climate change

The March for Science, set for Saturday in Washington, may command attention for one reason: "It’s pretty rare for people in any occupation to march on their field’s behalf," says FiveThirtyEight in an examination of public protest. "When scientists travel from across the country to ask their government for respect and funding, the group they will most closely be emulating is farmers."

Wheat prices reached their highest level in nearly three years on the London futures market because of fears that dry weather threatens the summer harvest.

Worried that Trump administration cuts to the EPA will mean slashing thousands of jobs, EPA employees are organizing to defend their work, says NPR. At one union hall in Washington, D.C., dozens of EPA staffers filed in to discuss the issue. NPR spoke with Marie Owens Powell, an EPA enforcement officer and local union leader.

Conservatives intent on reversing the Obama administration’s climate-change legacy are angry that EPA chief Scott Pruitt hasn’t gone further. They’d like to see him try to reverse the “endangerment finding” that provides the legal framework for the Clean Power Plan and other climate-change policies.

The Trump administration’s proposed budget would cancel four NASA climate science missions, which would have measured the flow of carbon dioxide and tracked long-term weather patterns. “Long before President Trump was elected, climate researchers have warned that the nation’s climate monitoring capabilities — which include satellites as well as air- and surface-based instruments — were less than adequate and faced data collection gaps and other uncertainties,” reports The New York Times.

Back-to-back coral bleachings in 2016 and 2017 have left only the southern third of the Great Barrier Reef untouched, and experts are predicting the death of the entire ecosystem.

The new photo on the Bureau of Land Management’s homepage shows a wall of coal at the Peabody North Antelope Rochelle Coal Mine in Wyoming, echoing President Trump’s support for the struggling industry. Under the Obama Administration, the photo was of a man and a boy backpacking in the mountains and looking into the sunset.

The Paris climate treaty is a “bad deal” for the U.S. said Scott Pruitt, while adding that the country should stay “engaged" in international climate discussions.

Climate change has set off the largest mass movement of species, since the last ice age, about 25,000 years ago, says a study published in the journal Science. “Land-based species are moving polewards by an average of 17km per decade, and marine species by 72km per decade,” said Professor Gretta Pecl at the University of Tasmania in Australia, the study’s lead author.

In the past it’s been the U.S. pushing China to clean up its energy portfolio and lower emissions, but under Trump the tables could turn, says The New York Times. China has publicly called on all signatories, including the U.S., of the Paris climate treaty to respect the pact. Trump has said he will back out of the deal and this week signed an executive order to reverse the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which lowered carbon emissions from coal plants.

President Trump officially rolled back Obama’s Clean Power Plan, signing a document called the “Energy Independence” executive order, says The New York Times. Even though many economists have said that the rise in demand for natural gas — and not climate change regulations — are to blame for a depressed coal market, Trump promised his order would put the miners back to work.

President Trump will sign an executive order this week to undo President Obama’s 2015 clean-power plan, EPA secretary Scott Pruitt revealed in an interview with ABC’s This Week. The plan was designed to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. by 30 percent from 2005 levels before 2030, in part by targeting carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.

About 70 percent of Americans want government regulations on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, yet government officials are poised to roll back coal restrictions, says The New York Times, laying out public opinion on climate change in a series of maps.

As costs have dropped, solar panels are becoming a common sight, including in rural America, where farmers are using solar to offset their costs in a variety of ways, says Civil Eats. When farmers move beyond generating electricity for farmstead use into acres of solar panels, it creates a tussle between clean energy and preservation of open spaces for forests and farms, according to a news site in Connecticut, where solar has the upper hand.

The disappearance of "biocrusts" in the world’s deserts may help slow climate change — though not without consequences, says a 10-year study in the journal Scientific Reports. Biocrusts are the “tangled masses of mosses, lichens and cyanobacteria” that emerge from the desert floor in places like the Sonoran desert in the American southwest and the Colorado plateau.

An assistant professor at the University of British Columbia says her research shows that the great majority of people who played outside as children are interested in environmental issues as adults. "Developing positive experiences in nature at a young age can influence our attitudes and behaviors towards nature as adults," says researcher Catherine Broom in a UBC release.

President Trump will soon cancel the Obama-era policy that demanded federal agencies account for the “social cost of carbon” when drafting new regulations, says Reuters. Under Obama, agency officials had to quantify the economic damage of an activity, like coal mining or oil drilling, based on its contribution to climate change.

An ethanol industry trade group says President Trump's decision to review fuel economy standards for automobiles set by his predecessor could mean a larger role for "high octane, low carbon fuels" such as renewable fuels. Trump announced "the big news that we're going to work on the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards, so you can make cars in America again" during a speech in Detroit.