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Bill Nye Tries to Beam Light in Great Darkness

It seems like, for about a decade or so, Bill Nye has been on a lonely crusade. I've seen him popping up in random places on TV like CNN and National Geographic, trying to maintain energy, patience, enthusiasm and thoughtfulness with an unmistakable undercurrent of exhaustion at the aggressive persistence of scientific illiteracy among the public and the powerful. Like many people my age, I remember him initially as Bill Nye the Science Guy, a quirky bow-tied entertainer in the 1990s with an engineering background trying to make science fascinating and fun for then-young people like me. I was not an avid viewer of his show, I seem to remember an episode or two being shown in my high school science classes and finding them entertaining to the extent I could given that I was sitting in a high school science classroom. Bill has been doing more or less the same thing for the last decade or so, except he is more serious, as the problems he is addressing are incredibly serious, and h...
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Flood Report 3/22/17 - World Water Day, Coal, Siberian Permafrost, Rivers with Personhood, and Drumpf's Statements Being Used Against Him in Court

1. VOX informs us, " The global coal boom finally seems to be winding down. " This is not really news to anyone paying attention to climate-change related news in recent months. Reviving coal was central to Drumpf's campaign and thus it's been observed frequently that it just is not going to happen. 2. The Rainforest Action Network posts a little primer on how agriculture impacts water and what they are doing about it. Agriculture accounts for 70% of all world water consumption, and contributes to water pollution when not done properly. 3. Three major world rivers have been given legal personhood . This is good news that may allow for waterways to be better preserved, if it continues. 4. It's been discovered that around 7,000 permafrost bubbles exist in Siberia and are set to burst. This is a major problem as it would release massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas. 5. On World Water Day, the UN is here to remind us that we all waste water, and we ...
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Flood Report: 3/17/17 - The Kids vs. U.S. Government

National Geographic profiles the "Kids vs. Climate Change " court case which is attempting to use the courts to force the U.S. government to take action on climate change. Some legal experts have called it a potentially historic court case, possibly the best chance to get the government to take drastic action. "the federal government’s promotion of fossil fuel production and its indifference to the risks posed by greenhouse gas emissions have resulted in “a dangerous destabilizing climate system” that threatens the survival of future generations. That lapse violates, the court papers argue, their fundamental constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. The lawsuit also argues that the government violated the public trust doctrine, a legal concept grounded in ancient law that holds the government is responsible for protecting public resources, such as land and water—or in this case, the climate system—for public use." There are a number of interesting asp...
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