Links

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-confirms-more-judges-barreling-ahead-with-trumps-transformation-of-the-courts/
Aug. 17, 2018
President Trump has put more judges on the circuit courts this far into his first two years than other administrations had, thanks to Senate Republicans.
The Senate on Thursday confirmed two more of Trump's nominees, bringing to 26 the number of new appellate judges that have been approved this session of Congress.
The judges confirmed Thursday — U.S. District Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. and U.S. Attorney's Office Deputy Chief Jay Richardson — will fill seats on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in South Carolina.
A Trump-nominated judge now holds one out every seven seats on the circuit courts, according to the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Republicans have made a priority of confirming judges in their fight to hold the Senate majority ahead of the fall midterm election. Democrats have stalled many of Mr. Trump's picks.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2017/11/07/the-most-and-least-toxic-places-in-america/amp/
Nov 7, 2017,5:47 pm
The Most (And Least) Toxic Places In America
https://blog.odetoclean.com/the-united-states-of-toxins-1e219e5a701f


https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/17/news/economy/climate-change-economic-forecasts/index.html
Aug. 17, 2018
Heat waves that ground airplanes. Rising seas that drown waterfronts. Wildfires that consume whole cities and blanket the West Coast in smoke.
Climate change is having a real impact, not just on the environment but on the economy too. And a growing body of research by economists and climate scientists shows that extreme weather will weigh on economic growth even more so in the future. But almost no mainstream economic forecasting model takes that into account, in an omission that some economists say could affect the accuracy of economic predictions going forward.
The most recent study to quantify the economic impact of the carbon emissions that spur climate change was featured last week in a brief by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. By evaluating the performance of state economies in previous years, the report found that every one degree increase in average summer temperatures decreases annual state-level output growth by between 0.15 and 0.25 percentage points.
That snowballs over time. If meaningful action isn't taken to curb emissions, US economic growth will be a third lower than it would otherwise have been by the end of this century — or sooner, if warming accelerates even faster than scientists currently anticipate.
Recent research has found that climate change impacts the economy through many channels. There's the obvious effect on agriculture, as farmers scramble to keep up with changing threats from insects, diseases, early springs and drought. But rising temperatures also depress labor productivity, since manufacturing and construction workers can't get as much done in the extreme heat. Retail also takes a hit, since consumers are less willing to shop as the mercury rises.
"Every analysis that's been done of this shows that action is far cheaper than inaction, and there's a global clean energy race that we are currently losing, and that's bad for our economy," Hassol says. "We've got to break this out of the environmental and science box, because I think it's first and foremost an economic story."
Colacito traces a burst of interest in climate change impacts to 2014, when former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen attributed a spate of poor quarters to an unusually harsh winter — which scientists have said will also become more common in the coming years.

tags: extreme weather, severe weather


https://vancouversun.com/news/world/the-worlds-largest-king-penguin-colony-has-collapsed-losing-nearly-90-per-cent-of-its-population/wcm/0f6fcff8-e568-414c-92ef-162e94a072d5
Aug. 1, 2018
The biggest colony of king penguins on the planet has collapsed, with nearly 90 per cent of the population vanishing since the 1980s, ecologists said.
The colony was first discovered in the Sixties on Ile aux Cochons, also known as Pig Island, in the southern Indian Ocean, between Madagascar and Antarctica. At its peak it contained two million birds and 500,000 breeding pairs, but new satellite images have shown an empty landscape, in which 88 per cent of the colony appears to have vanished.
Although nobody has set foot on the island since 1982, photographs taken from a helicopter during a recent flyover show that there could be just 60,000 breeding pairs left, and scientists fear the decline will continue.
“It is completely unexpected, and particularly significant since this colony represented nearly one third of the king penguins in the world,” said research leader Dr. Henri Weimers-kirch, an ecologist at the Centre for -Biological Studies in Chize, France.
King penguins do not make a nest, but lay one egg at a time and carry it around on their feet. Parents take turns incubating the egg, switching every couple of weeks over two months.


https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/16/politics/cnn-poll-kavanaugh-confirmation/index.html
Aug. 16, 2018
Donald Trump's second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, receives a cooler public reception than nearly every nominee for the last four administrations, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Women are a driving force behind the tepid response, with fewer than three in 10 saying Kavanaugh ought to be confirmed.
Overall, 37% of Americans say they'd like to see the Senate vote in favor of his confirmation. Kavanaugh's support is the lowest in polling dating back to Robert Bork's nomination by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. That's lower support for Kavanaugh than similar public assessments of the unsuccessful nominations of Merrick Garland and Harriet Miers, as well as all successful nominees save David Souter, Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer, for whom equivalent data are not available. Slightly more, 40%, say the Senate should not vote to confirm Kavanaugh, while 22% have no opinion on the matter. And Americans' first impressions of the judge are mixed: 33% have a generally positive take, 27% neutral and 29% generally negative.


[Those who are blocking action on global warming are mass murderers, including fossil fuel executives and the politicians they have paid off, and those who voted for them because they didn't want to have to be inconvenienced by change.]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/17/kerala-floods-death-toll-rescue-effort-india
Aug. 17, 2018
More than 324 people have died in the worst flooding in nearly a century in the south Indian state of Kerala.
Roads are damaged, mobile phone networks are down, an international airport has been closed and more than 220,000 people have been left homeless after unusually heavy rain in the past nine days.
Casualty numbers are expected to increase further, with thousands more people still stranded and less intense though still heavy rain forecast for at least the next 24 hours. Many have died from being buried in hundreds of landslides set off by the flooding.
Residents of the state used social media to post desperate appeals for help, sometimes including their GPS coordinates to help guide rescuers.
Another man in the central town of Chengannur posted a video of himself neck-deep in water in his home. “It looks like water is rising to the second floor,” he says. “I hope you can see this. Please pray for us.”
Meteorologists said Kerala had received an average 37.5% more rainfall than usual. The hardest-hit districts such as Idukki in the north received 83.5% excess rain. More than 80 dams across the state had opened their gates to try to ease the crisis, the chief minister said.

tags: extreme weather, severe weather