It’s no secret that modern humans, with our fuel-burning cars, massive ranching and agriculture practices, and penchant for disposable goods, have had a huge impact on nearly every environment across the globe. But new research shows that even our ancestors in the Bronze Age changed the chemistry of the soils they…
The pace at which hurricanes move across the planet is slowing, according to new research. This suggests Hurricane Harvey, which stalled over Texas last summer, may not have been an anomaly, and that highly destructive, slow-moving tropical storms are becoming more common.
It can be tough to keep up with the many allegations of misconduct circulating about Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, because there’s so many of them flying out the door. Over the past few months alone, internal EPA teams have failed to identify any credible threats that would justify Pruitt’s $3…
Imagine an unbroken chronological record, dating back a million years, of temperature and atmospheric conditions on Earth. Such a thing could indeed exist in the form of an ancient and undisturbed Antarctic ice core, according to a recent survey.
Mo Brooks is just a plain-spoken man from Alabama with some theories on climate change. Luckily, because everything is terrible, he’s a congressman and sits on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee so he has a platform to float some of his entirely unfounded ideas like, for instance, sea levels are rising…
The ever-growing list of stuff Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has been accused of is already incredible. But here’s something that truly boggles the mind: Last year, Pruitt met with a Roman Catholic cardinal who also happens to be facing charges of “multiple historic sexual offenses” just because…
Our planet is in a remarkably circular orbit around the Sun, but as new research points out, Earth’s orbit sometimes experiences a slight jolt, thanks to the combined gravitational influence of Jupiter and Venus. Incredibly, this cycle has been going on for at least 215 million years—and one scientist suggests it…
The government of Australia announced on Sunday a plan to spend 500 million Australian dollars (roughly $379 million) on saving the Great Barrier Reef—the largest single investment ever committed towards the reef’s future, but that environmental activists say is still too little to preserve it in the face of climate…
The awkwardly named Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared that burning wood is carbon neutral. In the eyes of the Trump regime, burning wood for energy is now just as environmentally friendly as wind and solar power, despite the fact that burning biomass releases greenhouse gases.
Scott Pruitt, the increasingly scandal-mired, climate change-denying chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, met personally at the agency’s headquarters with a lobbyist who later gave him a sweetheart deal on an apartment, despite denials to the contrary.
Internal emails that revealed the Environmental Protection Agency has been pursuing a plan to restrict the type of scientific research the agency uses to write environmental policy have been removed from an online portal that made the documents publicly accessible.
Days after Donald Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, allegedly warned Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt to knock it off with all these goddamn scandals, the Associated Press reports that the full bill for the first year of Pruitt’s unprecedented travel and security expenses are now in the neighborhood…
Environmental Protection Agency chief and climate skeptic Scott Pruitt, who just months ago was widely rumored to be under consideration for a shift to the completely different role of attorney general, has seen his palace intrigue problems mount as more reports of wasteful behavior emerge.
Soon after the glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age, our planet was vulnerable to abrupt and dramatic shifts in climate, including prolonged cold snaps that lasted for decades. New research suggests early hunter-gatherers living in the British Isles didn’t just manage to survive these harsh conditions—they…
My apologies to anyone who doesn’t happen to live in the Northeastern United States. I don’t want you to feel bad for us. But I do want you to recognize the fact that we’ve been walloped with four enormous snowstorms in three weeks. Adding insult to injury, the most recent one occurred the day after spring “began.”
By 2050, the world’s population will top ten billion people. As industrial capitalism evolves across the globe like no time in human history, will our planet’s ecosystem be able to sustain itself during this rapid transformation? Will human beings be able to support themselves with agriculture and survive on this…
Our favorite autonomous underwater vehicle, Boaty McBoatface, has completed a two-month mission in which it explored a massive ice shelf in Antarctica’s southern Weddell Sea. Swimming nearly a kilometer beneath the surface, and with hardly any human assistance or oversight, Boaty spent over 50 hours directly beneath…
Just north of Amsterdam’s most famous canals, there’s an island of fat bobbing up and down in the sea by a wharf in a former shipyard. Right now it’s the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and weighs a metric ton, but its creators, Mike Thompson and Arne Hendriks, say it will be big enough to walk on one day. Thompson and…
After noticing the telltale signs of guano streaks on satellite imagery, an international team of researchers set out to count the number of penguins on Antarctica’s aptly named Danger Islands. They found a previously undetected supercolony of over 1.5 million Adélie penguins—a surprising result, given how poorly…
Scott Pruitt, who ostensibly runs the Environmental Protection Agency when he’s not taking first-class plane trips or speculating that climate change might actually be good, has once again taken to using the Bible to justify parts of his agenda.
