Climate change is fueling fires in the West

The Sand Fire that blazed through Southern California this week destroyed 38,000 acres in the Santa Clarita Valley. This latest inferno is part of a trend of more frequent and intense wildfires brought on by heat and drought. Since the late 1970s, the number of fires on public lands in the West has increased 500 percentClimate Central

African elephant poaching is down, but not nearly enough

A new report by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species says that 60 percent of elephants found dead last year in the wild were poached. In 2011, 80 percent of dead elephants had been killed for their ivory tusks. While these numbers are a step in the right direction, poaching rates are still far too high to allow the species to recover. Only 500,000 of the pachyderms remain in Africa, down from 1.2 million in the 1970s. Reuters

Climate change affects fish mating rituals

A study of ocellated wrasses in the Mediterranean Sea finds that high levels of carbon dioxide change the fish's complex reproductive behavior. Though the research focused on just one species, scientists worry that similar effects on other fish could exacerbate existing ocean stressors like overfishing, warming, and plastic pollution. Climate Central

Scientists call on Interior Department to keep coal in the ground

This week 67 scientists wrote a letter urging the department to halt the leasing, extraction, and burning of coal on public land, practices that currently account for 41 percent of the country's coal production. The group argued that if the program continues, the United States will not meet the targets outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement. InsideClimate News

The 2016 Summer Olympics will not be a win for the environment

Officials from Brazil's Federal Audit Court now say Rio de Janeiro will receive almost none of the environmental benefits promised by organizers of the games, such as reducing sewage and trash flow into Guanabara Bay and Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon. With only days to go before the opening ceremony, water quality remains very, very poor. (Sorry, swimmers.)  Reuters

Car sharing can make a dent in carbon pollution

An analysis of Car2go, North America's largest one-way car service, finds that over the course of three years, each car shared kept as many as 11 others off the streets, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 13 metric tons a year. Across the five study cities, the effect was like taking 28,000 privately-owned cars off the road. The Guardian

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