Our picksTargeted Bioweapons | Sinking East Coast | Wildfires in Deadly Weapons Sites, and more
· Climate Change Is a Remorseless Threat to the World’s Coasts
· The East Coast Is Sinking under Water—This Photographer Is Documenting It as It Disappears
· Russian Nuclear Monitoring Stations Went Silent After Missile Blast
· Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missiles Are a Terrible Idea. Russia’s Test Explosion Shows Why
· China’s Belt and Road Plan Is Destroying the World
· Austrian People’s Party Promises to Ban Far-Right Identitarians
· Video: California High-School Students Sang Nazi Song and Gave Hitler Salute
· Wildlife Now Roam Where U.S. Once Forged Its Deadliest Weapons
· Bioweapons Designed to Kill Only People of Particular Race
· Where Will Evolution Take Us in the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Climate Change Is a Remorseless Threat to the World’s Coasts (Editorial, Economist)
Few places are as vulnerable as the Netherlands, 27 percent of which is below sea level. But many other places also face substantial risk, and almost all of them are far less able to waterproof themselves than the Dutch. It is not just a matter of being able to afford the hardware (the Netherlands has 40,000km of dykes, levees and seawalls, plus innumerable sluices and barriers less mighty than the Maeslant). It is also a matter of social software: a culture of water governance developed over centuries of defending against the waves. The rest of the world cannot afford the centuries it took the Dutch to build that up.
There are some 1.6m kilometers of coastline shared between the 140 countries that face the sea. Along this they have strung two-thirds of the world’s large cities. A billion people now live no more than ten meters above sea level. And it is coming to get them.
The lack of global action on sea-level rise reflects a lack of drama—for almost everyone, the worst floods of the year or decade happen somewhere else. The oceans will not suddenly crush all the world’s coasts like some biblical retribution or Hollywood tsunami. It will rise slowly, like a tide, its encroachment as imperceptible from moment to moment as it is inexorable. But unlike a tide, it will not turn. Once the oceans rise, they will not fall back.
The East Coast Is Sinking under Water—This Photographer Is Documenting It as It Disappears (Adele Peters, Fast Company)
In “On the Edge,” photographer J. Henry Fair shows how sea-level rise is slowly eating away at coastal communities and landscapes.
Russian Nuclear Monitoring Stations Went Silent After Missile Blast (Michael R. Gordon, Wall Street Journal)
Outages spur concerns by experts that Moscow is trying to restrict evidence of the explosion
Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missiles Are a Terrible Idea. Russia’s Test Explosion Shows Why (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
A flying unshielded nuclear reactor would spew massive amounts of radiation, and that’s if it’s working correctly.
China’s Belt and Road Plan Is Destroying the World (Sagtom Saha, National Interest)
Most Chinese-financed, coal-fired power plants built overseas use low-efficiency, subcritical coal technology, which produces some of the highest emissions of any form of power generation. Thus, China is destroying the environment.
