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      Sudden loss of key US satellite data could send hurricane forecasting back ‘decades’

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      A critical US atmospheric data collection program will be halted by Monday, giving weather forecasters just days to prepare, according to a public notice sent this week. Scientists that the Guardian spoke with say the change could set hurricane forecasting back “decades”, just as this year’s season ramps up.In a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) message sent on Wednesday to its scientists, the agency said that “due to recent service changes” the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) will “discontinue ingest, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30, 2025”.Due to their unique characteristics and ability to map the entire world twice a day with extremely high resolution, the three DMSP satellites are a primary source of information for scientists to monitor Arctic sea ice and hurricane development. The DMSP partners with Noaa to make weather data collected from the satellites publicly available.The reasons for the changes, and which agency was driving them, were not immediately clear. Noaa said they would not affect the quality of forecasting.However, the Guardian spoke with several scientists inside and outside of the US government whose work depends on the DMSP, and all said there are no other US programs that can form an adequate replacement for its data.“We’re a bit blind now,” said Allison Wing, a hurricane researcher at Florida State University. Wing said the DMSP satellites are the only ones that let scientists see inside the clouds of developing hurricanes, giving them a critical edge in forecasting that now may be jeopardized.“Before these types of satellites were present, there would often be situations where you’d wake up in the morning and have a big surprise about what the hurricane looked like,” said Wing. “Given increases in hurricane intensity and increasing prevalence towards rapid intensification in recent years, it’s not a good time to have less information.”The satellites also formed a unique source of data for tracking changes to the Arctic and Antarctic, and had been tracking changes to polar sea ice continuously for more than 40 years.“These are some of the regions that are changing the fastest around the planet,” said Carlos Moffat, an oceanographer at the University of Delaware who had been working on a research project in Antarctica that depended on DMSP data. “This new announcement about the sea ice data really amounts to blinding ourselves and preventing us from observing these critical systems.”Researchers say the satellites themselves are operating normally and do not appear to have suffered any errors that would physically prevent the data from continuing to be collected and distributed, so the abrupt data halt might have been an intentional decision.“It’s pretty shocking,” Moffat said. “It’s hard to imagine what would be the logic of removing access now and in such a sudden manner that it’s just impossible to plan for. I certainly don’t know of any other previous cases where we’re taking away data that is being collected, and we’re just removing it from public access.”The loss of DMSP comes as Noaa’s weather and climate monitoring services have become critically understaffed this year as Donald Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) initiative has instilled draconian cuts to federal environmental programs.A current Noaa scientist who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation said that the action to halt the DMSP, when taken in context with other recent moves by the Trump administration, amounted to “a systematic destruction of science”.The researcher also confirmed that federal hurricane forecasters were left unprepared for the sudden change with only a few days of notice.“It’s an instant loss of roughly half of our capabilities,” said the scientist. “You can’t expect us to make accurate forecasts and warnings when you take the useful tools away. It frankly is an embarrassment for the government to pursue a course with less data and just pretend everything will be OK.”Scientists said the decision to halt the DMSP will result in immediately degraded hurricane forecasts during what is expected to be an above-average season as well as a gap in monitoring sea ice – just as Arctic sea ice is hitting new record lows.“This is a huge hit to our forecasting capabilities this season and beyond, especially our ability to predict rapid intensification or estimate the strength of storms in the absence of hurricane hunters,” said Michael Lowry, a meteorologist who has worked at Noaa’s National Hurricane Center and with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “The permanent discontinuation of data from these satellites is senseless, reckless and puts at risk the lives of tens of millions of Americans living in hurricane alley.”The DMSP dates back to 1963, when the Department of Defense determined a need for high-resolution cloud forecasts to help them plan spy missions. The program, which had been the longest-running weather satellite initiative in the federal government, has since evolved into a critical source of information not just on the inner workings of hurricanes, but also on polar sea ice, wildfires, solar flares and the aurora.In recent years, the DMSP had struggled to maintain consistent funding and priority within the Department of Defense as it transitioned away from its cold war mission. The only other nation with similar satellite capability is Japan, and messages posted earlier in June indicate that scientists had already been considering a switch to the Japanese data in case of a DMSP outage – though that transition will take time.Neither Noaa nor the Department of Defense specified exactly which service changes may have prompted such a critical program to be so abruptly halted.In a statement to the Guardian, Noaa’s communications director, Kim Doster, said: “The DMSP is a single dataset in a robust suite of hurricane forecasting and modeling tools in the National Weather Service portfolio. This routine process of data rotation and replacement would go unnoticed in past administrations, but the media is insistent on criticizing the great work that Noaa and its dedicated scientists perform every day.“Noaa’s data sources are fully capable of providing a complete suite of cutting-edge data and models that ensure the gold-standard weather forecasting the American people deserve.”One Noaa source the Guardian spoke to said the loss of DMSP’s high-resolution data could not be replaced by any other existing Noaa tool.A statement from an official at US space force, which is part of the Department of Defense, said: “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) operates the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) for the DoD on behalf of the US Space Force, who has satellite control authority.”The official went on to say that Noaa receives the data from the US navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) and added: “While the Space Force does provide DMSP data and processing software to DoD users, to include the US Navy, questions about the reasons for FNMOC’s changes to DMSP data processing should be directed to the Navy.“Even as FNMOC is making a change on their end, the posture on sharing DMSP data has not changed. Noaa has been making this DMSP data publicly available, and many non-DoD entities use this data that is originally processed by FNMOC.“DMSP satellites and instruments are still functional. The data provided to FNMOC is just one way the DoD uses DMSP data. DoD users (including the Navy) will continue to receive and operationally use DMSP data sent to weather satellite direct readout terminals across the DoD.”The Guardian is approaching the US navy for comment. More

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      Trump’s tax bill seeks to prevent AI regulations. Experts fear a heavy toll on the planet

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      US Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world’s dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned.About 1bn tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry’s enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a “pause” of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.“By limiting oversight, it could slow the transition away from fossil fuels and reduce incentives for more energy-efficient AI energy reliance,” Guidi said.“We talk a lot about what AI can do for us, but not nearly enough about what it’s doing to the planet. If we’re serious about using AI to improve human wellbeing, we can’t ignore the growing toll it’s taking on climate stability and public health.”Donald Trump has vowed that the US will become “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto” and has set about sweeping aside guardrails around AI development and demolishing rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution.The “big beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives would bar states from adding their own regulations upon AI and the GOP-controlled Senate is poised to pass its own version doing likewise.Unrestricted AI use is set to deal a sizable blow to efforts to tackle the climate crisis, though, by causing surging electricity use from a US grid still heavily reliant upon fossil fuels such as gas and coal. AI is particularly energy-hungry – one ChatGPT query needs about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.Carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled since 2018, with an upcoming Harvard research paper finding that the largest “hyperscale” centers now account for 2% of all US electricity use.“AI is going to change our world,” Manu Asthana, chief executive of the PJM Interconnection, the US largest grid, has predicted. Asthana estimated that almost all future increase in electricity demand will come from data centers, adding the equivalent of 20m new homes to the grid in the next five years.The explosive growth of AI has, meanwhile, worsened the recent erosion in climate commitments made by big tech companies. Last year, Google admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48% since 2019 due to its own foray into AI, meaning that “reducing emissions may be challenging” as AI further takes hold.Proponents of AI, and some researchers, have argued that advances in AI will aid the climate fight by increasing efficiencies in grid management and other improvements. Others are more skeptical. “That is just a greenwashing maneuver, quite transparently,” said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “There have been some absolutely nonsense things said about this. Big tech is mortgaging the present for a future that will never come.”While no state has yet placed specific green rules upon AI, they may look to do so given cuts to federal environmental regulations, with state lawmakers urging Congress to rethink the ban. “If we were expecting any rule-making at the federal level around data centers it’s surely off the table now,” said Hanna. “It’s all been quite alarming to see.”Republican lawmakers are undeterred, however. The proposed moratorium cleared a major hurdle over the weekend when the Senate parliamentarian decided that the proposed ban on state and local regulation of AI can remain in Trump’s tax and spending mega-bill. The Texas senator Ted Cruz, the Republican who chairs the Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation, changed the language to comply with the Byrd Rule, which prohibits “extraneous matters” from being included in such spending bills.The provision now refers to a “temporary pause” on regulation instead of a moratorium. It also includes a $500m addition to a grant program to expand access to broadband internet across the country, preventing states from receiving those funds if they attempt to regulate AI.The proposed AI regulation pause has provoked widespread concern from Democrats. The Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, a climate hawk, says he has prepared an amendment to strip the “dangerous” provision from the bill.“The rapid development of artificial intelligence is already impacting our environment, raising energy prices for consumers, straining our grid’s ability to keep the lights on, draining local water supplies, spewing toxic pollution in communities, and increasing climate emissions,” Markey told the Guardian.“However, instead of allowing states to protect the public and our planet, Republicans want to ban them from regulating AI for 10 years. It is shortsighted and irresponsible.”The Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss has also called the proposal “a terrible idea and an unpopular idea”.“I think we have to realize that AI is going to suffuse in rapid order many dimensions of healthcare, media, entertainment, education, and to just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless,” he said.Some Republicans have also come out against the provision, including the Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn and the Missouri senator Josh Hawley. An amendment to remove the pause from the bill would require the support of at least four Republican senators to pass.Hawley is said to be willing to introduce an amendment to remove the provision later this week if it is not eliminated beforehand.Earlier this month, the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene admitted she had missed the provision in the House version of the bill, and that she would not have backed the legislation if she had seen it. The far-right House Freedom caucus, of which Greene is a member, has also come out against the AI regulation pause. More

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      On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom’. Its moderators say it’s not for everyone

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      The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours.For many, the only sane solution is to stop reading the news altogether – advice often shared by therapists, self-help books and even newspaper articles.But to bury your head in the sand until the day the apocalypse arrives at your doorstep is not necessarily the most tranquil, nor moral, of postures. In the sprawling Reddit community r/collapse, people instead try to stare unblinkingly at the unravelling of civilization. For the roughly half a million members here, many of whom joined in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic and two Donald Trump inaugurations, the arc of history feels more like a freefall.This June, r/collapse was busy discussing the developing conflict between Iran and Israel, as well as “wet bulbs” (a far more humid and deadly type of heatwave), the millions of air conditioners being bought in India as temperatures rise and Trump’s plan to end Fema.But one of the top posts tackled a more specialist topic: declining levels of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic. “As if the North Atlantic fisheries wasn’t in bad enough shape from overfishing of cod, now the base of the entire food chain has observed to be getting smaller each year for the past 60 years,” the poster wrote. A commenter added: “Ocean acidification/die off is terrifying. Even if we solve all the other collapse problems (and we almost certainly can’t) the oceans dying means the atmosphere becomes depleted of oxygen and poisonous. If humans survive those scenarios, life on Earth would more resemble that of a moon colony.” Much informed panicking ensued.There are lots of places on the internet, and especially on Reddit, that collate news stories around a theme: r/UpliftingNews, r/LateStageCapitalism and r/nottheonion (which posts news so ridiculous it seems like satire) to name a few. But r/collapse is much more than a collation of links for people to feel outraged and nihilistic or warm and fuzzy about. What’s striking is the clear-eyed, unemotional tone in which posts are written: neither pessimistic nor hopeful, just peering through the window at a relentless decline.“We are not an activist subreddit,” one moderator, a retired history teacher, told me. “We filter out people who want to organize and protest. We are also not inclined towards accelerationism, we’re not seeking doom. We accept that perhaps it’s going to happen, but it’s not a conspiratorial subreddit. It’s basically logic, rational and scientific.”View image in fullscreenThat is thanks in part to r/collapse’s 30 fairly active moderators – among them neuroscientists, environmental scientists, chemical engineers, government auditors and history teachers – who intensively maintain the subreddit as relatively objective a resource as possible. They even have a separate page, called r/collapse_wilds, for posts removed by the moderation team, usually because they did not provide high quality enough evidence. When a new moderator applies, the existing group screens them for mental health issues and ability to handle consistently distressing content, as well as overt political bias.It might sound like a lot of red tape to help run a subreddit, but when you realize what it takes to drench yourself in fatalistic topics day in, day out, you start to understand that a collapse moderator is a special kind of person.I spoke with 10 such moderators on a video chat, just as the national guard and marines were sent to quell Ice protests in Los Angeles. All are men based in North America, polite and turn-taking, though most insisted on remaining anonymous so their online roles wouldn’t interfere with their real world positions. In their roles, they take the existential questions of civilization collapse seriously: What exactly constitutes collapse? Are we already experiencing it? Why aren’t people reacting more strongly to its likelihood, and does either humanity or technology have the ability to prevent it? Practical questions, too: where is the best place to live, the most helpful job to have, as collapse happens?They wrestle with whether too much Trump news is distracting, and painstakingly debate posts about the morality of having children and population growth, which they say is the most controversial topic among the community. Each post from a user must come with an accompanying statement explaining why it’s related to collapse that the moderators assess; sometimes it seems more like they’re overseeing a grant application process rather than an online forum.The work is often philosophical in nature. “People say that this is one of the least religious times in human history, but I think that’s completely false,” said Etienne, a moderator who is based in Ontario with a background in cognitive science and neuroscience. “Most of us have strong, strong faith in the myth of technological progress. Most people associate thinking about collapse with pessimism because you’re questioning the orthodoxy of our modern religion, which is faith in progress. And I think once you’ve made peace with the myth that we all grew up with being scientifically false, then you go through the stages of grief, then you build some psychological resilience to live in the world.”The group says that when the media or academia write about collapse issues, they often try to end on an optimistic note, so as not to depress the reader.“It’s really hard to find a mainstream publication that doesn’t end an article about, say, renewable energy, with a section that says: ‘things are difficult but let’s have hope’ and ‘it’s just a matter of building more solar panels,’” Etienne said. He cited reports, including an impactful study by Simon Michaux commissioned by the Finnish government, that say it’s simply impossible to replace energy with renewable sources at scale. “But we find there’s much less coverage of that – of using less energy and degrowth.”View image in fullscreenThe moderators also say that people who are concerned about societal collapse tend to think it’ll come suddenly with a nuclear bomb or terrible pandemic. The subreddit is of a different mind. One moderator, an engineer who preferred to remain anonymous, explained the tenets of r/collapse like this: “In the long term, it’s going to be very difficult for us to maintain this very complex industrial society. We’re looking at a type of simplification of industrial civilization. I think most of our members think this is what collapse is, which is why almost half of the members, when asked when they think collapse is going to happen, said that it’s already happening.“This is the idea of catabolic collapse: that what we’re living through is a series of crises, sometimes followed by momentary resolution, but the long-term trend is downturn. It’s not going to be a sudden event that’s everything in a single day, which I think people like preppers are more accustomed to thinking.”Every week, r/collapse puts out a special newsletter called Last Week in Collapse, a one-stop shop for everything that has gone wrong in the world. Its author is an international affairs researcher, who requested anonymity because their background might “color the reader’s interpretation of the events”. They’re not part of the moderation group, but began writing the roundup in 2021, inspired by what they had seen on the subreddit.“It was part of a process of making sense of the storm of news around us – almost a form of writing therapy,” they told me over email. “It is so easy to get lost or distracted by the next thing that we forget the big picture. So I decided to start organizing and summarizing other stories because I believed it would help other collapsologists and observers zoom out and take it all in.”It makes for a pretty brutal read. This week’s newsletter, for example, began with a newly published study of tree rings that suggested “irreversible large-scale forest loss” in the Amazon; featured a study saying climate change could reduce crop yields across the US and Europe 40% by 2100, which one scientist likened to “everyone on the planet giving up breakfast”; touched on counterintuitive research showing that some glass bottles contain up to 50 times more microplastics than plastic bottles or metal cans; and reported that this is “the sixth consecutive year that global peacefulness has deteriorated” per the Global Peace Index. These were just a few of around a hundred links.“Collapse is hard to deny when it’s all laid out for you every week,” says the author. Readers are now able to spend just five or 10 minutes reading one email “and be kept abreast on all the latest doom”.I ask what differentiates just bad news from a news story that is actually about collapse. “I have found that it helps to imagine likely realities for humanity, position your perspective in the future, and then look backwards for the telltale signs and milestones of future collapse,” the author says. “What factors and events will seem obvious to someone living 50 or 100 years from now? We can look back at the 1930s today and the road to WWII seems much clearer. Scientists are publishing under-appreciated studies every day, and their relevance is fairly obvious. Yet our attention lies elsewhere entirely.”A weekly roundup does seem like a useful alternative to completely ignoring society’s downfall. But if things are as bad as r/collapse believes them to be, does it do us any good to inundate ourselves with news of the end of everything? Aren’t we just increasing our personal suffering without making anything better?“Yes, I sometimes wonder about the overall mental impact of Last Week in Collapse,” says its author. “I know some people find it to be valuable, informative and even soothing. Others can’t bring themselves to read it. It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. To paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in collapse, but collapse is interested in you.”View image in fullscreenTo that end, the subreddit provides online mental health resources as well as a separate community, r/CollapseSupport, where people talk about their struggles. “Can’t stop thinking about the children”, “feeling completely hopeless” and “scared to death for everyone” are three recent post titles.Most of the moderators say that the thing they’ve found most helpful in dealing with the onslaught of information is moderating itself, and connecting with people who have similar concerns across the world: debating but also sharing cat photos and having meaningful discussion about how to lead a meaningful life in the end times. But they’re aware they’re not always the most fun people at a party.“I don’t want to be right about this sort of situation,” said one of the moderators, an electrical engineer from the midwest. “But if you’re open-minded and you’re considerate of sources, and you’re approaching it from a very methodical fashion, there is much cause for concern. Working through that grief was trying. I think there’s a lot of people that come to this community that maybe had my same perspective, and if I can at least help a few of those folks work through that, or come to their own peace, that adds some small iota of value to the internet space at large.”And that would be a vaguely uplifting note to end this article on, but as I’m hearing, that’s the coward’s way out. The truth is not all the people behind r/collapse feel like they’re necessarily helping.As the author of Last Week in Collapse put it to me, there’s probably no way out of the collapse: “I do not believe we will ultimately innovate or vote ourselves out of our situation. I predict humanity is in for a polluted future of climate emergencies, famines, wars and scarcity before the end of this century. And heatwaves, civil conflicts, breakdown of ocean currents, disease, poverty, overpopulation, drought and more. So I feel a certain sense of duty to inform those who are interested, but it’s probably healthier to ‘chop wood, carry water’ than to spend too much time following the world’s problems. Most people can’t really stop the machine anyway.” More

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      in US Politics

      Judge blocks Trump from withholding EV charger funds awarded to 14 states

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      A US district judge has blocked the Trump administration from withholding funds previously awarded to 14 states for electric vehicle charger infrastructure.Seattle-based judge Tana Lin, who was appointed to the bench by Joe Biden in 2021, granted a partial injunction to the states that filed suit against Trump’s Department of Transportation.She ruled that the states’ lawsuit – led by attorneys general in California, Colorado and Washington – would likely succeed. Her ruling did not apply to the District of Columbia, Minnesota and Vermont, which she found did not provide evidence that they would suffer immediate harm. The injunction will go into effect on 1 July, unless the Trump administration files an appeal blocking it.In February, the Trump administration ordered states not to spend $5bn in funds allocated under the Biden administration as part of the national electric vehicle infrastructure (Nevi) program.The program provided up to 80% of eligible project costs to deploy electric vehicle charges. Currently, 16 states have at least one operational EV station, according to EV States Clearinghouse.“The new leadership of the Department of Transportation … has decided to review the policies underlying the implementation of the Nevi formula program,” Emily Biondi, associate administrator for planning, environment and realty at the transportation department’s Federal Highway Administration, wrote in a memo.“As result of the rescission of the Nevi formula program guidance, the FHWA is also immediately suspending the approval of all state electric vehicle infrastructure deployment plans for all fiscal years. Therefore, effective immediately, no new obligations may occur under the Nevi formula program until the updated final Nevi formula program guidance is issued and new state plans are submitted and approved,” she added.In May, the Government Accountability Office found that the Trump administration violated the law when it withheld the funding. The administration “must continue to carry out the statutory requirements of the program”, it said.The White House challenged those findings, which it called “wrong and legally indefensible”, and ordered the transportation department to ignore them. The department is expected to release a draft of its updated electric vehicle guidance this month.During a hearing before the Seattle judge earlier this month, Leah Brown, of Washington’s attorney general’s office said, “This passing reference to revised guidance and to changed priorities is simply insufficient to override congressional intent.” She added that the states aren’t “challenging the ability to revise guidance, but we are arguing that doing so simply is not a sufficient explanation for the actions that they’ve taken,” the Washington State Standard reported.“The agency has no intent to withhold funds from the states,” justice department attorney Heidy Gonzalez said. “It just wants the opportunity to review past guidance and to promulgate guidance that comports with the current administration’s policies and priorities.”During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump voiced a hatred for electric vehicles that ran counter to his growing friendship with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.At one point in the campaign, Trump said supporters of the vehicles should “rot in hell” and that Biden’s support of EVs would bring a “bloodbath” to the US’s automotive industry.Although he later appointed Musk to serve as head of the “department of government efficiency”, Musk and Trump have since parted ways. More

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      When Humans Learned to Live Everywhere

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      About 70,000 years ago in Africa, humans expanded into more extreme environments, a new study finds, setting the stage for our global migration.Geography is one of the things that sets apart modern humans.Our closest living relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — are confined to a belt of Central African forests. But humans have spread across every continent, even remote islands. Our species can thrive not only in forests, but in grasslands, swamps, deserts and just about every other ecosystem dry land has to offer.In a study published on Wednesday, scientists pinpoint the origin of our extraordinary adaptability: Africa, about 70,000 years ago.That’s when modern humans learned to thrive in more extreme habitats. We’ve been expanding our range ever since. The finding could help resolve a paradox that has puzzled researchers for years.Our species arose in Africa about a million years ago and then departed the continent a number of times over the past few hundred thousand years. But those migrants eventually disappeared, with no descendants.Finally, about 50,000 years ago, one last wave spread out of Africa. All non-Africans can trace their ancestry to this last migration. The new study might explain why the final expansion was so successful.In the new study, Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues sought to understand what sort of habitats early humans lived in across Africa.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is Fake Grass Safe? A Manufacturer Sues to Stop a Discussion.

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      Four experts were sued for defamation ahead of a seminar where they planned to talk about research into the potential health risks on playgrounds and sports fields nationwide.The seminar seemed straightforward enough. Four experts planned to talk about whether artificial grass, which is used on playgrounds and sports fields nationwide, has health risks for children.But January’s seminar never happened, after the four speakers were sued for defamation by Polyloom, an artificial-turf maker, based on promotional material for the seminar.“This was before we even said a word,” said Kyla Bennett, an ecologist formerly with the Environmental Protection Agency who is one of the four defendants.Polyloom and the artificial-turf industry is responding to a growing body of scientific research showing the presence of harmful chemicals in synthetic turf, and potential environmental and health implications. All this is happening as demand for artificial turf, which is made from plastic and mimics the look and feel of natural grass, is booming globally.Once mainly used in places like professional football or baseball stadiums, today, artificial grass is common in city parks, community playgrounds and fields for high-school football and soccer. It’s even in some suburban backyards where homeowners want to avoid the need to water or mow the lawn.Between 1,200 and 1,500 large artificial turf fields were installed in 2023, bringing the total in the United States to around 19,000 fields, according to the latest figures from AMI Plastics, an industry data organization.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Tick Situation Is Getting Worse

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      As temperatures rise, ticks of all kinds are flourishing in ways that threaten people’s health.Lately, Shannon LaDeau and her colleagues have had unwelcome visitors at their office in New York’s Hudson Valley: ticks, crawling up the building and trying to get through doors.“Which is kind of alarming,” said Dr. LaDeau, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who studies the arachnids and the pathogens they carry.As winters get warmer, ticks of several kinds are flourishing. Deer ticks, known for transmitting Lyme disease, are moving farther north. The longhorned tick, which came from overseas, has gained a foothold on the East Coast and begun moving west. Gulf Coast ticks have made it to states like Connecticut and Indiana. The lone star tick, which can make people allergic to red meat, is fanning out from the South and has been found as far as Canada.And even in places long accustomed to them, ticks are becoming more numerous and active for longer stretches of each year.Why is this happening, and how can you protect yourself? We asked the experts.What changes are researchers seeing?Marc Lame, an entomologist and clinical professor emeritus at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, put it simply: “There are more and different types of ticks around than there used to be, and I don’t see that stopping anytime soon.”The spread of individual species can be difficult to track. The longhorned tick, for example, was not identified in the United States until 2017, but a recent study confirmed that it was here as early as 2010.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s EPA announces major rollbacks to power plant pollution limits

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      US power plants will be allowed to pollute nearby communities and the wider world with more unhealthy air toxins and an unlimited amount of planet-heating gases under new regulatory rollbacks proposed by Donald Trump’s administration, experts warned.The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled a plan on Wednesday that would repeal a landmark climate rule that aims to mostly eliminate greenhouse gases from power plants by the 2030s and would, separately, weaken another regulation that restricts power plants’ release of hazardous air pollutants such as mercury.“We choose to both protect the environment and grow the economy,” said Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA, at an event to announce the plans. He said the rollbacks will save households money while also defying what he called “the climate change cult”.The climate rule has “saddled our critical power sector with expensive, unreasonable and burdensome regulations”, Zeldin said. “American energy suffered and Americans who rely on reliable, affordable energy suffered. The good news is those days are over.”The EPA’s proposals will go out for public comment and are likely to face legal challenges.They target a rule crafted last year by the Biden administration to phase out emissions from electricity-producing fossil fuel plants, which are responsible for around a quarter of US greenhouse gases, and a regulation called the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which Biden toughened in 2023 to slash harmful pollution suffered by communities.These rollbacks come despite overwhelming scientific evidence of the dire consequences of the worsening climate crisis and the harm caused by pollutants such as mercury, which can seep into water, soils and the air and has been linked to neurological damage in young children as well as heart, lung and immune system ailments in adults. Coal-fired power plants cause nearly half of all mercury emissions in the US, according to the EPA.More than 200 health experts wrote to the EPA on Wednesday warning the moves “would lead to the biggest pollution increases in decades and is a blatant give-away to polluters”. The experts added the reversals are “a direct contradiction to the Environmental Protection Agency’s mission of protecting public health and the environment”.Trump, however, has vowed to boost fossil fuel production at all costs, having reaped record donations from the oil and gas industry during his election campaign. At Wednesday’s EPA event, Zeldin was joined by eight lawmakers, all Republicans – Kevin Cramer, Troy Balderson, Brett Guthrie, Carol Miller, Dan Meuser, Rob Bresnahan, Michael Rulli and Riley Moore – who have collectively received more than $3m from fossil fuel donors in their own election campaigns, a Guardian analysis of the OpenSecrets database shows.Bresnahan, a Pennsylvania representative, holds personal financial interests in more than 20 fossil fuel companies.In justifying the deletion of the Biden climate plan, which the EPA previously estimated would deliver $370bn in net benefits, Zeldin has claimed that US power plants only produce a small and declining fraction of the world’s emissions. This is despite the fact that if these power plants were a country, it would be the sixth-largest emitter on the planet.Gina McCarthy, who was EPA administrator under Barack Obama, said that Zeldin’s “dismantling of our nation’s protections from power plant pollution is absolutely illogical and indefensible. It’s a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review.”“By giving a green light to more pollution, his legacy will forever be someone who does the bidding of the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our health,” she added. “Everyone will be affected by his actions, but the most vulnerable among us, our kids and grandkids, will suffer the most.”The EPA has embarked upon a wide-ranging blitz upon environmental regulations since Trump became president, setting about removing or loosening clean air and water rules that, collectively, were on track to save 200,000 American lives in the decades ahead.Trump, who has adopted the mantra of “drill, baby, drill”, has claimed unhindered fossil fuel production will bring down energy costs, although he has sought to hobble clean energy such as solar and wind, which are typically the cheapest sources of new electricity generation.The rollbacks follow the second-hottest May on record globally, and a record-hot 2024 that unleashed a stunning number of climate-driven disasters and six weeks of extra-dangerously hot days. Experts have warned that sea level rise is on track to cause “catastrophic inland migration”, including to millions of Americans, with climate shocks set to wipe 50% from global GDP by the end of this century.“It’s completely reprehensible that Donald Trump would seek to roll back these lifesaving standards and do more harm to the American people and our planet just to earn some brownie points with the fossil fuel industry,” said Patrick Drupp, climate policy director at the Sierra Club.“This administration is transparently trading American lives for campaign dollars and the support of fossil fuel companies, and Americans ought to be disgusted and outraged that their government has launched an assault on our health and our future.” More