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States and cities say Trump violated federal law by delaying a key environmental decision

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Attorney General Eric Schneiderman

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A coalition of U.S. states and municipalities has begun legal action against President Donald Trump's administration, accusing it of violating federal law by delaying energy efficiency standards for several consumer and commercial products.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who announced the legal action, said enacting the six standards would dramatically reduce air pollution and save energy, eliminating close to $24 billion of costs for consumers and businesses.

Schneiderman said the standards cover ceiling fans, commercial boilers, compressors, portable air conditioners, power supply equipment, and walk-in coolers and freezers.

As part of their legal action, the states and municipalities have filed a petition with the federal appeals court in New York challenging what they called the administration's illegal delay in implementing efficiency standards for ceiling fans.

Joining New York in that petition are the states of California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, Vermont and Washington, as well as New York City and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

The U.S. Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SEE ALSO: Trump’s EPA just told states they can ignore a key Obama-era carbon dioxide regulation

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NOW WATCH: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just hit record lows — here's what would happen if all the ice melted


Get ready for wild swarms of biting insects all over the US this summer

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Winter is the time of year when many people forget the previous summer's gross weather and become eager for it to get warmer again. But then summer arrives, and those same people are often sweaty, hot, covered in biting insects, and waiting for the weather to finally cool off.

It's the circle of life.

But the cycle isn't exactly the same from one year to another. Some summers are warmer, others cooler. Ditto for winters — though they tend to skew warmer in our changed climate era.

The result? Early springs, which are dangerous for plants. Record-setting heat streaks. And, this spring and summer in the US, probably more pests than usual.

Bugs do well in warm winters. Frost doesn't penetrate their winter holes as much, so many more survive until spring and summer.

bug barometer spring2016 030916

That's according to the National Pest Management Association, a nonprofit associated with the pest-control industry that puts out information on bugs and swarms across the US.

Its predictions are fairly rough, based on broad information about how insect populations tend to respond to different seasonal conditions. But they're based on firm science. And they are broken down into five regions of the continental US.

In the West, which just had an unusually wet and cold winter after years of drought ― and which now expects a cool and wet spring ― mosquitoes are a threat, likely to appear early and in large numbers.

The Midwest, which experienced a wet winter as well without the usual deep freeze, can also expect early pest activity. Termites and ticks will be out in force, with significant mosquito populations present as well.

Further south, an area spanning New Mexico to Louisiana and including Texas had a warm wet winter, with a cooler, rainier spring following. That region can expect high ant, tick, and mosquito populations, with termite swarms showing up late.

The Southeast had a mild winter, setting the stage for more mosquitoes than usual.

In the Northeast, a warm winter and a warm spring set the stage for a wild pest summer: mosquitoes, ticks, ants, and even stink bugs will be out in force early.

SEE ALSO: An ancient tick found in amber contains monkey blood from 20 to 30 million years ago

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NOW WATCH: This is the deadliest disease known to humans

Catastrophic waterfalls destroyed an ancient land bridge that once linked Britain to the rest of Europe

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An illustration of what the land bridge connecting Britain to Europe may have looked like before the formation of the Dover Strait is seen in an image handed out by Imperial College London April 4, 2017. The foreground is around where the port of Calais is today and way in the distance (the background of this illustration) is early Britain. Huge waterfalls cascading over the land bridge represents the beginning of physical separation of Britain from Europe. Imperial College London/Chase Stone handout via REUTERS

LONDON (Reuters) — Scientists have found evidence of how ancient Britain separated from Europe in what they are dubbing "Brexit 1.0"— a flooding event that happened in two stages thousands of years ago.

In research published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, the scientists said they now have proof that the opening of the Dover Strait in the English Channel, severing the land between Britain and France, occurred in two episodes — an initial lake spill over, followed by catastrophic flooding.

"The breaching of this land bridge between Dover and Calais was undeniably one of the most important events in British history, helping to shape our island nation's identity," said Sanjeev Gupta, a professor at Imperial College London who co-led the work.

"When the ice age ended and sea levels rose, flooding the valley floor for good, Britain lost its physical connection to the mainland," he said. "This is Brexit 1.0 – the Brexit nobody voted for."

The first pieces of the puzzle came some 10 years ago, when researchers found geophysical evidence of giant valleys on the seafloor in the central part of English Channel. They believed these valley networks were evidence of a megaflood gouging out the land, probably caused by a breach in a chalk rock ridge joining Britain to France.

In the new study, new geophysical data collected by colleagues in Belgium and France has been combined with seafloor data from Britain showing evidence of huge holes and a valley system located on the seafloor. This help the team establish how the chalk ridge was breached.

dover land bridge english channel natureThe ridge acted like a huge dam and behind it was a proglacial lake, the researchers explained. The lake overflowed in giant waterfalls, eroding the rock escarpment, weakening it and eventually causing it to fail and release huge volumes of water onto the valley floor below.

"We still don't know for sure why the proglacial lake spilt over," said Jenny Collier, a co-author of the study from Imperial's department of earth science and engineering.

"Perhaps part of the ice sheet broke off, collapsing into the lake, causing a surge that carved a path for the water to cascade off the chalk ridge. Maybe an earth tremor... further weakened the ridge and caused (it) to collapse, releasing the megaflood that we have found evidence for in our studies."

Either way, the scientists said, if it was not for a set of chance geological circumstances, Britain may have remained connected to mainland Europe, jutting out into the sea like Denmark.

The researchers still have no exact timeline of events, but said they now want to take and analyze core samples of the in-filled sediments in the plunge pools to try and pinpoint the timing of erosion and the filling of the pools.

They cautioned, however, that this next step will be tricky, since getting samples in the Dover Strait means navigating huge tidal changes and the world's busiest shipping lane.

 

(Editing by Pritha Sarkar)

SEE ALSO: Here’s how climate change is already affecting your health, based on the state you live in

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There are billions of pounds of plastic in the ocean — but scientists think this machine can clean it up

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Ocean Plastic

There's a lot of plastic in the water.

Plastic clumps and particles account for 70% of all litter in the ocean, representing billions of pounds of material that present a serious hazard to ocean life.

But sifting small pieces of plastic out of the largest bodies of water on the planet is a major challenge.

Already, machines exist that can sift plastic particles out of salt water and convert them into their base hydrocarbons — the building blocks of fuel. But those machines are generally too big and unwieldy do deploy where they can be the most useful: in the oceans themselves.

A new project, presented at the most recent meeting of the American Chemical Society, aims to do just that.

NM253plasticsJames Holm, a sailor, and Swaminathan Ramesh, a chemist, developed a mobile reactor, small enough to fit on a boat, that can injest ocean plastic and salt water all day and churn out usable diesel fuel. The process is continuous, efficient, and scalable, meaning it can be adjusted to fit any sized ship and work without constant stops and starts. It's also fast enough that the diesel it produces could theoretically be used on the boat carrying it during the voyage.

Of course, though the project was created with the goal of improving the environment in mind, it has at least one built-in environmental drawback: Converting all the billions of pounds of ocean plastic into a hydrocarbon fuel, then burning that fuel, would likely add a non-trivial amount of carbon to the atmosphere.

The first major test of the reactor will take place in Santa Cruz, California, where it will convert plastics into diesel for the local government to power city vehicles. Whether similar reactors will actually be deployed out on the water in any large-scale way remains to be seen.

SEE ALSO: Get ready for wild swarms of biting insects all over the US this summer

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NOW WATCH: The government just declassified a huge archive of never-before-seen nuclear tests — here’s the chilling footage

Within 10 years, renewable could be cheaper than fossil fuels all over the world

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us wind farm texas

The costs of renewable energy are going down all over the world.

This isn't a new trend. Improvements in technology, government support, and the scaling-up of investments have driven down costs for years.

Already, it's cheaper in most places to add a new renewable energy source from the power grid than a new fossil fuel source. And a new report from the United Nations found that within ten years renewable energy will be globally cheaper than fossil fuels.

But that doesn't make renewable energy inevitable.

 In many of what the UN calls "developing" countries, governments are, not unreasonably, most interested in delivering power to as many people as possible as soon as possible in order to improve quality of life and spur economic growth.

For many countries, that means building infrastructure and burning hydrocarbons, not developing more complex, and sometimes still-costly renewable power grids. India and many nations in Africa fall into this category, as they rush to meet the growing needs of their populations.

Among wealthier countries with already-established grids, the UN expects a mix of outcomes. Europe and Australia have the political will and resources to develop truly renewable grids, the UN reports. But others, most notably Japan and the US, are more reticent.

For Japan, space is an issue; it takes a lot more room to set up a wind farm or solar plant (and the necessary storage centers for days without wind and sun) than a fuel-burning facility. But an even bigger concern is the entrenched energy industry, which is unlikely to support a move to renewables and difficult to dislodge.

The US doesn't suffer from the first problem, but it does from the second. While many fuel companies in the US recognize the challenge of climate change, the political party currently in power — almost unique among major political parties around the world — does not. With the current president working to dismantle green-energy policies and the Environmental Protection Agency administrator doubting climate change, forward motion seems unlikely.

China presents perhaps the most interesting case study. Like India and many growing parts of Africa, it has a large population rapidly increasing its economic output. And in the past, the US has pressured the Chinese political establishment to act on climate issues. But now the political will seems to exist in the emerging superpower to build a greener grid, and to even pressure the US to do the same. A truly renewables-based Chinese energy system seems at least possible.

SEE ALSO: Trump boosts coal as China takes the lead on climate change

DON'T MISS: Here's how Trump's plan to dismantle Obama's climate legacy could fall apart

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NOW WATCH: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just hit record lows — here's what would happen if all the ice melted

Report: The EPA just shut down its most significant climate safety programs

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Donald Trump Scott Pruitt Mike Pence Ryan Zinke EPA

The EPA is closing down programs that help cities and states adapt to the changing climate, according to a report from Bloomberg BNA's Andrew Childers and Tiffany Stecker.

Childers and Stecker's report, sourced to multiple agency employees as well as former employees still in touch with the agency, states that "more than 40" employees will be transferred to new positions in the agency and away from programs that address climate issues.

The closing programs are dedicated to smart growth, regulatory innovation, and climate preparedness. Here's what that means:

  • Smart growth refers to a series of EPA programs dedicated to helping communities grow their economies in ways that are sustainable and support public health. The EPA website touts the example of Atlantic Station, a major poisonous "brownfield" site in midtown Atlanta where an old steel facility once operated. Atlantic Station is being cleaned up and converted into a mixed-used residential and commercial district.
  • Regulatory innovation refers, broadly speaking, to efforts to craft new regulatory methods that solve problems the agency has struggled or failed to solve in the past.
  • Climate preparedness is the most significant project for addressing the impacts of climate change at the EPA. The EPA's climate preparedness programs tend to be very local, developed to help cities, towns, tribes, and states adapt their infrastructures and economies to deal with changing sea levels, worsening storms, melting ice, drought, and other issues.

Nothing in this report is exactly a surprise. Trump has proposed steep cuts at the agency in his budget, and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney has suggested that climate programs are, "a waste of your money," and said, "We're not spending money on that anymore."

SEE ALSO: Trump’s EPA cuts are great news for polluters, but bad news for his voters

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Here's how Justice Gorusch could tank Trump's plan to slash the EPA

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neil gorsuch

Patrick Parenteau is a professor of law and senior counsel at the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic at Vermont Law School.

In nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump said he was fulfilling a campaign promise “to select someone who respects our laws and … will interpret them as written,” in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. In fact, Trump merely chose Gorsuch from a list of conservative judges vetted by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.

It could have been worse — much worse. Some of the other names on Trump’s short list were downright scary. Like 11th Circuit Judge William Pryor, who called Roe v. Wade“the worst abomination in the history of constitutional law.” Or 6th Circuit Judge Raymond Kethledge, who denied standing to the Sierra Club in an air pollution case by dismissing a prior circuit court decision as “a bottle of dubious vintage, whose contents turned to vinegar long ago, and which we need not consume here.”

Still, make no mistake: Judge Gorsuch, who sits on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, is a solidly conservative jurist who greatly admired Scalia. Like Scalia, he is a proponent of “originalism” — the idea that judges should interpret the words of the Constitution as they were understood at the time they were written — and a “textualist” who considers only the words of the law being reviewed, not legislators’ intent or the consequences of the decision.

He is perhaps best known for his outspoken criticism of the Chevron doctrine, which requires courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. This is a key issue in the legal challenges to the Clean Power Plan and the Clean Water Rule, both of which could find their way to the Supreme Court despite Trump’s pledges to repeal them. It is safe to say that a Justice Gorsuch would be skeptical of both rules and it would take some convincing arguments to win him over. But given the current split on the court, it is not clear that his vote would make the difference in the ultimate outcome. Justice Anthony Kennedy remains the swing vote, just as he was in Massachusetts v. EPA, the landmark decision authorizing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants.

But Gorsuch’s skepticism of agency lawmaking could also spell trouble for Trump’s efforts to roll back environmental rules willy-nilly. In an opinion last year, Gorsuch wrote that courts have an obligation to give the public “some assurance that the rug will not be pulled from under them tomorrow, the next day, or after the next election” through shifting agency interpretations of laws. Are you paying attention, Scott Pruitt?

Gorsuch’s record on environmental cases is sparse. He has not written any blockbuster opinions. He has generally followed the relevant precedent, albeit in ways that are not always friendly to the environmental side. In 2010, he signed onto a decision upholding an Interior Department move to allow coal mining in eastern Utah. In another case, he was the lone dissenter arguing against allowing three environmental groups the right to participate in a lawsuit about off-highway vehicle use in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico.

On the other hand, he wrote the majority opinion in a case upholding Colorado’s renewable energy standards against a challenge that they were unconstitutional under the commerce clause.

His decisions generally reflect the views of a conservative jurist, but not a particular animosity toward environmental regulations. Plus he’s an avid fly-fisher, which surely counts for something.

Gorsuch is sure to be questioned about Chevron during Senate confirmation hearings, but he is not likely to tip his hand on his views of the pending challenges to the Clean Power Plan and the Clean Water Rule.

So the Democrats face a tough decision: to filibuster or not to filibuster. Tensions are heightened by the fact that a Supreme Court vacancy only exists because the Republican-controlled Senate stonewalled President Obama’s nomination of the eminently qualified Judge Merrick Garland. It only takes one senator to start a filibuster and just a handful to keep it going and force a cloture vote, which would require the approval of 60 senators to bring the nomination to the floor. Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon has already announced his opposition to Gorsuch and is threatening a filibuster. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has to consider the potential backlash from that with an eye to the upcoming 2018 midterms, in which 10 Democratic senators will be up for reelection in states that Trump won.

Looking forward, there’s a real danger that Trump may get the opportunity to fill a second vacancy on the Supreme Court over the next four years. Justices Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer are all considered vulnerable for various reasons. Gorsuch clerked for Kennedy, who just turned 81. Kennedy will not want to leave unless he believes his legacy as a moderate and a strong voice for individual liberties will be sustained. He may think that Gorsuch would be that same sort of strong, moderate voice and decide that it’s time to retire. That could dramatically change the ideological makeup of the court and pose an even more significant threat to environmental regulations and protections for decades to come.

SEE ALSO: Here's the full story of how Trump's plan to dismantle Obama's climate legacy could fall apart

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NOW WATCH: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just hit record lows — here's what would happen if all the ice melted

A brilliant sci-fi thriller imagines how the massive floods of climate change could transform Earth

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new york 2140.PNG

There are times when an author releases a book, and it seems like they've finally pinned down an idea they've been wrestling with for their entire writing career. The science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson has done that with his latest novel, "New York 2140."

Robinson's past books mostly been set in space — on interstellar starships or amid the long terraforming project of the planet Mars — but they've centered on questions of how we treat planet Earth. Is this fragile environment portable? Can we fix it if we break it? What is there left to do if we can't?

His stories are adventures first, but they keep coming back to the anxiety that, as a species, we're wrecking the planet, and we don't really have a good imagination of what the planet is going to look like afterward.

"New York 2140" is Robinson's most straightforward attempt to imagine the consequences of our environmental inaction today.

His future Earth flooded in two pulses. The first, a massive calamity caused by rising temperatures melting Antarctic ice, cause sea levels to rise ten feet in ten years. (You won't need a spoiler alert for that one if you've been following climate news.) In his story, the flood spurs a massive refugee crisis, as well as a global effort to radically slash carbon emissions and even pump sunlight-reflecting gas into the atmosphere to cool it back down.

But, at that point, it was too late. Too much heat had made it deep into the oceans, triggering faster ice flows and more melting. A second pulse followed the first, raising sea level another 40 feet, changing coastlines all over the word and smashing the emergency sea wall around New York City. All of this takes place decades before the start of the novel, but sets up the world in which the novel takes place.

In Robinson's version of 2140, Manhattan remains a thriving city. The economic centers have moved uptown, to Washington Heights and the Cloisters. But the central characters still make their lives downtown, where the streets function like wide, polluted, Venetian canals.

The thriller Robinson unspools in that flooded city is gripping on its own merits. But it's the radical imagination of the book that makes it so hard to put down.

If you've spent any time in New York City, you'll have a thousand tiny moments of recognition as Robinson tours his drenched city's neighborhood politics, frustrated public works projects, and street-by-street physical transformation. But even if you haven't, the plausibility of his transformed world is transfixing.

There are moments when the book becomes self-aware in a way that borders on grating, like when Robinson winkingly writes himself in to a bit of 22nd Century environmental history: 

People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth's entire previous five billion years... and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise!... They put in in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really.

But by imagining what the world might look like after the harshest impacts of climate change manifest, Robinson creates a richly detailed story out of the increasingly urgent climate science reports that have come out over the last few decades.

For all of that weight it's carrying, "New York 2140" is a surprisingly fun book. It's available now.

SEE ALSO: Trump’s environmental ideas are unpopular all over the country — here's why he's pushing them anyway

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NOW WATCH: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just hit record lows — here's what would happen if all the ice melted


The Great Barrier Reef has reached a 'terminal stage' of damage

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Peter Gash, owner and manager of the Lady Elliot Island Eco Resort in the Great Barrier Reef area, snorkels during an inspection of the reef's condition in an area called the 'Coral Gardens' located at Lady Elliot Island, Australia, in this June 11, 2015 file photo. REUTERS/David Gray

Back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found.

The findings have caused alarm among scientists, who say the proximity of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events is unprecedented for the reef, and will give damaged coral little chance to recover.

Scientists with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for CoralReef Studies last week completed aerial surveys of the world’s largest living structure, scoring bleaching at 800 individual coral reefs across 8,000km.

The results show the two consecutive mass bleaching events have affected a 1,500km stretch, leaving only the reef’s southern third unscathed.

In this handout photo provided by Greenpeace, Activists paint the message 'Reef in Danger' on the side of coal ship Chou San on March 7, 2012 in Gladstone, Australia.

Where last year’s bleaching was concentrated in the reef’s northern third, the 2017 event spread further south, and was most intense in the middle section of the Great Barrier Reef. This year’s mass bleaching, second in severity only to 2016, has occurred even in the absence of an El Niño event.

Last year was bad enough, this year is a disaster

Mass bleaching – a phenomenon caused by global warming-induced rises to sea surface temperatures – has occurred on the reef four times in recorded history.

Prof Terry Hughes, who led the surveys, said the length of time coral needed to recover – about 10 years for fast-growing types – raised serious concerns about the increasing frequency of mass bleaching events.

"The significance of bleaching this year is that it’s back to back, so there’s been zero time for recovery," Hughes told the Guardian. "It’s too early yet to tell what the full death toll will be from this year’s bleaching, but clearly it will extend 500km south of last year’s bleaching."

great barrier reef

Last year, in the worst-affected areas to the reef’s north, roughly two-thirds of shallow-water corals were lost.

Hughes has warned Australia now faces a closing window to save the reef by taking decisive action on climate change.

We’ve given up. It’s been my life managing water quality, we’ve failed.

The 2017 bleaching is likely to be compounded by other stresses on the reef, including the destructive crown-of-thorns starfish and poor water quality. The category-four tropical cyclone Debbie came too late and too far south for its cooling effect to alleviate bleaching.

But Hughes said its slow movement across the reef was likely to have caused destruction to coral along a path up to 100km wide. "It added to the woes of the bleaching. It came too late to stop the bleaching, and it came to the wrong place," he said.

The University of Technology Sydney’s lead reef researcher, marine biologist David Suggett, said that to properly recover, affected reefs needed to be connected to those left untouched by bleaching.

Climate Change, Great Barrier Reef

He said Hughes’ survey results showed such connectivity was in jeopardy. "It’s that connection ultimately that will drive the rate and extent of recovery," Suggett said. "So if bleaching events are moving around the [Great Barrier Reef] system on an annual basis, it does really undermine any potential resilience through connectivity between neighbouring reefs."

Some reef scientists are now becoming despondent. Water quality expert, Jon Brodie, told the Guardian the reef was now in a "terminal stage". Brodie has devoted much of his life to improving water quality on the reef, one of a suite of measures used to stop bleaching.

He said measures to improve water quality, which were a central tenet of the Australian government’s rescue effort, were failing.

"We’ve given up. It’s been my life managing water quality, we’ve failed," Brodie said. "Even though we’ve spent a lot of money, we’ve had no success."

Scuba diver in the great barrier reef

Brodie used strong language to describe the threats to the reef in 2017. He said the compounding effect of back-to-back bleaching, Cyclone Debbie, and run-off from nearby catchments should not be understated.

"Last year was bad enough, this year is a disaster year," Brodie said. "The federal government is doing nothing really, and the current programs, the water quality management is having very limited success. It’s unsuccessful."

Others remain optimistic, out of necessity. Jon Day was a director of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority for 16 years until retiring in 2014.

Day, whose expertise lies in protected area planning and management, said the federal government’s approach to protecting the reef was sorely lacking. He said it was taking too relaxed an approach to fishing, run-off and pollution from farming, and the dumping of maintenance dredge spoil.

The government was far short of the $8.2bn investment needed to meet water quality targets, he said, and Australia was on track to fail its short-term 2018 water quality targets, let alone achieve more ambitious long-term goals.

diving great barrier reef australia

"You’ve got to be optimistic, I think we have to be," Day said. "But every moment we waste, and every dollar we waste, isn’t helping the issue. We’ve been denying it for so long, and now we’re starting to accept it. But we’re spending insufficient amounts addressing the problem."

The Queensland tourism industry raised questions about the reliability of the survey, saying scientists had previously made exaggerated claims about mortality rates and bleaching.

"There is no doubt that we have had a significant bleaching event off Cairns this time around," said Col McKenzie, of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators.

"The far north probably did a little bit better, Port Douglas to Townsille has seen some significant bleaching," he said. "Fortunately we haven’t seen much mortality at this time, and fortunately the temperatures have fallen."

McKenzie said more money needed to be invested in water quality measures, and criticised what he saw as a piecemeal and uncoordinated approach to water quality projects up and down the coast.

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These are the 5 most potentially deadly volcanoes in the world

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Mount Etna volcano

An eruption of Mount Etna recently caught out some BBC journalists who were filming there. The footage was extraordinary and highlighted the hazards volcanoes pose to humans and society.

Since 1600, 278,880 people have been killed by volcanic activity, with many of these deaths attributed to secondary hazards associated with the main eruption. Starvation killed 92,000 following the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia, for example, and a volcanic tsunami killed 36,000 following the 1883 Krakatoa eruption.

Since the 1980s, deaths related to volcanic eruptions have been rather limited, but this is not entirely a result of increased preparedness or investment in hazard management – it is significantly a matter of chance.

Research shows that volcanic activity has shown no let up since the turn of the 21st century – it just hasn’t been around population centres. Indeed, there remain a number of volcanoes poised to blow which pose a major threat to life and livelihood.

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Vesuvius, Italy

Known for its 79AD eruption, which destroyed the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Vesuvius is still a significant hazard given that it overshadows the city of Naples and its surrounds, which are home to over 3m people.

It is also known for a particularly intense form of eruption. Plinian (after Pliny the Younger who was the first to describe the 79AD event) eruptions are characterised by the ejection of a vast column of gas and ash which extends into the stratosphere, far higher than commercial airliners fly.

Were such an eruption to occur at Vesuvius today, it is likely that much of the population would already have been evacuated as a precursory swarm of earthquakes would likely herald its imminent approach. But those who remained would initially be showered with huge pumice rocks too large to be kept aloft by the column of gas.

Then, as the volcano began to run out of energy, the column itself would collapse, causing smaller particles of rock (from fine ash to small boulders) to fall from the sky and back to Earth at high velocity. Asphyxiating clouds of gas and pulverised rock – pyroclastic density currents – would then flood down the slopes of the volcano, annihilating anything in their path. Such gas-ash features have been known to travel tens of kilometres and at terrifying speeds, potentially turning modern Naples into a new Pompeii.



Nyiragongo, Democratic Republic of Congo

This central African volcano has erupted several times over the last few decades and while its eruptions aren’t particularly explosive, it produces a particularly runny – and dangerous – form of lava. Once effused, this lava can rapidly move down the flanks of the volcano and inundate areas with little or no warning.

In 2002, the lava lake at the volcano’s summit was breached, resulting in streams of lava hurtling towards the nearby city of Goma at 60km/h, engulfing parts of it to a depth of two metres.

Fortunately, warnings had been issued as the volcano’s unrest has made it the focus of intense research – and over 300,000 people were evacuated in time. Should such an event occur again, we have to hope that the authorities are equally prepared, but this is a politically unstable area and it remains seriously vulnerable.



Popocatepetl, Mexico

“Popo”, as the locals call it, is just 70km south-west of the one of the largest cities in the world: Mexico City, home to 20m people. Popo is regularly active and its most recent bout of activity in 2016 sent a plume of ash to an altitude of five kilometres.

In recent times, and indeed throughout much of its history, eruptive events at Popo have consisted of similarly isolated ash plumes. But these plumes coat the mountain in a thick blanket of ash which, when mixed with water, can form a dense muddy mixture which has the potential to flow for many kilometres and at relatively high speeds.

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Such phenomena, known as “lahars”, can be extremely deadly, as exemplified by the Nevado del Ruiz disaster of 1985 when around 26,000 people were killed in the town of Armero, Colombia, by a lahar with a volcanic source that was 60km away.

The Nevado del Ruiz tragedy was the direct result of volcanic activity melting ice at the volcano’s summit, but a large volume of rainfall or snowmelt could feasibly generate a similar lahar on Popo. This could flow down-slope towards nearby settlements with little or no warning.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

China is snatching away Trump's chance to be a global leader on energy

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U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago state in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.

REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Much of Pres. Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Fla., sits less than two meters above the Atlantic Ocean, meaning big parts of the resort could rest beneath the waves by the end of this century as seas rise in response to global warming. Already nearby communities like Miami Beach are flooded even when the sun shines, as higher seas push water up and out of the porous limestone underneath the ground in southern Florida.

China is no better off, with cities from Hong Kong to Shanghai at increasing risk of inundation. Other threats such as extreme weather, farms turned to desert and choking smog are all exacerbated by climate change that results from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air. Even China's efforts to combat those rising concentrations – in part by switching from burning coal to capturing the power latent in rivers like the Yangtze– falter in the face of global warming, as a result of less water in those rivers due to drought and the dwindling glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau.

But all that seems to exist in an alternate universe where facts matter, because Trump and China's Pres. Xi Jinping apparently ignored climate change at their inaugural meeting last week. Although the two leaders apparently found time to discuss everything from North Korea's nuclear capability to a potential reset of trade relations, climate change was never mentioned, even though Trump might have wanted to take the opportunity to directly fact check his Tweet from last year that China invented climate change to cripple U.S. manufacturing.

The silence was not a surprise, however, even if the focus of the summit was meant to be "global challenges around the world." As Susan Thornton, acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the U.S. State Department, predicted, "I don't think that [climate change is] going to be a major part of the discussion in Florida."

That's too bad, because China and the U.S. remain the two biggest polluters when it comes to greenhouse gases. Cooperation on climate change provided a rare area of agreement between China and the U.S. during the Obama administration. And it was in large part due to the efforts of China and the U.S. that the nations of the world agreed to combat climate change in Paris in 2015.

It is also too bad for the U.S. – because, ironically, the silence leaves China as the world's future energy leader. As many see the Trump regime abandoning U.S. leadership in the fight to restrain global warming, China seems willing to step up, at least in rhetoric. "What should concern us is refusing to face up to problems and not knowing what to do about them,"Xi said in a speech to the World Economic Forum in January. "The Paris Agreement is a hard-won achievement which is in keeping with the underlying trend of global development. All signatories should stick to it instead of walking away from it, as this is a responsibility we must assume for future generations."

At the same time, the Chinese have taken the lead in producing clean energy – from topping the world in the production and installation of solar power to building an entire new series of nuclear power plants, making use of the latest technology. Trump's avoidance of the climate change problem could leave U.S. industry at a competitive disadvantage.

Even the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. is worried, and urging Trump to remain in the Paris agreement. So are a host of scientists, businesses and even his own secretary of State. Notably, some coal executives are also on board. "Remain in the Paris agreement," urged Colin Marshall, CEO of coal producer Cloud Peak Energy, in a letter to Trump on April 6. "Technology currently exists that can address climate concerns while allowing us to benefit from reliable, abundant natural resources like coal."

Donald Trump Scott Pruitt Mike Pence Ryan Zinke EPABut Trump has already signed an executive order forcing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw the Clean Power Plan, which would have cut pollution from power plants. He is rolling back other federal efforts to combat climate change, such as reducing methane pollution from oil and gas pipelines as well as promoting a budget that could eliminate funding for clean energy research. All of which undercuts any serious effort to meet the U.S. commitment under the Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Xi's China, by contrast, plans to implement a national cap-and-trade system to reduce CO2 pollution this year. And there are already signs that decades-long growth in China's coal burning has slowed or even stopped, potentially fulfilling the country's Paris pledge to reach a peak in its pollution by 2030. This change of course is not just aimed at fending off climate change but also at reducing unhealthy air pollution that even government leaders in Beijing cannot avoid breathing.

It remains unclear whether the U.S. and China will continue cooperating to develop the technology that Cloud Peak's CEO mentioned, known as carbon capture and storage, which might reduce or even eliminate CO2 pollution. Given those prospects, and the Trump administration's likely lack of action, perhaps in the future China will cooperate with the European Union – which also has a cap-and-trade carbon market – to impose carbon tariffs on U.S. goods produced from an economy that has no constraints on such global warming pollution.

Nowhere remains safe from climate change. The U.S. is already feeling the effects, such as weird weather upsetting the plans of American farmers. Those effects will only get worse if nothing is done to stop dumping CO2 into the sky, much less to begin to reduce concentrations that have now reached more than 400 parts per million in the air– higher than that breathed by any members of our fellow Homo sapiens in the last 200,000 years. The global warming challenge is also intimately connected to the global challenges of feeding more than seven billion people, providing drinkable water as supplies dwindle and supplying electricity to billions of people who still do not have it. None of these challenges can be solved in isolation but rather require solutions like clean energy supergrids and microgrids that address energy poverty and reduce climate change pollution at the same time.

This also holds true even for the items that were on the U.S.–China agenda at Mar-a-Lago, such as the future of war-torn Syria after Trump ordered a cruise missile strike in response to that nation's use of chemical weapons in its civil war. A shortage of water and food in Syria helped start the horrendous conflict there, forcing refugees to flee the war and the nation – in other words, a deadly fight and flight exacerbated by climate change. The conflict in Syria may serve as a warning from a future in which Trump continues to deny the facts about global warming.

Much of Pres. Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Fla., sits less than two meters above the Atlantic Ocean, meaning big parts of the resort could rest beneath the waves by the end of this century as seas rise in response to global warming. Already nearby communities like Miami Beach are flooded even when the sun shines, as higher seas push water up and out of the porous limestone underneath the ground in southern Florida.

China is no better off, with cities from Hong Kong to Shanghai at increasing risk of inundation. Other threats such as extreme weather, farms turned to desert and choking smog are all exacerbated by climate change that results from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air. Even China's efforts to combat those rising concentrations – in part by switching from burning coal to capturing the power latent in rivers like the Yangtze– falter in the face of global warming, as a result of less water in those rivers due to drought and the dwindling glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau.

But all that seems to exist in an alternate universe where facts matter, because Trump and China's Pres. Xi Jinping apparently ignored climate change at their inaugural meeting last week. Although the two leaders apparently found time to discuss everything from North Korea's nuclear capability to a potential reset of trade relations, climate change was never mentioned, even though Trump might have wanted to take the opportunity to directly fact check his Tweet from last year that China invented climate change to cripple U.S. manufacturing.

The silence was not a surprise, however, even if the focus of the summit was meant to be "global challenges around the world." As Susan Thornton, acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the U.S. State Department, predicted, "I don't think that [climate change is] going to be a major part of the discussion in Florida."

That's too bad, because China and the U.S. remain the two biggest polluters when it comes to greenhouse gases. Cooperation on climate change provided a rare area of agreement between China and the U.S. during the Obama administration. And it was in large part due to the efforts of China and the U.S. that the nations of the world agreed to combat climate change in Paris in 2015.

It is also too bad for the U.S. – because, ironically, the silence leaves China as the world's future energy leader. As many see the Trump regime abandoning U.S. leadership in the fight to restrain global warming, China seems willing to step up, at least in rhetoric. "What should concern us is refusing to face up to problems and not knowing what to do about them,"Xi said in a speech to the World Economic Forum in January. "The Paris Agreement is a hard-won achievement which is in keeping with the underlying trend of global development. All signatories should stick to it instead of walking away from it, as this is a responsibility we must assume for future generations."

At the same time, the Chinese have taken the lead in producing clean energy – from topping the world in the production and installation of solar power to building an entire new series of nuclear power plants, making use of the latest technology. Trump's avoidance of the climate change problem could leave U.S. industry at a competitive disadvantage.

Even the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. is worried, and urging Trump to remain in the Paris agreement. So are a host of scientists, businesses and even his own secretary of State. Notably, some coal executives are also on board. "Remain in the Paris agreement," urged Colin Marshall, CEO of coal producer Cloud Peak Energy, in a letter to Trump on April 6. "Technology currently exists that can address climate concerns while allowing us to benefit from reliable, abundant natural resources like coal."

But Trump has already signed an executive order forcing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw the Clean Power Plan, which would have cut pollution from power plants. He is rolling back other federal efforts to combat climate change, such as reducing methane pollution from oil and gas pipelines as well as promoting a budget that could eliminate funding for clean energy research. All of which undercuts any serious effort to meet the U.S. commitment under the Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Xi's China, by contrast, plans to implement a national cap-and-trade system to reduce CO2 pollution this year. And there are already signs that decades-long growth in China's coal burning has slowed or even stopped, potentially fulfilling the country's Paris pledge to reach a peak in its pollution by 2030. This change of course is not just aimed at fending off climate change but also at reducing unhealthy air pollution that even government leaders in Beijing cannot avoid breathing.

It remains unclear whether the U.S. and China will continue cooperating to develop the technology that Cloud Peak's CEO mentioned, known as carbon capture and storage, which might reduce or even eliminate CO2 pollution. Given those prospects, and the Trump administration's likely lack of action, perhaps in the future China will cooperate with the European Union – which also has a cap-and-trade carbon market – to impose carbon tariffs on U.S. goods produced from an economy that has no constraints on such global warming pollution.

Nowhere remains safe from climate change. The U.S. is already feeling the effects, such as weird weather upsetting the plans of American farmers. Those effects will only get worse if nothing is done to stop dumping CO2 into the sky, much less to begin to reduce concentrations that have now reached more than 400 parts per million in the air– higher than that breathed by any members of our fellow Homo sapiens in the last 200,000 years. The global warming challenge is also intimately connected to the global challenges of feeding more than seven billion people, providing drinkable water as supplies dwindle and supplying electricity to billions of people who still do not have it. None of these challenges can be solved in isolation but rather require solutions like clean energy supergrids and microgrids that address energy poverty and reduce climate change pollution at the same time.

This also holds true even for the items that were on the U.S.–China agenda at Mar-a-Lago, such as the future of war-torn Syria after Trump ordered a cruise missile strike in response to that nation's use of chemical weapons in its civil war. A shortage of water and food in Syria helped start the horrendous conflict there, forcing refugees to flee the war and the nation – in other words, a deadly fight and flight exacerbated by climate change. The conflict in Syria may serve as a warning from a future in which Trump continues to deny the facts about global warming.

SEE ALSO: Four emerging countries are pushing the US to stop being 'unclear' about climate change

DON'T MISS: Trump’s environmental ideas are unpopular all over the country — here's why he's pushing them anyway

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just hit record lows — here's what would happen if all the ice melted

A powerful new tool reveals how climate change could transform your hometown

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climate change real

The climate is changing. Most people know that it's changing, and a sizeable majority even say they worry about those changes.

But at the same time, just 40% of Americans think it's going to harm them personally. And just 33% of Americans say they talk about climate change "even occasionally."

climate change hurt meOne of the reasons for this discrepancy may be that discussion of climate science tends to happen at the 30,000-foot level — examining global shifts in average temperatures and weather — or focuses on extreme environments, like the Arctic, where the impacts of climate change are most extreme.

But climate change is going to impact every corner of the Earth in some way or another.

That's why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's slick new online Climate Explorer is so fascinating

The updated system lets you zip across the 48 contiguous states (and Washington DC), and see for yourself how the local climate in any given neighborhood is likely to change between 2010 and 2100. The Climate Explorer also includes data on how the climate has behaved between 1950 and 2010; scroll forward in time, and you're seeing data pulled from international climate models.

NOAA's site plots out changes according to two possible futures — one in which global emissions peak in 2040 and then begin to decrease, and another in which emissions keep increasing apace. Take a look.

SEE ALSO: Report: The EPA just shut down its most significant climate safety programs

The first thing you notice when tooling around in the Climate Explorer is how dramatically different the first scenario looks from the second.

This image swipes back and forth between the two scenarios in a map of the country in 2090. Darker shades of red indicate more days each year above 95 degrees Farenheit.

That darkest red, visible around Phoenix, Arizona, as well as parts of southern Texas and Florida in the high-emissions scenario, indicates as many as 225 days over 95 each year. 



But this isn't just a tool for looking at the whole country. It's a tool for thinking about your town. Zoom in on Cherry Hill, New Jersey — the town I lived in as a kid — and a chart pops up.

The chart shows the difference between the two scenarios.

The red area indicates the range of possibilities for the higher-emissions scenario, and the blue area indicates the range for lower emissions. Those lines down the middle indicate the most likely outcomes.

You can see that for Cherry Hill, the difference between high and low emissions amounts to about 50 days with highs over 95 degrees each year by 2090. That's a lot of dangerously hot weather.



But the map isn't just good for examining changes in heat. Here's what happens when you look at changes in precipitation in the West.

You can see the northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest turning brown in both scenarios, signaling they're likely to get much drier.

But California shows the most dramatic impacts to precipitation. Look at that deep brown in Northern California, where the climate is expected to dry out. Then flick your eye down to deep green Southern California, expected to get a whole lot wetter than it's been historically.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

This machine crushes bottles and creates usable sand

With major EPA cuts looming, Scott Pruitt wants a 10-person, 24/7 security detail

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scott pruitt EPA

Scott Pruitt, President Trump's Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has voiced support for the White House's proposal to radically cut the agency's budget.

But there's one spending category Pruitt wants to bulk up: his own security.

As reported by E&E News in February and by The New York Times on April 10, the EPA has requested 10 additional full-time security guards to form a round-the-clock detail that will protect the administrator.

Pruitt has emerged as an unusually high-profile and iconoclastic agency chief. During his confirmation hearings, he made two claims to Congress that each turned out not to be true, and faced the opposition of nearly 800 former EPA officials due to his record of attacking the agency.

As chief of the nation's environmental public health agency, Pruitt has taken a number of steps that earned him praise among opponents of regulation, and sharp criticism from environmental safety advocates. He went on cable news to question, without evidence, the scientific consensus that humans are driving climate change, stood by the president as Trump signed an order to dismantle core EPA emissions rules, told states they could ignore certain Obama-era carbon dioxide regulations, declined to ban a pesticide that appears to cause brain damage in infants, and backed off of methane limits.

Pruitt has also become the first EPA administrator ever to seek a 24/7 security detail.

Over the course of US history, 16 cabinet members have died in office, but none was the victim of an assassination. (The role of EPA administrator is not a cabinet position per se, but is of similar stature.)

The most violent episodes involving members of the cabinet occurred when former vice president Aaron Burr killed former treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, and when Abraham Lincoln's secretary of state, William Seward, was attacked in his home on the same night Lincoln was killed in 1865.

SEE ALSO: Trump’s EPA just told states they can ignore a key Obama-era carbon dioxide regulation

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NOW WATCH: The Great Barrier Reef is turning white and it's a horrible sign for the environment

Incredible photos that will change the way you see the world

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Srinagar Kashmir

No matter if it's captured in a state of peace or destruction, Earth is a fascinating and beautiful place.

Below are 22 of the best environmental photos taken for Reuters in 2016.

From star trails in Kazakhstan to a breathtaking sunrise over the mountains of Austria, these photos will give you a unique perspective of the planet we live on.

The stars above a camp in Kazakhstan's Altyn-Emel National Park look psychedelic thanks to long exposure photography.



A group of people brave a sightseeing platform amidst the otherworldly quartzite sandstone columns that fill Zhangjiajie in China's Hunan Province.

Not surprisingly, the city served as inspiration for the movie "Avatar."



Boats make their way through Chaka Salt Lake in Haixi in China's Qinghai Province.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Doomsday isn't coming — here's why the world is only getting better

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mountain handstand

Don’t be seduced by doomsday thinking.

Ever since Earth Day began in 1970 as a call to arms against air and water pollution, species extinction, overpopulation, poverty, and other pressing human and environmental issues, the propensity has been to ring the alarm bells continuously to prevent public complacency, as if no progress has been made in 47 years.

In fact, if you believe the hype of apocalyptic popularizers you might conclude that climate change, runaway overpopulation, poverty, hunger, and disease will ruin the Earth and leave humanity's only hope for survival on Mars.

It's easy to think this way, given that newspapers, books, television shows and documentary films are built around drama and pessimistic thinking, from Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" to Leonardo DiCaprio's "Before The Flood."

Even Bill Nye's new series on Netflix, which begins on Earth Day, is called "Bill Nye Saves The World." Bill is a good friend and I support his work.

But does the whole world need saving?

In point of fact, as one observer noted in 2016: "We're fortunate to be living in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history. It's been decades since the last war between major powers. More people live in democracies. We're wealthier and healthier and better educated, with a global economy that has lifted up more than a billion people from extreme poverty."

That observer was President Barack Obama, who added later that year that genetic engineering is leading to cures for diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries, that a young girl in a remote village with a smart phone has access to the entirety of human knowledge, and that those born today will be healthier, live longer and have more opportunities than anyone in history.

There is no period in history when it would have been better to be alive than today.

tulipsThe air and water in our cities is the cleanest it’s been in centuries. People in the West have so much food that for the first time in human history obesity has become an epidemic problem. Although the world's population is still increasing, the rate of growth is decreasing and the United Nations predicts that it will peak by 2050 and decline below where it is today by 2100.

The wealthiest nations with the greatest food security have the lowest fertility rates, while the most food insecure countries have the highest fertility rates. This means once African nations make the transition from developing to developed countries—through democratic governance, free trade, access to birth control, and especially the education and economic empowerment of women—population and poverty will be solved there.

The end of poverty? Yes.

According to the economist Max Roser, in 1820 between 84 percent and 94 percent of the world's people lived in poverty or extreme poverty (defined by the UN as earning less than $2.50 a day and $1.25 a day respectively, in 2015 dollars). By 1981 the percentage had dropped to 52%, and by 2010 it was at slightly less than 20%.

But the rate of poverty decline is accelerating, and at the current rate it will reach zero by around 2035. We will then enter the era of post-scarcity economics, sometimes called Trekonomics, after the science fictional world of Star Trek where everyone has all their basic needs met.

This could also happen in our lifetime. According to the World Bank, the per capita GDP for the entire world nearly doubled between 2000 and 2015, from $5448 to $10,000. That is 17 times higher than in 1950 and 100 times higher than the way people lived for the first 99,000 years of our existence as a species, when economists estimate that the annual average income per person was the equivalent of $100 (all in 2015 U.S. dollars).

The UC Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong has computed that the 19th century Industrial Revolution produced a 200 percent increase in per capita income over the previous century, the 20th century generated an 800 percent increase over the 19th, and that the 21st century could witness a 1600 percent increase over the 20th.

If this happens it will mean that people this century will experience more wealth and prosperity than in all previous centuries combined. Inconceivable.

What all this data tells us is that the world doesn't need saving. We are going to be okay. Therefore, we should follow the trend lines, not the headlines, and acknowledge the work that those first Earth Day celebrants began nearly half a century ago.

We should be grateful for the blessings we have today, optimistic about the future, and continue to work toward a better tomorrow because none of this progress was inevitable. It was the result of people taking action to solve our most pressing problems. It is the reason our species was given the label sapiens. We are wise.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of "Why Darwin Matters,""The Believing Brain" and "The Moral Arc." His next book is "Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for Immortality, the Afterlife, and Utopia."

SEE ALSO: Why now is the best time in human history to be an entrepreneur

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NOW WATCH: 8 scary facts about a world with 11 billion people

The EPA wants to know what you think about scrapping air-pollution and radiation rules

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scott pruitt coal miners MAGA

The US has a lot of rules about which kinds of gases, particles, and forms of radiation can get pumped into the atmosphere.

Many of those regulations were written by the Environmental Protection Agency, under the authority Congress granted it through the Clean Air Act.

President Donald Trump and many other conservatives see these rules as overly burdensome and believe the country should have fewer of them. Trump's EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, vocally endorses that position, too.

Trump signed an executive order in March instructing the EPA to review those rules and revise or repeal them.

The order says it's the "policy of the United States to alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens placed on the American people."

Trump specifically instructed the EPA to begin dismantling the Clean Power Plan, a sweeping Obama-era law designed to get 47 states to slash greenhouse-gas emissions from their coal plants.

But revising or repealing a regulation that's already on the books isn't so simple. The EPA will have to go through the same arduous, months-long rulemaking process it used to create the regulations in the first place. And part of that process involves seeking comments from the public.

Now that process is underway.

The EPA has created a page on Regulations.gov where the public can comment. As of writing, it has already logged 1,268 comments, most of which appear to oppose repealing the air-quality regulations.

"The existing regulations are in place for a reason," one recent comment says. "They were enacted to fill a public need for clean water and air. Undoing these regulations is not in the public interest. Short term thinking and ignoring basic facts is sure way to be on the wrong side of history."

"Don't do this," another says.

The agency will also hold a teleconference from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET on April 24 — members of the public will have the opportunity to weigh in. You can find more information on the EPA's regulatory reform process on its website.

SEE ALSO: With major EPA cuts looming, Scott Pruitt wants a 10-person, 24/7 security detail

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just hit record lows — here's what would happen if all the ice melted

Neil DeGrasse Tyson says this new video may contain the 'most important words' he's ever spoken

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Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has released a video urging Americans to change how they relate to science.

Tyson posted the four-and-a-half minute video on his Facebook page, alongside this written note:

Dear Facebook Universe,

I offer this four-minute video on "Science in America" containing what may be the most important words I have ever spoken.

As always, but especially these days, keep looking up.

—Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tyson's message in the video centers on what he sees as a worrisome decline in scientific literacy in the US. 

"Science is a fundamental part of the country that we are," he says in the video. "But in this, the 21st century, when it comes time to make decisions about science, it seems that people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not."

That shift, he says, is a "recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy."

Tyson's speech is interspersed with clips of political debates and news.  The video cuts to a clip of Vice President Mike Pence, then a congressman, speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives.

"Let us demand that educators around America teach evolution not as fact, but as theory," Pence says in the clip.

The role of science, Tyson says, is to provide the factual grounding for politics. The role of politics is to decide what to do about those facts.

You can watch the video in full below.

 

SEE ALSO: Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States, has said he doesn't believe that smoking kills

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NOW WATCH: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just hit record lows — here's what would happen if all the ice melted

13 small things you can do to help the Earth every day

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farmers market

Earth Day, on April 22, is a day to think about the environment and do what you can to help it. A billion people get involved every year, making it the largest civic observance in the world, according to The Telegraph.

But why stop there? You can make saving the planet part of your daily lifestyle. Here are 13 small things you can do everyday to live a sustainable lifestyle and help planet Earth.

Walk or bike to work.

If you live close enough to your office, walking or biking to work will prevent you from using a gasoline-guzzling car. You're also less likely to run into traffic, and you'll burn some calories in the process.



Take public transport.

If you're too far to take a bike, see if your local public transportation network is convenient enough to use on your commute. Cities upload their public transport data to Google Maps, which makes it easy to find out how long and convenient your commute would be.

There are a litany of benefits to taking public transportation. It'll save you gas and money, and you can take the time to read on your commute instead of focusing on the road.



Use a carpool service.

If a bike or public transport aren't quite feasible, you don't have to sacrifice the comfort of a car: just use a carpool service.

Some cities, like New York, organize their own carpools. You can also use an app, like Waze Carpool, Lyft Line, or uberPOOL.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Rising seas could flood middle America with people from the coasts

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hudson yards

Rising sea levels caused by climate change may drive U.S. coastal residents to areas far from the seaboard, not just to adjacent inland regions, according to a study published online in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Even landlocked states such as Arizona and Wyoming could see significant increases in population because of coastal migration by 2100, and may be unprepared to handle the surge, said the analysis from a University of Georgia researcher.

"We typically think about sea-level rise as being a coastal challenge or a coastal issue," Mathew Hauer, author of the study and head of the Applied Demography program at the University of Georgia, said in an interview on Tuesday. "But if people have to move, they go somewhere."

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted in January a 1-to-8-foot (0.3-2.5 meter) increase in sea levels by the year 2100. Previous research by Hauer and others has put the number of Americans displaced by rising seas over the same period as high as 13.1 million.

While a movement of residents from low-lying coastal regions to adjacent inland communities will likely occur, Hauer said that according to his model, even landlocked states such as Nevada, Arizona and Wyoming will see an influx.

Nevada's Clark County, home to Las Vegas, is projected to see an influx of up to 117,000 climate migrants by the end of the century, and nearly every county in Wyoming is predicted to see some increase, as are many counties in western Montana, central Colorado and northern Utah, the study found.

Hauer said previous studies had shown that people permanently leaving their homes often choose destinations where they have family connections or better job prospects, even if those locations are far away.

“A lot of these places, although they might seem like they’re very far (from the coast), people may have kin ties or economic ties or economic reasons for moving,” he said. “People could go to school in an area and they come back years later, maybe that’s closer to family.”

Although municipalities typically are not considering climate migrants in their long-term planning, Hauer said, they should start to do so because the effects of sea-level rise were already being felt.

“It’s not like we go from zero feet of sea-level rise to 6 feet right at the end of the century - it’s an incremental process,” he said.

SEE ALSO: The EPA wants to know what you think about scrapping air-pollution and radiation rules

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just hit record lows — here's what would happen if all the ice melted

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