Environment
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This place is where the planet’s warmer and watery future is being written. It is so warm here, just inside the Arctic Circle, that on an August day, coats are left on the ground and scientists work on the watery melting ice without gloves. In one of the closest towns, Kulusuk, the morning temperature reached…
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Last year, when China, the biggest consumer of discarded plastics, banned nearly all waste imports, it signaled a sea change in the global recycling system. The trade in plastics quickly rerouted to neighboring Southeast Asian countries that lacked effective recycling plants and disposal laws, leaving much of the waste to be burned or dumped in fields and…
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Sixty six (66) million years ago, a 6-mile-wide space rock caused a tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean, along with earthquakes and landslides up and down what is now the Americas. A heat pulse baked the Earth, and the Tyrannosaurus rex and its compatriots died out, along with 75% of the planet’s species. There have in fact been 4…
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The email responses to this weeks newsletters have been terrific. The Tuesday newsletter about “never giving up” received the most positive responses this year. A very gratifying email from Mark Nuovo about how my newsletter helped a friend of his going thru a trying time. A lot of people on both sides of the #MeToo…
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Warmer temperatures caused by climate change will have the biggest impact on the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people. Research shows that’s already happened over the last several decades. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that in most poor countries, higher temperatures are more than 90% likely to have resulted in decreased economic output, compared…