Really disturbing news that NASA has reversed its decision to host the National Climate Assessment, previously published on the scrubbed globalchange.gov, which comes soon after the EPA announced it is reconsidering whether climate change poses a threat to the public.
The website that hosts the most recent edition of the National Climate Assessment has gone dark. The sprawling report is the most influential source of information about how climate change affects the United States.
The National Climate Assessment is widely used by teachers, city planners, farmers, judges and regular citizens looking for answers to common questions such as how quickly sea levels are rising near American cities and how to deal with wildfire smoke exposure. The most recent edition had a searchable atlas that allowed anyone to learn about the current and future effects of global warming in their specific town or state.
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An archived version of the most recent edition is available through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All five editions of the National Climate Assessment that have been published over the years will also be available on NASA’s website, according to NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens. NASA doesn’t yet know when that website will be available to the public. www.wesa.fm/…
This is just the latest example of climate “erasure” since the new administration took over in January.
By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing. In April, the administration pulled nearly $4 million in funding from a Princeton program to improve computer models predicting changes in the oceans and atmosphere, claiming the work created “climate anxiety” among young people. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual report to the United Nations detailing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended its 45-year tradition of tracking billion-dollar weather disasters. Trump also hopes to shut down the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaiʻi, which has measured the steady rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since the 1950s — the first data to definitively show humans were changing the climate. grist.org/…
“This kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research, to my knowledge, is historically unprecedented,” Aronowsky said.
Watch: Flash flooding sweeps through New York City subways
Global Warming’s impact on Vacation Time might be the “wake-up call” we need…
“Climate change is changing Europe into a summer paradise lost,” The New York Times reported in a grim dispatch from Barcelona this week. “Across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and beyond, sand-devouring storms, rising seas, asphyxiating temperatures, deadly floods and horrific wildfires have year after year turned some of the continent’s most desired getaways into miserable locales to get away from.”
Near-perfect weather is part of what makes a summer paradise, and in sweltering heat, even the cultural attractions aren’t quite as inviting. For events such as the Avignon Festival, a destination for theater fans in southern France, temperatures surpassing 100 degrees are becoming “an existential threat.” “But Spain,” the Times added, “has become the least fun in the sun destination.” Temperatures in some southern locales there have reached 115 degrees lately, and efforts to escape the heat by going to the beach are complicated by the fact that erosion and coastal flooding are, in some places, devouring tens of thousands of square miles of sand. from This Might Be the Climate Wake-Up Call We’ve Been Waiting For
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