climate change

The HBO investigative series Vice airs a new show devoted to climate change on Friday, Feb. 24. “Almost overnight the most powerful political entity in the world, the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government are now led by climate change deniers, leaving America as the sole outlier in the developed world,” says VICE founder and CEO Shane Smith, speaking of the election of Donald Trump and a Republican-held Congress.

The number of endangered and threatened species affected by climate change is dramatically higher than previously thought, say researchers in the UK, Australia, Italy and the U.S. “New analysis has found that nearly half (47%) of the mammals and nearly a quarter (24.4%) of the birds on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list of threatened species are negatively impacted by climate change – a total of about 700 species,” reports The Guardian.

In Louisiana, rising sea levels are threatening the traditional foodways of tribes that for hundreds of years have found their sustenance on the land and in the water, says Barry Yeoman in FERN’s latest story, "Reclaiming Native Ground," in partnership with The Lens and Gravy, the podcast of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

As head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt is working up plans to rewrite climate change rules, reduce staffing and close regional offices. But it’s likely he will use a “scalpel rather than a meat cleaver” to cut the agency’s authority, says The New York Times.

Chairman John Barrasso called it "political theater," but Democratic members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee prevented a vote on EPA nominee Scott Pruitt by boycotting a committee meeting. Barrasso said he would meet with the senior Democrat on the panel, Tom Carper, to find a way to move the nomination forward, said The Hill newspaper.

Federal employees from more than a dozen U.S. departments are tweeting climate change and other scientific information under unofficial Twitter accounts in a move against the climate-skeptical Trump administration, says Reuters.

The Trump administration has told EPA officials to remove the agency's Internet page on climate change, says Reuters, "the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama's climate change initiatives."

Doug Ericksen, head of communications for President Trump's EPA transition team, says that during the transition period, agency scientists will have their work vetted on a “case by case” basis before it can be published and dispersed outside the agency.

Under a worst-case scenario, climate change could raise ocean levels an average of more than eight feet by 2100, about 20 inches more than was indicated by the last federal report, published in 2012, according to scientists from universities and multiple federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A best-case scenario puts the rise at one foot by 2100, but the scientists say that a 1.5-foot increase is the most realistic.

Without mentioning President Trump by name, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown made clear in his state of the state address that California is prepared to fight the new administration over key issues, including climate change and immigration.

Little research and scant funding is directed toward the ecological impacts of pesticides, says a new report published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. “Fewer than 1 percent of published ecological studies over the past 25 years mentioned synthetic chemicals, according to the researchers, who looked at papers in 20 mainstream ecology journals,” said Ensia.

As the Trump administration settles into the White House, seven states are hoping for dramatic changes in the federal government's public-lands policy, reports E&E News, offering analysis of each state. Alaska, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, which together contain 60 percent of U.S. public lands, are set to be battlegrounds for environmentalists, landowners, ranchers and oil companies.

The Trump administration has removed nearly all mention of climate change from the White House website, says Reuters, while publishing a call for increased energy development and fewer environmental regulations.

Researchers say fossil-fuel emissions will make the oceans more acidic in coming decades and drive down the population of the Dungeness crab, native to the north Pacific coast, by 30 percent, reports the Seattle Times. Federal fishery biologist Issac Kaplan, a co-author of the study, said the research points to "a moderate decline in a species that is really economically important."

Eight of the 12 months of 2016 were the warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880, helping to make 2016 the warmest year globally — the third record-setting year in a row, said NASA. "We don't expect record years every year but the ongoing long-term warming trend is clear," said Gavin Schmidt, direct of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

For many orchards, cold weather is a menace but in California's Central Valley, mild winters are becoming a threat, says Valley Public Radio. Crops such as peaches, pistachios and almonds need a certain amount of frigid weather - chill hours in agricultural terminology - to set the buds that bloom into flowers that produce fruit and nuts.

With his wife and family seated behind him, Rep. Ryan Zinke faced the Senate Committee for Energy and Natural Resources yesterday during his confirmation hearing for secretary of the Interior. The Montana Republican told the committee that he was “absolutely against” the sale or transfer of public lands. But he reassured many of his fellow Republicans that under his watch states would have more say in the management of natural resources and wildlife within their borders.

A preliminary report conducted by the Department of the Interior says the office is considering whether to raise coal royalty rates on public lands and require compensation from coal companies for carbon emissions. Coal on public land accounts for 10 percent of total U.S. greenhouse emissions, says The Seattle Times.