ICYMI: Open Season at Wildlife Refuges, the Plague Is Back, & More

A weekly roundup for busy people

By Paul Rauber

November 10, 2017

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Illustration by Peter Arkle

The Interior Department expands hunting opportunities at nine national wildlife refuges. 

A parasitic brainworm carried by white-tailed deer in Minnesota is killing off the state’s moose.

Wolf OR 25 is shot and killed in Oregon’s Sun Pass State Forest, the third wolf to be illegally killed in the state since October 2016.

Thirteen federal agencies release a new National Climate Assessment, which finds that we are now in the warmest period of modern human civilization; that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century and that there is “no convincing alternative explanation” for the warming; and that the dramatic effects are already being felt.

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt says that the report will not alter his intention to roll back the Clean Power Plan, the country’s leading mechanism for limiting climate change.

At her Senate confirmation hearing to be head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Kathleen Hartnett White rejects mainstream climate science

Syria agrees to sign the Paris climate accord, leaving the United States as the only country in the world opposed to the agreement. 

A study in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers finds that even direct personal experience of extreme weather and climate disasters is not enough to convince climate skeptics. 

The Republican Congress orders a satellite that was urgently needed to monitor climate change in the Arctic to be dismantled. 

The Republican tax bill now being considered by the House of Representatives would eliminate the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles after this year. 

The United Kingdom will ban neonicotinoid pesticides because of their “unacceptable effects” on honeybee health.

The insecticide Fipronil, a key ingredient in flea treatments for dogs and cats, is found in the waters of San Francisco Bay at levels that could affect fish and other aquatic life.

An airborne version of the bubonic plague kills 143 people in Madagascar. 

Cape Town, South Africa, sharply limits water use as its six reservoirs are in danger of running dry.

A New York man is sentenced to one and a half years in prison for trafficking in more than $150,000 worth of black market eels.