"It was half past midnight on March 11 when a cacophony of sirens and shouting jolted Emilio Vasquez and his family from a sound sleep. “Get out of your houses immediately!” a voice barked in Spanish through a bullhorn. “The water is coming!”"
Journalists who lack a strong science background can find themselves in deep water when reporting environmental stories. How do you avoid over- or understating research findings? What’s the difference between observational and experimental studies? And what about those pesky percentages? Former Washington Post science reporter Rick Weiss and his SciLine colleagues have some answers.
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture has allocated more than $3 billion to help farmers transition to practices that sequester carbon and reduce emissions. But some researchers claim the program can’t measure emissions accurately and is unlikely to achieve its climate goals."
"When he was growing up in the coastal California village of Bolinas in the 1980s, Ole Schell remembers, the monarchs that returned each fall to their overwintering sites seemed 'endless.'"
"Warmer, drier weather because of an earlier than usual El Nino is expected to hamper rice production across Asia, hitting global food security in a world still reeling from the impacts of the war in Ukraine."
"For nearly a decade, the state of Arizona has leased this rural terrain west of Phoenix to a Saudi-owned company, allowing it to pump all the water it needs to grow the alfalfa hay — a crop it exports to feed the kingdom’s dairy cows. And, for years, the state did not know how much water the company was consuming."
"The Agriculture Department said on Wednesday that it would establish a monitoring and data collection network to measure greenhouse gas emissions and determine how much carbon can be captured using certain farming practices."
"As droughts strain water supplies across Western states, some cities and farmers have struggled with mandatory cutbacks. Determining who gets cut is decided by the foundational pecking order of Western water: the older your claim to water, created as the country expanded westward, the better protected it is."
"Chlorpyrifos is so harmful that America banned its use on food. But a top EPA official made it clear that the U.S. was not ready to support similar protections for the rest of the world under a treaty that restricts pollutants that travel the globe."
"Huge green blooms are threatening wildlife, pets, people and cities. And algae season is only getting started."
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