. In Michigan, the state’s climate plan calls for 60 percent of the state’s power to come from renewable sources within the next eight years. Incremental goals in that...

… In the case Salmon vs. Seattle, the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe is seeking legal action against the municipality on behalf of the salmon population. Sauk-Suiattle had previously attempted other legal maneuvers to improve the salmon's plight. They filed a lawsuit claiming Seattle was greenwashing by labeling the dams the "nation's greenest utility," despite contradicting evidence. Salmon vs. Seattle relies on the legal theory "Rights of Nature," which states ecosystems like rivers, lakes, trees, animals, and mountains, have the same legal rights as human beings. Legal theorists have proposed nature should be granted legal rights of personhood like how entities that can't...

As evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine mounts, the U.S. is once again grappling with our dependence on foreign oil. Although we produce more than we consume, we imported about 670,000 barrels per day from Russia last year — more than we imported from Saudi Arabia. At recent prices of $100 per barrel, that’s nearly $25 billion that fed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine. The U.S. ban on Russian oil helps, but is small compared to total Russian exports. So, how can we cut oil consumption and energy costs? President Biden wants electric vehicles (EVs) to comprise half of...

The Department of Justice is establishing a new “Office of Environmental Justice.” Attorney General Merrick Garland made the announcement at a press conference with EPA Administrator Michael Regan Thursday. Garland said that the new office, which will also be known by the initialism OEJ, would “oversee and help guide the Justice Department’s wide-ranging environmental justice efforts.” The office was created as part of the Department’s “comprehensive environmental justice enforcement strategy,” in compliance with the Biden administration’s January 2021 executive order directing the Attorney General to develop such a strategy in conjunction with the EPA. Garland said that OEJ would initially...

(Reuters) - Tech and financial companies leading efforts to cut climate changing emissions are finding a new challenge from remote work: the CO2 spewing out of home offices. A few companies have begun counting what happens when employees boot up computers at home, turn up gas furnaces and ignore the world's most energy-efficient corporate campuses. It turns out that home setups popularized by the pandemic are eroding some of the climate benefit of abandoned commutes. “Emissions didn't go away," said Amanda von Almen, head of emissions reduction at Salesforce.com Inc. "They just shifted to another area." Half of 20 big...

Computer models that project future climates are widely used for adaptation, mitigation and resilience planning. More than 50 such models were assessed and compared in the latest round of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 6 (CMIP6), run by the World Climate Research Programme1. It is crucial that researchers know the best way to use those outputs to provide consistent information for climate science and policy. We are climate modellers and analysts who develop, distribute and use these projections. We know scientists must treat them with great care. Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too...

John Doerr, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the history of Silicon Valley, is giving $1.1 billion to Stanford University to fund a school focused on climate change and sustainability. The gift, which Doerr is making with his wife, Ann, is the largest ever to a university for the establishment of a new school, and is the second largest gift to an academic institution, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Only Michael Bloomberg’s 2018 donation of $1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, ranks higher. The gift establishes the Doerrs as leading funders of climate...