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As Hurricane Beryl barreled toward Jamaica after killing at causing devastation across Caribbean’s Windward Islands, climate scientists warned the record-breaking Category 5 storm is a present-tense example of what’s to come on a rapidly heating planet.
Even before the Atlantic hurricane season began on June 1, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted an 85% chance of above-normal activity and 17-25 total named storms this year. Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist for The Washington Post‘s Capital Weather Gang, highlighted some records Beryl has already broken.
“There is a strong, well-documented link between the effects of human-induced climate change and the development of stronger, wetter storms that are more prone to rapidly intensify,” he wrote Tuesday. “Beryl sprung from a tropical depression to a Category 4 hurricane in just 48 hours, the fastest any storm on record has strengthened before the month of September.”
Beryl is also the earliest Category 4 and 5 hurricane on record in the Atlantic, Cappucci pointed out. Previously, the earliest storm to reach the top level of the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale was Emily, in mid-July of 2005.
It’s open season on the environment.
U.S. environmental law is a relatively young discipline. The Environmental Protection Agency is a little over 50 years old, and the Clean Air and Clean Water acts—legislation we today see as bedrocks of public health and environmental safeguards—were passed in 1963 and 1973, respectively. When the case that would become Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council was filed in the early 1980s, the EPA was just beginning to pump out rules that would have major economic consequences for business and industry.
In its decision last week overturning Chevron deference—a crucial legal precedent that gives federal agencies the ability to interpret laws that are otherwise vague or ambiguous—the Supreme Court has taken the future of an incalculable number of regulations on public health, clean water, and clean air out of the hands of scientists for organizations like the EPA and passed it along to nonexpert judges who will hear challenges to these regulations in court.
“Anybody who doesn’t like a federal-agency regulation can now bring it before a court,” said Jillian Blanchard, a director at Lawyers for Good Government. “It’s scary.”
Overturning Chevron is just a cog in the larger plan to dismantle the administrative state and environmental law as we know it—and the ultraconservative forces and fossil fuel defenders, like the Koch brothers, behind it are only getting started.
Bombshell endorsement delivers final blow to PM Rishi Sunak.
The Sun, Britain’s main tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, has swung its support behind Labour for the first time since Tony Blair was prime minister.
Murdoch is keen to back a winner, endorsing the Conservatives from 2010, after only switching to Labour in 1997.
“There is no doubt Sir Keir Starmer has fought hard to change his party for the better, even if it is still a work in progress,” the paper’s editorial notes, saying the party has moved away sufficiently from the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
Rishi Sunak, who seems doomed to electoral oblivion Thursday, is the U.K. Conservative Party’s fifth prime minister in eight years. He will never be judged on his own terms now, and this is his curse.
Sunak ascended to the premiership in 2022, the year both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss fell, and he has not escaped their shadow. He was Johnson’s chancellor and assassin; then the man called to lead when Truss shattered seven weeks into her tenure. His party had only just rejected him in a leadership contest, choosing her instead.
As a child he wanted to be a Jedi knight: to live in a parallel universe. Instead, he went to Winchester College, a gilded public school, and Oxford University, where he was president of the Investment Society and a ballroom dancer.
There is a video of him from those years, shot for a documentary about class. “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are, you know, working-class,” he says, all trace of Southampton stripped from his voice. Then he adds, as if fearing ridicule: “Well, not working-class!” At each school he attended he was head boy. He’s still head boy, though the public school accent has flattened.
Whatever else happens in the coming days with the presidential election, the whole saga will permanently affect my understanding of the culture of The New York Times. It is not the first time that in the midst of a presidential contest the Times has deployed and leveraged all its editorial resources to achieve a desired goal. We saw it in 2016 on a couple occasions. Tonight a TPM Reader suggested I look at the front page telling me …
“Eight out of 8 top articles are about whether Joe Biden should drop out, whether he’s doomed to be defeated by Trump, etc. Five out of 10 op-ed articles are about the same topic; of those, 4 are toeing the Times line, one (by the sole nonwhite author today) says that only Trump benefits from forcing Biden out.
“Number of articles about any of the Supreme Court’s decisions this term, including the immunity decision: zero. It was literally a one-day story in the Times.”
...I actually like crusading journalism, flooding the zone with stories on the question of the day you find most important. But is the Times normally that crusading paper? Not usually and actually on very few topics. In this case I feel like it’s clearly doing that while hiding behind it’s cloak of all the news that’s fit to print. Not crusading just covering the story. I can only say, will only say again that it is not the first time the Times has, in a presidential campaign, leveraged all its institutional and editorial muscle to engineer a desired goal.
Grocery store prices are changing faster than ever before — literally. This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds.
“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there's something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst.
Apps like Uber already use surge pricing, in which higher demand leads to higher prices in real time. Companies across industries have caused controversy with talk of implementing surge pricing, with fast-food restaurant Wendy’s making headlines most recently. Electronic shelf labels allow the same strategy to be applied at grocery stores, but are not the only reason why retailers may make the switch.
...Electronic shelf tags should make it much easier for brick-and-mortar stores to keep pace with prices as they change online. And, he says, that consistency should be better for customers.
Like a nightmarish, post-apocalyptic plot, rising temperatures are causing fungi to mutate in ways that not only make them hyper-infectious but drug-resistant, too.
"Temperature-dependent mutagenesis can enable the development of pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in fungi, and support the idea that global warming can promote the evolution of new fungal pathogens."
Fungal infections already cause around 3.75 million deaths annually, despite most species preferring much lower temperatures than those found within our bodies.
But previous research suggests that forcing fungi to adapt to warmer environments can completely alter their physiology.
Scientists recently identified the first known fungi likely to have emerged as a pathogen due to climate change: Candida auris. As other fungi become more heat tolerant like C. auris is thought to have, more species will find mammalian bodies a temptingly protective shelter within which they can flourish.
Researchers in Vermont found a hidden treasure of a plant not seen in over a century.
According to the New York Times, the rare false mermaid-weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides), was thought to be extinct in the region until this remarkable discovery.
Biologist Molly Parren stumbled upon this botanical rarity while surveying wood turtle habitats in rural Addison County. Amid the wild meadow garlic by a stream, she snapped a photograph, which she promptly shared with Vermont's state botanist, Grace Glynn. However, it wasn't the garlic that captivated Glynn but another plant in the frame — the long-lost false mermaid-weed, unseen in Vermont for generations.
The significance of the find struck Glynn immediately. She reached out to Parren and, in an eruption of excitement, contacted Matt Charpentier, a Massachusetts-based field botanist also on the trail of this elusive species.
...False mermaid-weed, which appears in late April and flowers for about a month before retreating by early June, is known for its delicate features and small, centimeter-wide flowers, making it easy to miss.
Who are you encountering tonight? Tell us all about it in the comments!
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw