“One day I asked her, ‘Why are egg yolks yellow?’ She said, ‘why don’t you find out?’” So he did.
For his part, Mann is thrilled to be sharing the award with Washington, his longtime idol.
“He is one of our most distinguished alumni,” Mann said.
He collaborated in creating the earliest computer climate models and went on to advise six presidents about climate change : Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W.
He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010 by President Obama.
Washington was an early pioneer of climate modeling.
She left college after two years because she was upset about it.” In grade school, Washington read books about George Washington Carver and other black Americans “doing interesting science.” By high school, he had decided on a career in physics.
Today, I probably have more computing power in my smartphone than in those very early computers.” Most of the presidents he advised — with the exception of Obama — were more interested in supporting climate research than mitigation, he said.
He doesn’t get advice, like most presidents [do],” Washington said.
“He doesn’t have any interest in reading any reports on any subject, not just science.
Conservation & Sustainability
Although the 2018 winners of London’s Natural History Museum’s renowned Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition were announced in October, the LUMIX People’s Choice Award was revealed on Wednesday, and the winning photo, titled “Bond of Brothers,” captures a beautifully tender moment between two male lions.
Photographer David Lloyd was in Tanzania when he spotted the two cats — most likely brothers — nuzzling each other’s faces for 30 seconds as he snapped his award-winning black-and-white photo.
The contest notes that it is unusual for lions to do this for such a long amount of time.
“Because it illustrates the emotion and feeling of animals and emphasizes that this is not limited to humans.
It is something I think more people need to be aware of for the sake of all animals.” Four highly commended images also won the hearts of the public and rounded off the top five spots.
You can check them out below.
After countless hours and many failed attempts his persistence paid off.” “Justin’s whole body pained as he watched this starving polar bear at an abandoned hunter’s camp, in the Canadian Arctic, slowly heave itself up to standing.
With little, and thinning, ice to move around on, the bear is unable to search for food.” “Wim came across these king penguins on a beach in the Falkland Islands just as the sun was rising.
They were caught up in a fascinating mating behavior — the two males were constantly moving around the female using their flippers to fend the other off.” “While adult African wild dogs are merciless killers, their pups are extremely cute and play all day long.
Bence photographed these brothers in Mkuze, South Africa — they all wanted to play with the leg of an impala and were trying to drag it in three different directions!”
formally unveiled Thursday outlines plans to cut global greenhouse gas emissions 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and to reduce human-caused greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050.
In the lead-up to the unveiling, after months of calling for lawmakers to get on board, their plan received enthusiastic support from major candidates hoping to take down President Donald Trump in 2020.
Sens.
Cory Booker (D-N.Y.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has had a more tempered response, emphasizing that there will be other resolutions on the table to consider.
“I welcome the Green New Deal and any other proposals,” she said.
“I’m pleased that House Committees began holding hearings on climate change this week, and I look forward to bringing legislation to the House Floor to reduce carbon pollution, help our communities prepare for current and future climate risks, and create clean energy jobs,” he told HuffPost in an email.
Among the chairs of climate-adjacent House panels, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) of the Natural Resources Committee is the only one to explicitly support the resolution, calling it “the right framework for the work we need to do, in Congress and across the nation, to reduce our fossil fuel use, create green jobs, and protect our country and our planet for the long term.” As for the Senate, none of the party’s leaders have given their support to the Green New Deal or replied to inquiries about it.
“I’m grateful for Senator Markey’s passion and strong voice on these issues,” he said in a statement Thursday.
I encourage members of our committee to examine the Green New Deal resolution and consider the ways in which we may be able to incorporate its ideas within our work this Congress.”
Glowing green The Green New Deal has been championed by advocates for getting the country running on purely renewable energy right away.
Some 600 environmental groups had demanded the initiative set out to ban not just fossil fuels, but also nuclear, biomass power, and large-scale hydroelectricity.
So when the resolution made its long-awaited debut on Thursday, it came as a surprise to some that the door was left open for nuclear power and even fossil fuels with carbon capture.
So just like that, the most aggressive climate policy proposal we’ve seen in years has the de facto backing of the Democratic party.
The non-binding resolution, unveiled by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, and Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts, calls for “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” In wonk-speak, zero-emission is code for nuclear power or fossil fuels with carbon capture.
It’s unclear if we will be able to decommission every nuclear plant within 10 years, but the plan is to transition off of nuclear and all fossil fuels as soon as possible.” The factsheet disappeared from Ocasio-Cortez’s website on Thursday after the resolution was released.
Booker and Warren, for instance, have voted to fund research on advanced nuclear power.
The resolution calls on the US to meet “100% of power demand through clean, renewable, and zero-emissions energy sources.”
That includes “dramatically expanding … renewable power sources” but can also be read as inclusive of clean, CO2-free sources like nuclear & carbon capture — JesseJenkins (@JesseJenkins) February 7, 2019 The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that we will need to rely on a variety of energy sources to make deep cuts to carbon emissions.
Now, after voting for years to kill market-based climate policies, they’re getting a taste of just what they had feared.
Massive starfish die-off is tied to global warming Starfish deaths from wasting disease — which can disrupt entire ocean ecosystems — are correlated with higher ocean temperatures, a new study finds.
Read the story here.
The story: While associating frigid weather with a warmer Earth may seem counterintuitive, the extreme temperatures in the U.S. last week are indeed caused by climate change and resulted from the polar vortex, Jennifer Francis reported for The Huffington Post last week.
The big picture: Usually, the polar vortex stays North because of the pressure differences caused by extremely low temperatures in the Arctic and semi-warm temperatures in the, say, Midwest, but climate change has caused the Arctic to warm twice as fast as the rest of the world, disrupting this pressure difference and making the polar vortex less likely to stay north.
“And it’s clear that at times, coping with global warming means arming ourselves with extra scarfs, mittens and long underwear.” Read the story here.
In December, many of the world’s largest conservation organizations — including Conservation International — posted a joint statement calling for 30 percent of the planet to be protected by 2030.
The story: The goal with protecting 30 percent of the planet by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050 is to fight climate change, protect biodiversity and stop extinctions, Emma Marris reported for National Geographic last week.
As of last year, 14.9 percent of terrestrial Earth and 7.3 percent of oceans were formally protected, making this goal still attainable.
Protecting 30 percent of the world would provide habitat for biodiversity and also fight climate change by enabling trees and plants to capture climate-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Donate to Conservation International here.
Climate Desk This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found.
The regrowth soaked up enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to actually cool the planet, with the average temperature dropping by 0.15 degrees C (0.27 degrees F) in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the study by scientists at University College London found.
The study attributes the deaths to factors including introduced disease, such as smallpox and measles, as well as warfare and societal collapse.
Researchers then calculated how much land indigenous people required and then subsequently fell into disuse, finding that around 55 million hectares, an area roughly equivalent to France, became vacant and was reclaimed by carbon dioxide-absorbing vegetation.
Scientists have warned that the world has little over a decade to drastically reduce emissions or face increasingly severe storms, drought, heatwaves, coastal flooding, and food insecurity.
The revegetation of the Americas after European arrival aided declines of global carbon content in the air, dropping by around 7 to 10 parts of carbon dioxide for every million molecules of air in the atmosphere.
This compares to the 3 ppm of carbon dioxide that humanity is currently adding to the atmosphere every year through the burning of fossil fuels.
“There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaching and using tree-planting to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” study coauthor Chris Brierley told the BBC.
“And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the great dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few parts per million.” “This is useful,” he continued, “it shows us what reforestation can do.
A die-off of sea stars so massive that scientists believe it could be the largest disease epidemic ever observed in wild marine animals has been linked in a new study to global warming.
Scientists believe a disease once of little concern has been wiping out the sea star population because of warming waters.
Researchers discovered that sea star devastation appeared to be particularly marked where water temperatures are highest, such as in shallow waters near the shore — though oceans water temperatures are generally also increasing.
The “marine heat wave” is triggering a “continental-scale collapse of a pivotal predator,” the study notes.
Since 2013, sea star wasting disease has “caused massive, ongoing mortality from Mexico to Alaska,” the study states.
“What we think is that the warm water anomalies made these starfish more susceptible to the disease that was already out there,” study author Joe Gaydos, the science director of the SeaDoc Society at the University of California at Davis, told NPR.
Dying sea stars can trigger a cascading ecological collapse as animals that depend on the creatures suffer in turn — and animals the sea stars eat can proliferate in destructive numbers once the sea stars are gone.
The population of sea urchins once eaten by healthy sea stars has exploded in areas without the predators.
The urchins then gobble up sea kelp, destroying kelp forest ecosystems.
“We have higher biodiversity when we have more kelp.
smell a rat It’s getting harder and harder to reconcile Punxsutawney Phil’s Groundhog Day predictions with the realities of climate change.
As the planet warms and winters become increasingly and predictably shorter, America’s favorite rodent continues to see his shadow in blatant disregard for scientific consensus.
We were as shocked as you surely are about the groundhog king’s transgressions.
One Grist staffer lashed out in anger, calling Phil a beaver despite the fact that groundhogs are better described as giant squirrels — the words of someone clearly experiencing unspeakable hurt.
What about General Beauregard Lee?
Are all of our trusted fluffy meteorologists just underground agents of climate denial?
In the true spirit of investigative reporting, we dug through tens of years-old local news articles to bring you a definitive list of which cute clairvoyants can — and cannot — be trusted.
Rufus the Mountain Beaver: Deforestation fan Groundhogs are exclusively an East Coast thing — but, in true West Coast fashion, there’s a deceptively crunchy and equally heinous version living in Washington state.
Despite having no real credentials, Lee has been awarded a “Doctor of Weather Prognostication” from a professor at the University of Georgia and a “Doctor of Southern Groundology” from Georgia State University.
Staten Island Chuck: Pro-public transit revolutionary Not everyone agrees with Staten Island Chuck’s rather extreme methods, like when he bit then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg during a Groundhog Day celebration.
As the Rapid Assessment Program director at Conservation International, Larsen spends his days organizing international teams of scientists to find and document wildlife in far-flung locales.
A shot that Larsen captured of a small, rarely seen frog was recently selected to grace a banknote in Madagascar.
Their mission for that day: to help Larsen find a tiny frog known of the genus Mantella.
“I was searching for this species because I really wanted to observe and photograph them,” Larsen said.
“The guide knew exactly where this frog was,” Neugarten said.
“I started to play around when I got my first SLR (camera), and I would bring a camera every time I was doing field work.” “I took some pretty terrible shots at first, but you learn, and I started overlapping with professional photographers in the field and learned a lot of tricks from those guys.” In 2017, Larsen was part of a small team of researchers selected to travel to a sensational archaeological find in Honduras.
After his work trip to Madagascar, Larsen uploaded his frog shots to Conservation International’s in-house photo database and forgot about them.
It was from Conservation International’s Madagascar office.
“When the government decided to create new banknotes, the Central Bank asked me to share some ideas related to nature,” said Sahondra Rajoelina, Conservation International Madagascar’s country director.
Want to read more stories like this?
(Reuters) ― A blast of super-cold arctic air is bringing dangerous sub-zero cold to the U.S. Midwest and Northeast as the system cartwheels through the Dakotas into Chicago, Illinois, and on to New England.
By Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, Chicago will hit an astounding 20-to-25 below-zero Farhenheit, the National Weather Service said.
“This is dangerous, deadly cold,” said Richard Bann, meteorologist with the NWS’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park Maryland.
“Most of the snow will be in the Dakotas, the Twin Cities and Central Michigan, where they might get a foot or more,” Bann said.
“Upstate New York, Vermont and New Hampshire will see less than a foot.
Boston and cities in the east will get less than an inch.” “But it’s going to be cold throughout the east coast,” he said.
“Even parts of Mississippi and Alabama might see an inch or two of snow before this is over.” But Chicago will take the main brunt of the super-cold weather.
“An entire generation has gone by without experiencing this type of cold in the Chicago area.” said Mike Doll, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.
The agency’s Des Moines branch said “dangerous, life-threatening cold air” will impact Iowa from Tuesday morning through Friday morning, with wind chill values on Wednesday likely to range from minus 45 Fahrenheit to minus 55 Fahrenheit across the northern part of the state.
Delta Airlines said it would waive change fees for passengers affected by the winter weather in Chicago, Detroit and areas of the Upper Midwest.
