President Trump gave a great deal of publicity this week to what had been a little known hypothesis about the

I’m talking about pool games, people.
You can play this game solo—aiming for personal records—or compete against a friend.
Cannonballs This one is another jumping contest, but this time, you’re going to see who can make the biggest splash by jumping in cannonball style.
You can race yourself or others trying out different strokes.
Floating object push races Grab any floating objects such as a beach ball, kick board, or flamingo float.
Swim and push the object ahead of you.
The person who is “it” starts in the center of the pool, while everyone else tries to swim from one end of the pool to the other without getting tagged.
The last person to be tagged wins.
To play, you need four people divided into two teams of two people.
Keep away A sponge ball is a great pool accessory, but any ball or soft toy will do for this game.

The state can now add to the list record-warm ocean temperatures.
The warm water stretched far beyond La Jolla.
The warmest sea surface temperatures (red) extend from Point Conception to the Baja California coast.
“The primary driver of these warm ocean temperatures is the persistence of continental atmospheric high pressure that has dominated western weather,” Patzert said.
He explained that normally, high pressure over the eastern Pacific Ocean drives winds from the north along the California coast.
This pattern has sustained a cap of warm ocean waters from San Diego to Santa Barbara, preventing cool water from rising up.
“This pattern is also driving the month-long heat wave suffocating California and it is a major cause of the explosion of Western wildfires,” Patzert said.
“The continuing Western drought, July heat waves, explosive fire season, and balmy ocean temperatures are all related.” Via NASA Earth Observatory However, what you don’t see is the bigger picture, with cooler than normal SST’s just to the north The environment around the weather station used to measure the official temperature changed dramatically in the past few years.
There’s this headline circulation in the news, thanks to the Associated Press: Death Valley sets tentative world record for hottest month The natural furnace of California’s Death Valley was on full broil in July, tentatively setting… Guest essay by Eric Worrall The part I don’t get – why is it important to greens not to “fall behind”?
Climate Change Impacts ‘No Longer Subtle,’ Scientist Says … Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Michael Mann (@MichaelEMann), distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State… Guest commentary by David Middleton Big Oil’s carbon capture tax credit betrayal BY JOHN NOEL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 07/30/18 09:30 AM EDT THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL Instead of finding ways to responsibly reduce production, the fossil fuel industry has decided carbon capture is the… Guest essay by Eric Worrall Our favourite identity thief Peter Gleick, who stole documents from Heartland while serving as chairman of the AGU ethics committee, has written a deliciously confused piece in which he urges people not to give up, despite the inevitability of serious climate change.

Many with economic ups and downs to parallel the mountain trails.
And with political headwinds in the place of thunderstorms.
But there are a few other trends that caught my attention as I reviewed their report: First of all, for the first time in a long time there has been an uptick for two quarters in a row in early stage venture funding (slide 8).
Other stages of venture capital remain light, but it’s encouraging to see the early stages start to attract capital again.
This may be a sign that institutional investors are finally starting to come back to this massive economic opportunity.
And that will eventually mean healthy opportunities at the later stages as well.
In other words, while the previously-mentioned trends show people are still putting money into new clean energy projects, this data also shows that there’s rapidly-growing hunger among acquirers of already-operating projects.
Finally (and relatedly), investments into smaller-scale assets (solar projects, energy storage, and other types) continue to grow (slide 45).
So take heart, hardy clean energy entrepreneurs.
There are steep and treacherous trail miles yet to run before the finish line.

Three days after the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ordered work to pause on the Mountain Valley Pipeline, its sister pipeline also ran into legal trouble.
A federal appeals court on Monday vacated two permits required by the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to complete its 600 mile project beginning in West Virginia and traveling through Virginia to North Carolina, The Associated Press reported.
The Sierra Club was one of the groups, along with Defenders of Wildlife and the Virginia Wilderness Committee, that brought the case that led to the ruling by the 4th U.S.
The case was argued by the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Construction would require cutting enough trees that a gap in the forest would be visible from at least one parkway observation point.
The revoking of the second permit built on a ruling in May, in which the court initially found that the “incidental take statement,” which is the statement that sets limits on the impact of projects on vulnerable species, was not sufficiently clear.
Following that initial ruling, the pipeline’s builders said they would suspend construction along 21 miles in West Virginia and 79 miles in Virginia until a new “incidental take statement” was completed. “Absent such authorizations, ACP, should it continue to proceed with construction, would violate FERC’S certificate of public convenience and necessity,” the footnote said, according to The Associated Press.
Gerken thought the ruling would be a huge stumbling block for the project. “We believe the Court’s concerns can be promptly addressed through additional review by the agencies without causing unnecessary delay to the project,” the company said in a written statement reported by The Associated Press.

Seattle’s orcas are dying.
First was Tahlequah’s calf.
Then came news Thursday that another young orca, Scarlet, appeared to be dying.
Grieving orca mother carries dead calf for days as killer whales fight for survival Read more “This is what they have told the world – it is human actions that are responsible for the dead and stillborn calves, the sick and starving adults and the declining condition of the environment in which they live,” Solien said before calling for a moment of silence for Tahlequah and her calf.
Three years have passed since an orca calf born in the region survived.
In the past 20 years, 40 orcas have been born into the group while 72 have died.
I don’t believe we have another chance Phil Anderson The work of saving the orca in Washington has fallen to the Puget Sound Partnership, a taskforce of leaders from state agencies, interest groups and tribal governments.
“My first great grandchild was born this year,” Sanchez said.
Dams, pollution and fishing have depressed Pacific north-west stocks of Chinook, which often appear in supermarkets as king salmon.
Phil Anderson, a fisheries negotiator with the Pacific Salmon Council, said a proposed treaty with Canada will reduce the salmon catch if both governments approve it.

“The water comes out of the tap white, and sometimes dark and dirty, with particles in it,” she said.
“Before the hurricane, the water wasn’t like that.
An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spokesman said there were “no indications that contaminated material left the facility” and infected Arecibo’s drinking water supply during the storm.
But local residents are taking no chances.
His own home was wrecked by the hurricane and he spends much of what little money he has on bottled water.
“There’s no way I’d drink the water here.
All the money that came to Puerto Rico wasn’t properly administered; it should be used to fix the things that need fixing.” Ben Bostick, a water quality expert at Columbia University, recently traveled to Puerto Rico to test water quality near three Superfund sites, including the battery plant.
In the wake of the hurricane, people desperate for water pried open wells at a contaminated site near Dorado but little information has been publicly released on water quality since.
I would say around 20% of the houses we sampled were empty because the people didn’t live in the building due to a lack of a reliable water supply.” The EPA said that virtually all Puerto Ricans supplied by the island’s water authority had “reliable drinking water”.
An EPA spokesman said: “Many will need federal assistance in order to restore reliable uninterrupted power and full system operation.

The problem is what we do with the clothes we no longer wear.
The EPA reports that over 16 million tons of clothing and textiles end up in landfills every year, comprising over 5 percent of total space.
Is Your Unwanted Clothing Reusable?
Some secondhand stores like Goodwill accept all textiles for donation as long as they aren’t “wet or contaminated with hazardous materials.” This is possible because volunteers can make small repairs and secondhand stores have established relationships with textile recyclers to handle unsold clothing.
Those 16 million tons of clothing and textiles in landfills aren’t there because secondhand stores are getting unsellable clothes; they’re there because consumers assume their unwanted clothes aren’t usable and throw them into the trash.
The Clothing Recycling Market While secondhand stores do good business, they typically sell less than 20 percent of consumer donations.
Luckily, it is possible to recycle old clothing.
All of these companies offer clothing drop-off bins throughout the U.S., usually in high-traffic areas such as parking lots.
Even some governments are getting into the game, such as New York’s refashionNYC.
Of the remaining 55 percent, most of it can be recycled: 30 percent is downcycled into industrial rags and 20 percent is processed into fiber that can be used in products like carpet or insulation.

Seattle’s orcas are dying.
First was Tahlequah’s calf.
Then came news Thursday that another young orca, Scarlet, appeared to be dying.
Grieving orca mother carries dead calf for days as killer whales fight for survival Read more “This is what they have told the world – it is human actions that are responsible for the dead and stillborn calves, the sick and starving adults and the declining condition of the environment in which they live,” Solien said before calling for a moment of silence for Tahlequah and her calf.
Three years have passed since an orca calf born in the region survived.
In the past 20 years, 40 orcas have been born into the group while 72 have died.
I don’t believe we have another chance Phil Anderson The work of saving the orca in Washington has fallen to the Puget Sound Partnership, a taskforce of leaders from state agencies, interest groups and tribal governments.
“My first great grandchild was born this year,” Sanchez said.
Dams, pollution and fishing have depressed Pacific north-west stocks of Chinook, which often appear in supermarkets as king salmon.
Phil Anderson, a fisheries negotiator with the Pacific Salmon Council, said a proposed treaty with Canada will reduce the salmon catch if both governments approve it.

“All that is the ‘new normal’ that we will have to face.” Why on earth is the word normal being thrown around to describe such extraordinary times?
The new normal is a catchy phrase, and one you’ve probably heard before — if not from Brown, then perhaps from the New York Times.
“It sounds like we left the old normal, the old conditions, and arrived at a new normal, a new stasis,” Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at the University of Idaho, tells me.
When people invoke the “new normal,” Stamper says they’re not referring to an unchanging, static condition, but rather “a measure of uncertainty and worsening danger.” In other words, the cliche conveys exactly the message that climate scientists want to convey.
“I hear what the climate scientists are saying — you don’t want to say bad hurricanes are the new normal, and we should just get used to them,” Stamper says.
“Delaware can’t afford a future where climate change and sea level rise are the new normal.” There are valid fears about complacency in the face of radical climate change — that we’ll forget the way that things used to be, become blind to the environmental destruction happening around us, and fail to act to save what’s left.
It’s a concern with climate change, too, he says.
“We’re in the middle of a shift that can destroy what we hold dear, and to call this normal is absurd.” Stamper has some advice for scientists, like Pauly, who hate the phrase.
“Do they think normal is a static point?
Because linguistically, we can show that what people call ‘normal’ changes constantly.” In fact, reporters are already approaching the phrase this way in climate reporting, which suggests that we might be able to have the phrase and use it too, exactly in the manner scientists would want — even if they still hate the term.

What conservation books are most inspiring?
As CEO of The Nature Conservancy, Mark Tercek knows the power of great conservation books.
As the book reviewer for Cool Green Science, I’m always looking for great conservation reads.
Lanham describes himself as a “rare bird, an oddity”: an African-American ornithologist who loves birding, hunting and exploring the land.
His memoir explores the influences that led him to his land ethic and his career in science.
Mark and I are both David Quammen fans, and it appears a lot of Twitter users are, too.
I frequently turn to The Well-read Naturalist for my reading recommendations, so I’m not surprised that his choice was one of my favorites.
It turns out, there’s a scientific basis for nature’s healing powers, as top journalist Florence Williams reveals in The Nature Fix.
Desert Solitaire and other works by Edward Abbey frequently appear on lists like this.
Read this book and discover Abbey for yourself.

Aug. 1 marks Earth Overshoot Day 2018, the point in our calendars when we tip into consuming more natural resources than the planet can regenerate in a year.
“At the moment, we’re able to live in this ecological debt by using up the Earth’s future resources to operate our economies in the present ― in other words, we’re running a Ponzi scheme with our planet,” Mathis Wackernagel, CEO of Global Footprint Network, told HuffPost.
“The question,” he said, “is whether we do so by design or by disaster.” There’s a human cost to all of this, said Michael O’Heaney, executive director of environmental campaign group The Story of Stuff.
“When we don’t live in harmony with the Earth’s ability to sustain itself, people get hurt ― you see ecosystem collapse in places primarily impacting poor people, people in the global south,” O’Heaney said.
Research indicates that while the effects of climate change will be felt everywhere, the poorest nations will be hit hardest.
If the world’s population lived like the U.S. currently does we would need five planets to sustain consumption levels, according to Global Footprint Network’s data.
In other words, our planet relies on 1.7 planets worth of resources.
Take the example of bottled water.
We all did fine without water in plastic bottles 25 years ago.” As corporations have convinced us that we need things like bottled water, governments have been doing an increasingly bad job of protecting our natural resources, O’Heaney said.
All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations.

LAKEPORT, Calif. (AP) — A pair of wildfires that prompted evacuation orders for nearly 20,000 people barreled Monday toward small lake towns in Northern California, and authorities faced questions about how quickly they warned residents about the largest and deadliest blaze burning in the state.
Ed Bledsoe told CBS News he did not receive any warning to evacuate his home in the city of Redding before the flames came through last week and killed his wife, Melody, and his great-grandchildren, 5-year-old James Roberts and 4-year-old Emily Roberts.
Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko told the network there’s an investigation into whether the Bledsoe home received a warning call or a knock on the door.
The blazes have destroyed seven homes and threaten 10,000 others.
So far, the flames have blackened more than 68,000 acres — well over 100 square miles — with minimal containment.
A fleet of aircraft made continuous water and fire retardant drops on the blaze.
The blaze, which killed two firefighters and four civilians including two children, has now destroyed 818 homes and 311 outbuildings and damaged 165 homes, McLean said.
More than 27,000 people remained evacuated from their homes although another 10,000 were allowed to return Monday as fire crews reinforced lines on the western end of the blaze.
He said he received a phone call from his wife 15 minutes after he left saying he needed to get home because the fire was approaching.
The dispatch center put out more than 18 emergency alerts between Thursday evening and midday Friday, Bartolo said.

“This summer has been seen as a make-or-break test,” for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, wrote Joshua Rhodes, who researches energy at the University of Texas, Austin.
Every year, Los Angeles seems to set a new electricity demand record, said Martin Adams, Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Rising temperatures trigger a dangerous chain reaction: More people run air conditioners to keep themselves cool, which strains electrical systems causing blackouts, which exposes people to hazardous heat.
Experts have a few suggestions: Replace old wires When electricity demand surged in Los Angeles, pieces of the electrical system started to blow up.
It’s better for both utility workers and customers if utilities can replace aging parts ahead of time.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of solar built in Texas in the next few years,” Rhodes said.
“When there’s a shortage of electricity, the prices go up, but customers are mostly still paying the same price they would at any other time,” explained James Bushnell, an energy economist and the University of California, Davis.
Manage demand A while back, Rhodes’s electricity provider made him an interesting offer: Austin Energy wanted permission to control his thermostat for 15 minutes at a time, four to six times a year, when electricity demand was peaking.
For instance, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power might see the temperatures rising toward 160 degrees in that underground vault, and react by turning down the air conditioners of the customers downstream, allowing the equipment to cool before it blows up and leaves them with no air-conditioning at all.
The more the climate changes, the more people need electricity to cool them down.

President Trump gave a great deal of publicity this week to what had been a little known hypothesis about the

The state can now add to the list record-warm ocean temperatures.
The warm water stretched far beyond La Jolla.
The warmest sea surface temperatures (red) extend from Point Conception to the Baja California coast.
“The primary driver of these warm ocean temperatures is the persistence of continental atmospheric high pressure that has dominated western weather,” Patzert said.
He explained that normally, high pressure over the eastern Pacific Ocean drives winds from the north along the California coast.
This pattern has sustained a cap of warm ocean waters from San Diego to Santa Barbara, preventing cool water from rising up.
“This pattern is also driving the month-long heat wave suffocating California and it is a major cause of the explosion of Western wildfires,” Patzert said.
“The continuing Western drought, July heat waves, explosive fire season, and balmy ocean temperatures are all related.” Via NASA Earth Observatory However, what you don’t see is the bigger picture, with cooler than normal SST’s just to the north The environment around the weather station used to measure the official temperature changed dramatically in the past few years.
There’s this headline circulation in the news, thanks to the Associated Press: Death Valley sets tentative world record for hottest month The natural furnace of California’s Death Valley was on full broil in July, tentatively setting… Guest essay by Eric Worrall The part I don’t get – why is it important to greens not to “fall behind”?
Climate Change Impacts ‘No Longer Subtle,’ Scientist Says … Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Michael Mann (@MichaelEMann), distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State… Guest commentary by David Middleton Big Oil’s carbon capture tax credit betrayal BY JOHN NOEL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 07/30/18 09:30 AM EDT THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL Instead of finding ways to responsibly reduce production, the fossil fuel industry has decided carbon capture is the… Guest essay by Eric Worrall Our favourite identity thief Peter Gleick, who stole documents from Heartland while serving as chairman of the AGU ethics committee, has written a deliciously confused piece in which he urges people not to give up, despite the inevitability of serious climate change.

Guest essay by Eric Worrall If we behave we won’t have to accept a full command economy to save the planet.
It is time for us to panic about global warming.
Indeed, a proper state of panic is long overdue.
… “I would place a price on carbon,” Michael E. Mann, a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, told Salon by email.
“Whether this takes the form of a carbon tax (a revenue-neutral carbon tax?
The price on carbon needs to be set such that it leads to a reduction in carbon emissions of several percent a year for the next few decades.
“In the past, market mechanisms for pricing environmental externalities have worked.
The real problem, in my view, isn’t the nature of our economic system, it’s the way that special interests and plutocrats have blocked the sort of common-sense market approaches to dealing with environmental problems that were once supported by democrats and republicans alike.
Mann is happy for the people’s representatives to decide the exact form of the carbon burden Mann and his friends have demanded we accept.
Climate Change Impacts ‘No Longer Subtle,’ Scientist Says … Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Michael Mann (@MichaelEMann), distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State… Guest commentary by David Middleton Big Oil’s carbon capture tax credit betrayal BY JOHN NOEL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 07/30/18 09:30 AM EDT THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL Instead of finding ways to responsibly reduce production, the fossil fuel industry has decided carbon capture is the… Guest essay by Eric Worrall Our favourite identity thief Peter Gleick, who stole documents from Heartland while serving as chairman of the AGU ethics committee, has written a deliciously confused piece in which he urges people not to give up, despite the inevitability of serious climate change.

We are smoked in.
We had a “smoke wave” like this last summer too.
There are dozens of major fires currently burning across the west, including the Carr fire in and near Redding, California, which is over 150,000 acres.
There’s even a worse category called “hazardous,” which is a kind of a muddy crimson I’ve come to associate with the apocalypse.
In Klamath Falls, we’ve hit “red” for at least part of every day for the last 16 days, and “purple” for 12 of those days.
Humanity has known about climate change for decades, and we have done next to nothing to stop it This increase isn’t random.
One study from 2016 suggests that climate change has doubled the acreage of forest fires since 1984.
Another 2016 paper predicts that climate change will cause 60% more frequent and 30% more intense “smoke waves” across much of the western US by 2050.
Humanity has known about climate change for decades, and we have done next to nothing to stop it.
She told me that if she had the option to send her kids away during the summer, or if she could afford an air filter, she’d stay.

Elon Musk, though both a prominent industrialist and a thoughtful student of the consequences of technology, delivered onto us this

Guest essay by Larry Hamlin The L. A.
As usual with climate fear articles like this one in the L. A.
The latest scientific study completed by the Royal Society concludes that global wildfires are in decline.
Additionally a study by the USGS of wildfires in the western U.S. provides scientific evidence documenting the decline of wildfires over the last 40 years in California using both USFS and Cal Fire historical fire data sources.
Times Ca.
wildfire propaganda claim wrong about the pattern of wildfire occurrences in California it is also wrong about its flawed claim that these fires are the result of “heat like the state has never seen”.
The complete summer month maximum temperature data for June through September from NOAA’s California temperature data base shows that the state has experienced the present “heat” levels many times before.
Additionally a 2015 study by the University of California at Berkeley concluded that the present extremely high level of vegetation now fueling California wildfires has occurred because of fire fighting forest management policies over the last century which have allowed an unsustainable amount of vegetation to accumulate.
The Berkeley study notes: “National parks and other protected areas clearly provide an important function in removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it,” said Battles.
Times continues its climate alarmism propaganda campaign while ignoring and hiding from its readers significant scientific data and studies which completely undermine its alarmists claims.