Climate Point: Premature births linked to global warming
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and environment news. I'm Janet Wilson, reporting from Palm Springs, Calif. Elon Musk is an interesting man. The latest? Tesla employees refused to cooperate with sheriffs probing theft of copper from his Nevada electric car "Gigafactory" after Musk himself reportedly told them to avoid bad publicity. Instead, the man who reported the theft was fired, while one of the investigation's targets remained on the job. Loos like the plan backfired, and Benjamin Spillman with the Reno Gazette-Journal tells us all about it.
Here are some other stories that may be of interest:
MUST-READ STORIES
Premature. Rates of early births—as much as two weeks before full term—rose in the United States when temperatures spiked above 90 degrees in areas hit by climate change, Doyle Rice with USA Today reports. “That’s enough to take somebody from what’s considered to be a pretty healthy pregnancy into a ‘we are somewhat worried’ pregnancy,” said Alan Barreca, a UCLA professor and lead author.
Cry me a river. Western states are experiencing $1 billion a year in economic impacts from atmospheric rivers, according to a new UC San Deigo-led study. As temperatures rise, more moisture ends up in the atmosphere, making storms more intense. Over 40 years, just 10 storms triggered by the sky-high patterns triggered billions in property losses and other damages, Cheri Carlson with the Ventura County Star explains.
POLITICAL CLIMATE
Off you go. National park rangers across the country, including popular parks in the Great Smoky Mountains, Alaska and Utah, have been ordered to the Mexican border to fight illegal immigration and drug traffickers, Karen Chavez and Trevor Hughes report for USA Today. Chavez follows up that the nation's top parks official was in the dark about President Donald Trump's ongoing efforts to use rangers at the border.
Clear the air. EPA has quietly changed the government definition of the word air to relax permitting requirements around polluting facilities, as Sean Reilly with E&E News found.
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
Tapping out. Out-of-state investors and foreign agriculture giants have descended on rural Arizona and snapped up farmland in areas where there is no limit on water pumping, taxing aquifers that may not be restored for thousands of years and leaving some small farmers and homeowners high and dry. The Arizona Republic's Ian James chronicles the loss.
Going nuclear. Canada is eyeing a site on the shores of Lake Huron as a repository for its most radioactive waste—spent fuel from nuclear power generation, in what would be their equivalent of the proposed controversial Yucca Mountain site in the United States. "This is the worst of the worst" waste, said Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist with the nonprofit Beyond Nuclear. Keith Matheny with the Detroit Free Press has the story.
Bottled up. Bottled water is not an essential public service, a Michigan court ruled, handing Nestle's Ice Mountain operation a defeat in its attempt to boost supplies, as Matheny writes. Environmentalists in small towns across the U.S. have fought the beverage company taking water from springs in a national forest and elsewhere.
AND ANOTHER THING
Sky high. The nation's rarest small mammal—and one of the cutest—continues its slow climb out of the danger zone, but a warming globe could spell the end for the Mount Graham red squirrel. As Debra Utacia Krol writes, the half-pounder survived eons of heat by moving to higher, cooler mountain habitat—dubbed sky islands by researchers—but those may be wiped out in the coming years, too.
Scientists say to keep a livable planet, we need to reduce carbon emissions to 350 ppm. We're above that and rising. Here are the latest numbers:
That's all for this week. For more climate, energy and environment news, follow me on Twitter @janetwilson66. You can sign up to get Climate Point in your inbox for free here. And if you like getting a daily round-up for free in your inbox, and you live in or wonder about the Golden State, you can also sign up for USA Today's new In California newsletter.