The West’s wildfire season of 2018 is shaping up to be another really bad one
Meanwhile, new research into downwind smoke from western wildfires suggests Minnesota gets more than its share.
Earth Journal
The battle over ‘Losing Earth’: Why a new history of climate inaction has inspired so much pushback
Was there really such broad consensus on what had to be done to address climate change? Was the marquee failure all that pivotal?
Heat spreads misery across Europe and beyond — with the worst yet to come
Japan is beleaguered, too, with more than 300 deaths attributed to extreme heat, floods and landslides in July.
New data show that key seasonal patterns are changing around the globe
While Minnesota summers and winters are both getting warmer, the most significant temperature change is taking place during the summer.
Rising sea levels threaten to drown domestic internet
Within the next 15 years, persistent coastal flooding will submerge more than 4,000 miles of the fiber-optic conduits that carry internet traffic in the United States.
As Quebec and Siberia demonstrate, heat waves afflict northern regions, too
New research suggests that heat waves can slow mental functioning.
From a vanishing porpoise to advanced organic farming, some great new reads
‘Cross Flipper with a very shy panda and you’ve bred a vaquita.’
Lawsuits on mining leases near BWCA resist governance by memo and whim
Ask yourself: Would it be OK to revoke a mining company’s rights in the same way that these were restored?
Counting the cost of high-tide flooding in homes abandoned to a rising sea
By 2045, homeowners might abandon more than 300,000 oceanfront properties. By the end of the century, 2.4 million.
Flooding surges in U.S. coastal cities, thanks to relentlessly rising sea levels
The incidence of high-tide flooding — also called “sunny day flooding,” “nuisance flooding” or “saltwater flooding” — has increased by 50 percent in just the last eight years, a new report says.
As Lyme goes global, a new book sees it as ‘first epidemic of climate change’
U.S. policy has “minimized, underestimated and politicized” the infection, discouraging swift and cheap treatments.
How did the ‘dinosaur birds’ survive? New findings trace a surprising story
Just five groups may have escaped extinction by asteroid — and flight had nothing to do with it.
Great reads on ending hunger, losing permafrost and engineering coral
Charles C. Mann sets Minnesota’s sainted Norman Borlaug opposite the less remembered William Vogt as “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World.”
An ozone-killing CFC is still being made, study suggests, despite the global ban
Atmospheric concentrations fell steadily until 2012; monitoring data suggest new production somewhere in eastern Asia.
U.S. cities and suburbs are losing 36 million trees each year, study finds
Development and disease whittle away at a resource that delivers billions in environmental benefits. Minnesota showed essentially no gain or loss between 2009 and 2014.
CDC reports a surge in insect-borne illness, and Lyme disease leads the way
Projections indicate 300,000 to 400,000 new Lyme infections this year, with Minnesota and Wisconsin among the most afflicted states.
Minnesota experiment upends notions about how plants will offset rising CO2
Many a grade-schooler can state the accepted notion of how plants thrive in CO2 and buffer global warming — but it might be really wrong.
U.S. and UK rushing to understand risks of a rapidly shrinking Antarctic glacier
An additional 3-foot rise in sea levels could be just decades, not centuries, into the future.
Now you can listen in on ocean life — live from the floor of Monterey Bay
After a little processing, the blue whale sounds rather like a long, bowed note on a double bass.
In a period of toxic federal politics, Earth Day attracts thoughtful analysis
At National Geographic, Brian Clark Howard produced a feature on 48 wins in 48 years — a list of “the biggest milestones in environmental protection,” year-by-year, since Earth Day 1970.
