Author: Reporter

A new guide from the Department of Homeland Security released in late December aims to help churches, synagogues, mosques and other houses of worship protect themselves at a time of heightened tensions in faith-based communities across the country. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of Homeland Security, works with faith groups across the country to help them prepare for and prevent targeted violence against their facilities and their members. David Mussington, who is in charge of infrastructure security at CISA, says the goal of the 16-page document is to give useable information in a format that is...

Flooding is driving millions of people to move out of their homes, limiting growth in some prospering communities, and accelerating the decline of others, according to a new study that details how climate change and flooding are transforming where Americans live. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the threat of flooding convinced more than 7 million people to avoid risky areas or abandon places that were risky, according to a paper in December by the journal Nature Communications and research by the risk analysis organization First Street Foundation. Climate change is making bad hurricanes more intense...

Justin Ralph estimates he has made about 200 trips delivering grain from the fields he farms with his brother and uncle this year. They were accustomed to using their four semi-trucks to take the harvest from a total of about 800 acres each of corn, soybeans, and wheat to market. What they were not used to are the distances they had to drive the past couple years, a consequence of bad weather that was only expected to increase in their area as a result of climate change. They used to take advantage of a grain elevator in Mayfield, Kentucky...

Revved-up climate change now permeates Americans’ daily lives with harm that is “already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” a massive new government report says. The National Climate Assessment, which comes out every four to five years, was released last November with details that bring climate change’s impacts down to a local level. Overall, it paints a picture of a country warming about 60% faster than the world as a whole, one that regularly gets smacked with costly weather disasters and faces even bigger problems in the future. Since 1970, the Lower 48 states have...

The average liter of bottled water has nearly a quarter million invisible pieces of ever so tiny nanoplastics, detected and categorized for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers. Scientists long figured there were lots of these microscopic plastic pieces, but until researchers at Columbia and Rutgers universities did their calculations they never knew how many or what kind. Looking at five samples each of three common bottled water brands, researchers found particle levels ranged from 110,000 to 400,000 per liter, averaging at around 240,000 according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of...