Dec 9, 2024 | Salon.com
A pair of satellites astronomers hope can create an artificial eclipse were launched from a site in India last week. Beginning in 2025, each satellite will cause a periodic eclipse that lasts for six hours, much longer than the few minutes caused by natural eclipses.
In addition to conducting this experimental maneuver, the so-called ESA’s Proba-3 mission will observe a slice of the Sun’s ethereal corona difficult to perceive from Earth....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 6, 2024 | Salon.com
Earlier last month, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that Earth’s average temperature in 2024 had been on average 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. This was the major threshold established in the 2015 Paris climate accord as a dangerous milestone for our species, in which temperatures are so hot, that collapse of major ocean and atmospheric systems and mass extinctions follow....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 6, 2024 | Salon.com
The residents of a small North Carolina town are suing Duke Energy, one of the largest utilities companies in the world, for its role in contributing to climate change. In the process, they are continuing a nationwide trend of communities suing oil companies, and now utilities, for contributing to global heating....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 5, 2024 | Salon.com
Before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became a top science adviser to Donald Trump — a once-and-future president who openly denies environmental science — the dynastic New York lawyer was such a prominent environmentalist that he literally became a “waterkeeper,” someone dedicated to conserving natural bodies of water from pollution. For more than 20 years, Kennedy helped lead the “Waterkeeper Alliance” he co-founded until leaving in 2020 to “devote himself” to vaguely defined “other issues.”...
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 5, 2024 | Salon.com
Venus, the second planet from our Sun, vividly demonstrates why the greenhouse effect makes life impossible. With an average surface temperature of roughly 1000º F (500º C) under a toxic atmosphere primarily composed of thick carbon dioxide, no lifeform known to inhabit our third planet from the Sun can dwell on its neighbor....
Originally posted on salon.com
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....
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