MOSCOW, Aug 28 (Reuters) – Russia said on Wednesday it wanted the International Atomic Energy Agency to take a “more objective and clearer” stance on nuclear safety, a day after the head of the agency visited a Russian nuclear plant close to where Ukraine has mounted an incursion into the country.
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi toured the Kursk plant on Tuesday and warned of the danger of a serious nuclear accident there. He said he had inspected damage from a drone strike, which Russia had blamed on Ukraine, but did not say who was responsible.
Russian state news agency RIA quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying in a radio interview that Moscow wanted the IAEA to speak out more clearly on issues of nuclear security, although she denied it was demanding that the agency should take a pro-Russian line.
“We see both the assessments and the work of this structure (the IAEA), but each time we want a more objective and clearer expression of the position of this structure,” Zakharova said.
Just as I was sinking into despair about the lack of Journalistic integrity in climate reporting, I stumbled on a TV Meteorologist in a major market unabashedly explaining climate change impacts.
Marina Jurica joined CBS News Los Angeles in September 2023 after spending four years with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. She worked on many Earth missions there including SWOT, Sentinel-6, NISAR, ICE-SAT2, and the landing of the Perseverance Mars rover. Previously she worked for 20 years as an Emmy award winning meteorologist in the most dynamic weather markets across the country including Minneapolis, MN, Cincinnati, OH, Orlando, FL, Lexington, KY and Fresno, CA as the first female Chief Meteorologist.
Marina did her undergraduate and graduate studies in atmospheric science and music performance at UCLA and Mississippi State University and is currently getting her PhD in climate science. She is studying the atmospheric effects on melting glaciers from above and below in places across the world like Greenland and Alaska and how we can adapt to these changes globally. She is very passionate about our changing climate and looks forward to bringing you up close and personal stories about our changing Earth and how space technology is helping us change with it. —
Marina, to be fair, is not alone – Jeff Berardelli at WFLA in Tampa, and Amber Sullins at ABC 15 in Phoenix come to mind as shining examples doing the right thing – but major networks still fall abysmally short of helping the wider public make an accurate assessment of current events.
“We are going to stop this crime,” Kennedy pledged to user “Concerned Citizen.” The crime? “Chemtrails,” the conspiracy theory that the lines planes trace in the sky are not water vapor (which they are) but at least occasionally dangerous chemicals being released for some nebulously explained population-control effort.
“Chemtrails” are an old-school conspiracy theory, growing up in the same neighborhood as tinfoil hats and Bigfoot. It’s something that’s been debunked countless times. And here is the newest member of Team Trump assuring an anonymous social media poster that “we” — presumably meaning him and Trump or him and the Trump administration — will prevent this thing that isn’t happening from happening.
Two hours after Kennedy assured Concerned Citizen that Trump would address chemtrails, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson posted a lengthy interview with Kennedy in which the former candidate described the role he had been promised with Trump’s team.
“We’re working on policy issues together. I’ve been asked to go on to the transition team, to help pick the people who will be running the government, and I’m looking forward to that,” Kennedy told Carlson. So if you’re an expert on chemtrail prosecution, get your résumé ready.
The public cannot make the connection between these continuing extremes and climate change if journalists continue to totally ignore it. Malpractice, malfeasance, and malicious betrayal of professional ethics. Too frequent and commonplace to be anything but deliberate.
“They’re more interested in water than money right now.”. Mexican farmers in rebellion over 80 year old treaty to share water across the border. Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gamman interviewed above.
Eighty years ago, the United States and Mexico worked out an arrangement to share water from the two major rivers that run through both countries: the Rio Grande and the Colorado. The treaty was created when water wasn’t as scarce as it is now.
Water from Mexico flows to Texas’ half-billion-dollar citrus industry and dozens of cities near the border. On the Mexican side, some border states like Baja California and Chihuahua are heavily reliant on the water that comes from the American side of the Colorado River.
Now, those water-sharing systems are facing one of the biggest tests in their history. Mexico is some 265 billion gallons of water behind on its deliveries to the United States.
Unpredictable weather patterns due to climate change, growing populations, aging infrastructure and significant water waste have left both countries strapped for water and have escalated tensions along the border.
Turns out ecologists and entomologists around the world have been warning about declining insect numbers for years. The culprits are climate change, habitat loss, light pollution, intensive farming, pesticide and fertiliser use. But it’s a struggle to get people to act. After all, we humans have a complicated relationship with our six-legged fellow Earth dwellers.
Who can forget the horror of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, where a travelling salesman wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a bug, or the morality tales of the Victorian age that saw naughty children turned into insects? Up close, even the face of a butterfly or bee is disturbingly alien. Maybe we’ve been “othering” insects to oblivion.
Yet our own existence depends on a thriving insect world. Studies show that where more insect species are present, pollination is more reliable and resilient. As Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, points out in his book Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse, about three-quarters of all crop types grown by humans require pollination by animals, the vast majority by insects.
“We could not feed the global human population without pollinators,” he writes. It’s not just about bees and butterflies, the poster children of the pollinator world. Other, less photogenic pollinators such as hoverflies, moths, wasps, soldier beetles and earwigs are also showing declines. Several of these species don’t just pollinate. They also eat the pest insects that ruin crops. A UK parliamentary report in March this year noted that, internationally, the economic value of pollinators has been estimated to be worth over £134bn to agricultural markets.
Already, in the apple and pear orchards of south-west China, depleted populations of pollinators have forced farmers to hand-pollinate their trees, carrying pots of pollen and paintbrushes with which to individually pollinate every flower. If it sounds labour-intensive and time-consuming, that’s because it is.
But try convincing, for example, beachgoers on Misquamicut State Beach in Rhode Island that insect numbers are plummeting. In July this year, they were swarmed by hundreds of thousands of dragonflies. The problem is that data on insects is patchy and varies not just by geographical region and time of year but also by species. Interpreting it is fiendishly difficult. There is no unified global monitoring system for insects. Their sheer number makes it impossible; insects account for the majority of species on the planet. We’ve named about one million of them but there are millions more we don’t know about and whose role in balancing ecosystems remains a mystery.
Last Sunday, my cousin told me her church service was rudely interrupted — not by an unruly parishioner, but by a choir of phones going off simultaneously with an ill-timed flood warning. While floods arecalled “acts of God” for a reason, I doubt the priest appreciated the push alerts during his prayer.
Really, there’s no escaping them these days: “With the planet heating up and nature growing more deadly and destructive, new tools to help people gauge their climate risks are landing faster than DVD-sized hail in Texas,” Mark Gongloff says. “Nearly the entire US population — 99% of the country — has been subject to at least one National Weather Service extreme-weather alert since May.”
More often than not, these alerts have us seeking shelter. A tornado evacuation in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin recently forced some newlyweds into a hotel basement, where they did their first dancein the dark. In Massachusetts, a mosquito-borne virus called eastern equine encephalitis (not to be confused with the West Nile virus that hospitalized Dr. Anthony Fauci) has authorities encouraging residents to stay inside after 6 p.m. until Sep. 30 — a climate curfew of sorts. And residents of California, Oregon and Washington have spent much of the summer indoors, not by choice, but out of necessity.
In 2024 a major party Presidential Candidate repeats pretty much verbatim climate denial talking points that were stale a dozen years ago, as video below demonstrates.
Eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV) is a mosquito-borne virus that is primarily found in North America and the Caribbean. Over the past decade there has been an increase in virus activity, including large outbreaks in human and horse populations. Predicted climate change is expected to affect the range of mosquitoes including vectors of EEEV, which may alter disease risk posing a public health concern.
During an AAEP Roundtable presentation sponsored by CareCredit, Sally DeNotta, DVM, PhD, DACVIM, from the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and Angela Pelzel-McCluskey, DVM, MS, equine epidemiologist for the USDA-APHIS Veterinary Services, discussed the current and future impact of climate change on infectious diseases.
Local climates are changing in many regions, with more natural disasters occurring and in larger geographic scopes. This is having a significant impact on vector-borne disease transmission. Vector insects are flourishing with warmer temperatures and greater precipitation, exotic vectors are entering new areas, and reservoir hosts are expanding. DeNotta and Pelzel-McCluskey said this is happening all over the country, increasing the incidence of diseases covered by AAEP-recommended core vaccines as well as risk-based diseases.
DeNotta gave some examples of amplified risks:
Increased risk of wildlife interactions increases rabies risk.
Structural damage and debris during tornadoes and hurricanes increase the risk of projectile injuries and tetanus in wounds.
Standing water immersion increases the risk of noninfectious diseases of the skin and hooves and potential sepsis.
Standing water provides breeding grounds for arbovirus vectors to increase incidence of West Nile virus (WNV) and Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE).
Flooding creates situations of congestion and crowding of horses into smaller areas on a farm or at evacuation centers, potentially increasing the incidence of risk-based diseases.
