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Sputnik International
As the Climate Warms, Could the U.S. Face Another Dust Bowl?
Improved agricultural practices and widespread irrigation may stave off another agricultural calamity in the Great Plains. But scientists are now warning that two inescapable realities rising temperatures and worsening drought could still spawn a modern-day Dust Bowl.
Growing up in rural Iowa in the 1990s, Isaac Larsen remembers a unique herald of springtime. The snowbanks piled along roads, once white or gray, would turn black. The culprit was windblown dust, stirred from barren farm fields into the air.
Even as some of the region’s farmers have adopted more sustainable practices, the dust still flies. Not long ago, Larsen’s mother told her son about an encounter with a dust storm, saying “the soil was just blowing across the road almost like a blizzard, but black.”
Rolling Stone Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier: How Doomed Are We?
Two new papers offer radically different predictions of the glacier’s future and thus for the future of low-lying cities around the world. Here’s how to understand the divergent projections
By Jeff Goodell
I came face to face with the Doomsday Glacier (a.k.a. Thwaites glacier) in 2019, on a trip to Antarctica aboard the
Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot-long icebreaker operated by the National Science Foundation. I had dubbed the Florida-sized slab of ice its nickname in an article I’d written a few years earlier, and the name stuck. Nevertheless, I was unprepared for how spooky it would be to actually confront the 100-foot-tall wall of ice from the deck of a ship. Locked up here was enough water to raise global sea levels nearly 10 feet. As I wrote in a dispatch from Antarctica on the day we encountered Thwaites, it was both terrifying and thrilling to know that our future is written in
One week after taking the oath of office, President Joe Biden issued a memo announcing the assembly of a task force that would identify and make recommendations to rectify incidences of partisan politics interfering with scientific policy. The decision built upon presidential memos from former President Barack Obama’s time in office, when Biden was the Vice President. Now, a 46-person panel has been assembled with the ultimate goal of reinstating public trust in science by removing partisan pressure from policy making, the Associated Press reports.
“We want people to be able to trust what the federal government is telling you, whether it’s a weather forecast or information about vaccine safety or whatever,” Jane Lubchenco, the deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, tells the AP.