Washington Gov. Jay Inslee talks with Marsha Maus, a resident of Agoura Hills, Calif., during a visit to the site of the Woolsey Fire, which Inslee said “was made worse by climate change.” (Jay Inslee Photo via Twitter)
Jay Inslee may be out of the presidential race, but he’s not out of the minds of climate policy campaigners.
The two-term Washington state governor won high praise from his Democratic rivals as well as experts on global climate change after he acknowledged on Aug. 21 that he would not be “carrying the ball” in the presidential campaign, largely due to his failure to attract sufficient support in political polls.
One of Inslee’s problems on the campaign trail was that he didn’t have a “unique selling proposition” for his climate policy initiatives, said Aseem Prakash, founding director of the University of Washington’s Center for Environmental Politics.
He said Inslee’s clarion call on climate was “pioneering” – but easily co-opted by other candidates. “So, in some sense, Jay Inslee is a victim of his own success,” Prakash said.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket rises from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. (NASA Photo)
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket sent a robotic Dragon cargo capsule on the first leg of its trip to the International Space Station, loaded up with more than two tons of supplies — including NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 and scores of other science experiments.
Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida came exactly when it had to, at 2:48 a.m. ET May 4 (11:48 p.m. PT May 3).
The previous night’s launch attempt had to be called off due to power problems on SpaceX’s drone landing ship in the Atlantic Ocean. No such problems cropped up tonight, and the first-stage booster made a pinpoint landing at sea.
SpaceX’s cargo-carrying Dragon, meanwhile, was successfully delivered to orbit by the Falcon 9’s second stage.
During her stint as NASA’s deputy administrator, Lori Garver visited Seattle’s Museum of Flight in 2011 for a NASA Future Forum. (Credit: Ted Huetter / Museum of Flight)
Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver helped lead the charge for commercial space ventures, and now she’s leading a brand-new space campaign to address the climate change challenge.
Garver is the CEO of Earthrise Alliance, a philanthropic initiative that will leverage space connections and satellite data get policymakers, educators and the public fired up about climate action.
She noted the connection between observing Earth from space and taking action on the environment goes back 50 years or so, to Apollo 8’s famous Earthrise photo in 1968 and the first Earth Day in 1970.
“Investment in space activities have driven scientific and technological advances that have transformed our understanding of Earth’s changing climate,” Garver said in a news release. “Earthrise Alliance was created to translate this knowledge into meaningful action and to inform critical decision making that supports and sustains humanity on planet Earth.”
A technician places a full-size test fuel pin bundle in TerraPower’s pin duct interaction test apparatus. TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, is working on traveling-wave reactor technology. (TerraPower Photo)
If dollars were votes, newly reintroduced legislation aimed at boosting nuclear energy innovation and advanced reactors would be a winner, thanks to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ strong endorsement today.
The world’s second-richest person is the founder and chairman of Bellevue, Wash.-based TerraPower, a startup that’s working on next-generation nuclear fission reactors. Back in December, Gates listed nuclear energy research as one of his top policy priorities, and he reportedly followed up by promising lawmakers he’d invest $1 billion of his own money and line up another $1 billion in private capital if federal funds were approved for a TerraPower pilot project in the United States.
TerraPower had planned a pilot in China, but trade tensions upset the plan.
During the waning days of the previous congressional session, a bipartisan group in the Senate introduced a measure called the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act, which would promote next-generation nuclear power by boosting research and setting up long-term agreements for federal power purchases from newly licensed reactors.
The bill would require the Department of Energy to demonstrate two advanced reactor concepts by 2025, followed by another two to five concepts by 2035.
That would brighten the outlook for TerraPower as well as other next-gen nuclear power companies such as Oregon-based NuScale Power, which is planning to build a small-scale modular reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory by 2026.
There wasn’t enough time to move the bill out of committee last year — but on Wednesday, the legislation was reintroduced by 15 senators, including Republicans such as Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham as well as Democrats such as New Jersey’s Cory Booker and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin.
That came as music to Gates’ ears, and today he let the world know on Twitter.
A dying sunflower sea star sits on the seafloor. (Ed Gullekson Photo via Science)
Warming oceans and an infectious wasting disease have combined to devastate what was once an abundant type of sea stars along the West Coast, scientists say in a newly published study.
Researchers deploy a Seaglider underwater drone from the South Korean icebreaker Araon in January 2018. (Paul G. Allen Philanthropies / UW APL / Columbia LDEO)
Except for one unfortunate battery-powered drone, that is.
“The one that hasn’t come back, it could be any number of things,” said Jason Gobat, a senior principal oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Maybe something broke, or maybe it got stuck in the silt at the bottom of the sea.
The good news is that two other Seaglider drones are continuing to transmit data via satellite. Four free-floating EM-APEX probes have been heard from as well.
The experiment, supported with nearly $2 million in funding from Seattle’s Paul G. Allen Philanthropies, has shown that the robots can use acoustic signals to navigate their way under the ice shelf, monitor the water that flows into and out of the ice shelf’s subsurface cavity, and keep operating for a whole year.
University of Oklahoma meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier addresses a meeting of the National Science Board in 2016. (NSF Photo)
Nearly two years after taking office, President Donald Trump now has a Senate-confirmed science adviser: Kelvin Droegemeier, a meteorologist from the University of Oklahoma who’s gotten good reviews from climate advocates as well as climate deniers.
Trump chose Droegemeier to head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in late July, but it took until Wednesday for the Senate to confirm the appointment on a voice vote. That was the last full day of the 115th Congress, and if the confirmation had been put off a day longer, the process would have had to start over.
Droegemeier is a former vice chair of the National Science Board, the oversight body of the National Science Foundation, and has long been active on national research policy.
An artist’s conception shows the desolation caused by the Permian-Triassic extinction more than 250 million years ago. (LPI / USRA Illustration)
Scientists say rapidly warming oceans played a key role in the world’s biggest mass extinction, 252 million years ago, and could point to the risks that lie ahead in an era of similarly rapid climate change.
The latest analysis, published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, puts together computer modeling of ancient ocean conditions and a close look at species characteristics to fit new pieces into a longstanding puzzle: What were the factors behind the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, also known as the Great Dying?
The U.S. Forest Service says more than 1.2 million acres have burned this year in the Northwest due to wildfires. Estimated cost of fighting the fires exceeded $673 million. (Forest Service NW Photo via Twitter)
The skiing could get worse, too. But on the bright side, warm-weather grape varieties may produce better Northwest wine for drowning our sorrows.
Those are just some of the projections contained in the latest edition of the National Climate Assessment, an encyclopedic rundown of the expected region-by-region impacts of climate change on the United States.
An adult female polar bear and a cub stroll on Wrangel Island in the fall of 2017. Hundreds of Chukchi Sea polar bears spend the summer months on the island. (University of Washington Photo / Eric Regehr)
The first census of polar bears living around the Chukchi Sea, straddling Alaska and eastern Siberia, suggests that the population has been stable and healthy over the past decade.
That comes as a welcome contrast to the problems facing polar bears in other Arctic regions as their sea-ice habitat shrinks. The loss of sea ice is an issue for the Chukchi Sea as well, but the nearly 3,000 bears in that region don’t seem to be feeling the strain as much.
“Despite having about one month less time on preferred sea-ice habitats to hunt compared with 25 years ago, we found that the Chukchi Sea subpopulation was doing well from 2008 to 2016,” Eric Regehr, a biologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, said today in a news release.
Regehr is the principal author of a study about the census published in the open-access journal Scientific Reports. The census, conducted by researchers from UW and federal agencies, chronicles a decade’s worth of observations — and delves into why the Chukchi Sea bears seem to be faring better than their cousins elsewhere.
