A little under two years ago, Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, urged British businessmen to begin ‘packing their suitcases
Sea levels may be rising, but North America’s Great Lakes are suffering from just the opposite problem: their water levels have been falling for the last decade and a half. Borne of glacial melt – but now at the mercy of the skies for most of their nourishment – the Great Lakes have been hit hard by shorter winters and warmer summers. Water temperatures and evaporation rates have increased, while water levels have remained below average for more than 14 years.
‘We have not seen anything like this in our recorded history,’ Frank Quinn, an emeritus hydrologist with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal earlier this year.
The shrinking of the world’s largest freshwater resource – and a key shipping route for international exports from the US – is already taking its toll on the $34bn Great Lakes shipping industry, which transports more than 160m tons of cargo annually. Fear of running aground is forcing ships to lighten their loads, which raises costs for shippers, steel mills, car manufacturers, utilities and more, ultimately hitting consumers.
‘At the end of the day, it causes a lot of inefficiencies,’ said Mark Barker, president of The Interlake Steamship Co, one of the […]
The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 on Tuesday in favor of seceding from California to form a new state called ‘Jefferson.
Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.
Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.
Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.
Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that ‘to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have […]
It’s hard to look at climate change deniers as being anything other than willfully ignorant. The numbers are right there: As surely as greenhouse gas emissions are rising, so are global temperatures. To discount all that is to choose to be stupid.
But according to Yale law professor Dan Kahan, it’s easier than we think for reasonable people to trick themselves into reaching unreasonable conclusions. Kahan and his team found that, when it comes to controversial issues, people’s ability to do math is impacted by their political beliefs.
The study pitted over 1,000 participants against a tricky math problem. In one version, the question involved a clinical trial of a skin cream that sometimes helped heal rashes, and sometimes made them worse. Using a set of raw data, the participants had to do some complex calculations to decide whether or not the cream was effective. It was difficult enough that 59 percent of the participants got the problem wrong.
Then things got interesting. The researchers took the same exact question and reframed it. Now, instead of being about skin cream, the numbers in question referred to the effectiveness of concealed carry laws. And this time, whether or not people got the question right […]
