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Memo released Tuesday informed Participant's staff of 100 that the 20-year-old studio is winding down operations Participant, the activist film and television studio that has financed Oscar winners like "Spotlight" and socially conscious documentaries like "Food, Inc," and "Waiting For Superman" is closing its doors after 20 years. Billionaire Jeff Skoll told his staff of 100 in a memo shared with The Associated Press Tuesday that they were winding down company operations. "This is not a step I am taking lightly," Skoll wrote in the memo. "But after 20 years of groundbreaking content and world-changing impact campaigns, it is the...

Lots of footage of flash floods as spring thaws early in northern hills, bringing torrential floods along the Ural river. Commentary from Konstantin accompanies footage.

Donald Trump has outlined his plans for federal taxation should he be elected. "I will make the Trump tax cuts permanent. You know they expire in a year. And we will cut your taxes even more than that," he said in a speech in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Feb. 14, 2024. Trump made the direction clear. Lower. But President Biden has also made his plan clear: He wants to wallop Americans with a $5 trillion tax increase. Biden’s written plan calls for a small business tax hike, a corporate tax hike, a capital gains and dividends tax hike, income...

Liberal actress Jane Fonda appeared at multiple high-profile events this week to promote her climate activism. The 86-year-old Fonda, who has been arrested while participating in past climate protests, tried to rev up famous faces at a Beverly Hills fundraiser against big oil in California, and later in the week, educate college students at USC Annenberg that the climate crisis is a "manifestation of racism, misogyny and patriarchy." She also apologized to young people, saying, "I’m sorry that we’ve created this issue for you." Fonda’s first event was a star-studded fundraiser she hosted to raise money to keep California from...

Scientists have created an interactive map that shows how parts of Illinois may be swallowed up by Lake Michigan as climate change bites. The Great Lakes in the Midwest comprise the largest unfrozen freshwater stores on Earth, but experts have forecast that rising water levels could have serious consequences. More than 30 million people live along the lakes' roughly 4,500 miles of coastline, which stretches across the U.S. and Canada, and touches upon the cities of Chicago, Detroit and Buffalo, New York. That means millions of families could be hit hard by new, higher water levels, which could potentially wash...

A team of European researchers says that hundreds of thousands of meteorites, which may provide valuable information about the dawn of life on Earth, are disappearing from Antarctica at an alarming rate. Based on their research, the scientists behind the alarming findings say that as many as three-quarters of the approximately 300,000-800,000 meteorites resting on the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet could be lost by 2050. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the research says the culprit behind the wholesale disappearance is the steady rise in global temperature. “For every tenth of a degree of increase in global...

April 9 (UPI) -- The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service said Tuesday that at 1.68 degrees Celsius hotter than the "pre-industrial" era, March was the warmest March on record and the tenth straight temperature record-breaking month. The new March high was calculated from an estimate of the average March temperature during the "pre-industrial" reference period, designated as 1850-1900 which also shows a year-round global average temperature from April 2023 to March 2024 period that is 1.58 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average. The climate group's top scientist called for urgent cuts in the volume of greenhouse gasses being...

A new study led by Jarmo Kikstra, a research scholar in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program, explores whether reducing production and consumption growth could make a significant contribution to resolving the climate crisis. As the effects of climate change become more severe and the scale of environmental damage gains magnitude, some researchers disagree about the desirability and feasibility of further economic growth in high-income countries. More recently, the case has been made for exploring a "degrowth" (or post-growth) strategy. Such a strategy would entail reducing less necessary forms of production and consumption (rather than growing them) with the...

Earthquakes on the East Coast are rare but sea level rise and frequent flooding may lead to a higher frequency of quakes. But here's why you shouldn't be alarmed.

CNN - The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season isn’t here yet, but is already shaping up to be one for the books, with more hurricanes and named storms predicted in a pre-season forecast from Colorado State University than ever before. This June through November could see 23 named storms in all, including 11 hurricanes and five Category 3 or higher “major” hurricanes, according to the university’s Atlantic hurricane season forecast, released Thursday. “This is the most active April forecast that we have ever issued,” lead forecaster Phil Klotzbach told CNN. “Our prior highest hurricane forecast in April was 9 hurricanes, which...

A harrowing history: 50 years since the 1974 Super Outbreak 50 years ago today, the South and part of the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys were devastated by one of the most significant weather events in U.S. history. Infamously known as the 1974 Super Outbreak, which lasted from April 3-4, 1974, the Outbreak was the first on record to produce more than 100 tornadoes in a 24-hour period. The onslaught resulted in the loss of 335 lives and $600 million in damages. The Super Outbreak wrought havoc across 13 states, producing the second-largest outbreak of tornadoes on record, including seven EF-5...

Martin Durkin has written and directed an informative film titled “Climate: The Movie.” A select group of (mostly former) climate scientists from academia, government, and industry, speak to the truth about the earth’s climate from the near and distant past. The movie backs up its claims with a diverse selection of slides and graphs which track micro and macro trends of the multivariate factors which contribute to changes in climate.Geological evidence from thousands and millions of years ago can provide a wealth of information about the history of the earth’s climate. From rock strata and ice cores, from fossils of...

For those interested, this is an excellent study of that event.. https://youtu.be/ral7kXMYLjI

Poland’s top climate official said the country is preparing to set a date for a complete phase-out of coal-fired power generation, just months after the nation elected a new government that has pledged to support environmental policies of the European Union (EU). ... Poland, which currently receives about 70% of its electricity from burning coal, and has long been Europe’s largest producer of the fuel, has been slowly increasing its use of solar and wind power. ... Urszula Zielinska, the country’s Secretary of State for Climate, during a meeting in Brussels, Belgium on Jan. 15, said, “Only with an end...

almost 50 years to the day of the 74 Super Outbreak...almost the exact same areas. https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/day1otlk.html

A problem is coming for global timekeeping, according to a paper published in the March 27, 2024 issue of Nature by Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and global warming is influencing when that problem might arrive. Worldwide coordination of timekeeping is how all smartphones and computers can keep the same time. This timekeeping includes, every so often, an extra second, called a leap second, which makes a particular minute last for 61 seconds. Anyone who has forgotten the change to or from daylight saving time and found themselves an hour early (or...

A federal lawsuit pits green energy against saving endangered whales, as three conservative groups are suing the Biden administration to stop what they say would be the largest wind energy project in the world. The Virginia Offshore Wind project could cause significant harm to the North Atlantic right whale, according to the 61-page complaint in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia filed by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), the Heartland Institute and the National Legal and Policy Center against federal agencies as well as Dominion Energy. The lawsuit names the Interior Department, the Commerce Department, the...

Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) - Martin Durkin . This film exposes the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science. It shows that mainstream studies and official data do not support the claim that we are witnessing an increase in extreme weather events – hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and all the rest. It emphatically counters the claim that current temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 are unusually and worryingly high. On the contrary, it is very clearly the case, as can be seen in all mainstream studies, that, compared to the last half billion years...

Senate Democrats were left red-faced at a hearing on climate change as their 'expert witness' proved to be anything but when faced by veteran senator John Kennedy. Budget Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse invited Olympic skier Gus Schumacher to give his perspective as the committee considered the impact of climate change on the recreation industry. But it was all downhill for the 23-year-old as he struggled to answer basic questions and could not remember his tweets claiming the war on drugs was designed to jail black people, and calling for the police to be abolished. The excruciating exchange continued with Schumacher insisting...

During the most recent total solar eclipse visible in the U.S., on Aug. 21, 2017, the skies darkened as the Moon crossed in front of the Sun. It blocked out all sunlight – except for that from a golden ring visible around the Moon’s shape, called the corona. Not surprisingly, solar power generation across North America plummeted for several hours, from the first moment the Moon began to obscure the Sun to when the Sun’s disk was clear again. On April 8, 2024, another total solar eclipse will track across the U.S., causing perhaps an even greater loss of solar...