Apr 15, 2024 | Salon.com
Chinese scientists analyzing health data from more than 200 countries and territories discovered people are more likely to suffer fatal or disabling strokes when the climate changes. While the recent study in the journal Neurology does not directly attribute the strokes to human-caused climate change, it notes an increase in the number of strokes clinically diagnosed as at least partially caused by “sub-optimal temperatures.”...
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 15, 2024 | Salon.com
As climate change worsens, extreme weather events are becoming more common and more intense, from heat waves to floods to freak storms. For the most part, people can escape these events by going inside. But for the unhoused, things are obviously not so easy. For people without housing, they are the most vulnerable to dramatic shifts in climate, as they cannot easily cool off during a heat wave, warm up when it is below freezing or protect themselves from elements like fire, wind, rain and snow....
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 14, 2024 | Salon.com
Earth’s 4.5 billion year geological history is full of death and rebirth, mass extinctions and explosions of biodiversity, with different periods often marked by cataclysmic changes that radically reshaped environments and climates. Whether it was major ice ages or meteor impacts, these changes encompass everything from the shape of our continents to the composition of our oceans....
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 11, 2024 | Salon.com
Global heating has so profoundly altered our planet that some experts argue it’s no longer about a changing climate and instead about a changed climate. In other words, the hotter world, more chaotic world predicted by climate scientists is part of our present, not just our future. And those changes extend beyond rising sea levels and heat waves to how diseases spread and impact society....
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 10, 2024 | Salon.com
“Forever chemicals” live up to their name and take inconceivably long to break down. You definitely don’t want these substances in your body. Technically known as PFAS (short for “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances”), they are linked to ailments like high blood pressure, liver disease, lowered sperm count and various cancers....
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 10, 2024 | Salon.com
A group of elderly Swiss women made history on Tuesday when they became the first plaintiffs to win a climate-related victory in the European Court of Human Rights.
Representing a group of more than 2,000 individuals known as KlimaSeniorinnen — a Swiss German shorthand term for “Senior Women for Climate Protection” — the women successfully argued that because of their age and sex, they cannot leave their homes during heat waves without suffering health attacks. ...
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 9, 2024 | Salon.com
As climate change continues to increase global temperatures, scientists are focusing on the most sparsely populated continent in the world: Antarctica. The largely frozen southern continent has immense amounts of land ice that is gradually melting, causing sea levels to rise all over the world. A recent study revealed the so-called “doomsday” glacier, actually called Thwaites Glacier, began to lose large amounts of ice in the 1940s and is still melting today....
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 8, 2024 | Salon.com
When you blend raw cocoa with sugar, it yields one of the most universally desired products on the planet, whether as part of a candy bar at the corner store or a high-end artisanal chocolate at a price point many times higher. But there’s a problem: The cocoa beans indispensable to making real chocolate have become increasingly expensive, with the price rising by 136% between July 2022 and February 2024....
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 7, 2024 | Salon.com
There is a certain romanticism about fishing, an ancient practice that brings to mind the Biblical Saint Peter, famously a fisherman, or perhaps the titular protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Behind every fish, crustacean and other form of seafood we eat is a story, or how that food landed on our plates....
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 6, 2024 | Salon.com
Imagine a fungus that makes your skin turn angry red. Some of the skin breaks into ulcers, especially at the tips of your toes, while in other places, pieces of skin shed off entirely. By the time it reaches your heart, which is inevitably fatal, death is probably a welcome relief....
Originally posted on salon.com