Smart coverage of the ongoing hurricane season means reporting not just people stories, but numbers stories too. This week’s TipSheet explains and offers half a dozen metrics, including pressure, width, surge and rainfall, to better track these extreme storms. Plus, should there be a “Category 6?”
"Matt Nolan, who runs a mapping business in Alaska using aerial photography, was flying a small plane to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeastern part of the state last month when he noticed a pattern on the tundra."
"After more than 40 years, Montana now has a new Wild and Scenic River. The White House announced on Thursday that President Donald Trump had signed into law H.R. 4645, the East Rosebud Wild and Scenic Rivers Act."
"A team from UC Irvine that compared temperature changes across the U.S. found that temperatures rise faster in places under drought conditions than they do in places with average climates. This relationship could also raise the risk of concurrent heatwaves and wildfires, the researchers say."
"As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency prepared to make label changes for the herbicide dicamba after it caused widespread crop damage, the agency depended on the herbicide’s maker for guidance, documents produced in a federal lawsuit show."
"His Senate office coordinated closely with Drummond Coal and its lawyers to derail an environmental cleanup."
"In Northern Europe, this summer feels like a modern-day version of the biblical plagues. Cows are dying of thirst in Switzerland, fires are gobbling up timber in Sweden, the majestic Dachstein glacier is melting in Austria."
"A federal jury decided Friday that the world’s largest pork producer should pay $473.5 million to neighbors of three North Carolina industrial-scale hog farms for unreasonable nuisances they suffered from odors, flies and rumbling trucks."
"The Trump administration has rescinded an Obama-era ban on the use of pesticides linked to declining bee populations and the cultivation of genetically modified crops in dozens of national wildlife refuges where farming is permitted."
"The nation’s largest source of industrial lead pollution is just 20 miles down the Lake Michigan shore from Chicago, churning more than twice as much of the brain-damaging metal into the air each year as all other factories in the region combined."
