All posts tagged "Environmentalconcerns"

ABOARD THE SOUNDGUARDIAN, Lake Washington — The region's cold, watery heart is nestled between Seattle and the Eastside. It uniquely supports two major roadways atop floating bridges, has offered beachgoers a summertime respite for decades and is central to the identity of the Seattle area's culture. But Lake Washington is changing — by over half a degree Fahrenheit each recent decade. In fact, since 1963, the lake's surface from June to September has warmed about 4.3 degrees, according to data collected and analyzed by King County and the University of Washington. While some of the lake's war......

Groups of desperate people fleeing Cuba have landed at least twice this week in the Florida Keys — the latest seasonal uptick of migrants willing to risk their lives in rickety vessels for a shot at freedom in the United States. But, for now at least, arrivals in December and the first days of January are down dramatically from the previous holiday season when so many people poured in — often with several landings a day — that it overwhelmed local law enforcement agencies in the Florida Keys and forced both Gov. Ron DeSantis and President Joe Biden to send in emergency reinforcements. Since th......

A new study from Oregon State University estimates that wildfire and drought caused $11.2 billion in economic losses to privately owned timberland in California, Oregon and Washington over the past two decades. The study, which analyzed sales of private timberland over 17 years along with wildfire and drought data, found that most of the losses were not due to forests burning directly but the perception that forests could burn due to neighboring fires. "This study shows that climate change is already reducing the value of western forests," said Oregon State economist and study co-author David ......

Over the course of 12 months, an area of Great Plains grasslands bigger than the state of Delaware was erased from the map. In 2021 alone, 1.6 million acres were plowed across the United States and Canada to make way for primarily row crop expansion, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s annual Plowprint Report, released Thursday.The report analyzed grasslands plow-up in North America using government data and satellite imagery from the past two years. Since 2012, the region has had 32 million acres of its landscapes destroyed. But the land most suited for farming in the Great Plains was plow......

Steve Coombs’ lakefront home used to quake when waves crashed along Ogden Dunes’ receding shoreline. “At one point, my wife said, ‘Should we just move out? Should we just go to a hotel?’ I mean, it’s very unnerving,” he recalled. But fleeing the “biggest asset that we own” wasn’t an option for Coombs, who said he enjoyed 60 yards of sand between his home and the lake when he bought it a decade ago. “There are some people who say, ‘Well, you folks built houses where they shouldn’t have been built,’ but that’s not the case,” Coombs said. “Years ago, there was all kinds of shoreline and sand here......

WASHINGTON -- The latest battle in the war over the lesser prairie chicken came in the U.S. House. For more than a decade, private landholders in western Kansas have pushed back against federal efforts to protect the bird, which scientists say is on the path to extinction. And so federal lawmakers from Kansas turned to one of the few tools they can wield against federal legislation — the Congressional Review Act. Last week, the House approved a resolution expressing its disapproval of the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s rule placing the lesser prairie chicken on the endangered species list, ......