Dec 3, 2024 | Salon.com
Plastic pollution is choking the planet. From the bottom of the Mariana trench to the top of Mount Everest, there is little escaping the problem. Regardless, treaty negotiations to end plastic pollution collapsed on Sunday after the event in Busan, South Korea closed without the nations firmly agreeing to put limits on plastic production....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 2, 2024 | Immigration, Salon.com
Climate change denial is often seen as a mainstay of the political right, as leaders like President-elect Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson ignore or contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans are cooking our only planet. It wasn’t always this way, of course — Republicans were once moderate stewards of the environment, with presidents like Richard Nixon passing progressive environmental laws....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 1, 2024 | Salon.com
A pale blue-green enigma, the planet Uranus has long fascinated astronomers precisely because of its extreme distance, some 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion km) from Earth. While it is comparatively easy to gaze upon neighboring celestial bodies like the Moon and the planets Mars and Venus, Uranus is difficult to see without the most powerful telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope....
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 30, 2024 | Salon.com
2024 was an ominous year for the future of Earth. Climate scientists anticipate that it will be the first year in which the average planetary temperature was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, a critical threshold established in 2015 during the Paris climate accord. Meanwhile a 2023 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found humans brought about as many extinctions over the previous five centuries that if our species had never existed, it would have taken 18,000 years for that same number of genera to have gone extinct on their own....
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 26, 2024 | Salon.com
Australian police arrested 170 climate change activists in the state of New South Wales during a protest from Friday through Sunday. Representing the group Rising Tide Australia, the protesters shut down maritime traffic in the Port of Newcastle, which is one of the world’s biggest exporters of coal and coal products....
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 24, 2024 | Salon.com
When scientists discovered water and a chemical compound common in RNA on a rock from the asteroid Ryugu, astronomy fans and laypeople alike held their collective breath for the chance of extraterrestrial life. As more evidence of microorganisms emerged, experts began to wonder if humans would soon learn life exists somewhere in the universe besides Earth....
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 24, 2024 | History, Salon.com
Tashbulak and Tugunbulak may be largely forgotten today, but the pair of Uzbekistani cities thrived during the Medieval era. Nestled in the Tien Shan mountains, the largest east to west mountain range on Earth, merchants from all over Europe and Asia would travel to Tashbulak and Tugunbulak to hawk their wares....
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 22, 2024 | Salon.com
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency released newly-acquired data showing that over 143 million Americans are exposed to so-called “forever chemicals,” or PFAS. The source of this exposure is their drinking water — and as more data comes in, that number is expected to rise.
In the analysis, the EPA learned that 11 million more people are exposed to PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in their drinking water than was previously reported....
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 21, 2024 | Salon.com
The Chagos Archipelago is one of the most remote places on Earth. Smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the collection of more than five dozen tiny islands are mostly uninhabited, due in no small part to the United States and United Kingdom expelling the Indigenous Chagossians in an ethnic cleansing from 1967 to 1973....
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 20, 2024 | Salon.com
A “once in a decade” bomb cyclone pummeled the Pacific Northwest on early Wednesday, with southern Canada and Washington, Oregon and California experiencing wind speeds as high as 101 mph (163 km/hr), torrential rain and heavy mountain snow.
At least one person is confirmed to have died from the storm — a woman in her 50s who was killed after a large tree fell on her homeless encampment — while hundreds of thousands of others in the affected area are without power....
Originally posted on salon.com