Paros Island Council Backs Take Back Beaches Movement – Next Year – the National Herald

Beach in Santorini © 2023 Deepika Shrestha Ross

Limited in its authority, the municipal council on the island of Paros that’s overrun with unlawful businesses occupying public beaches and charging users for umbrellas and lounge beds said there should be inspections.

But officials on the island said the overall jurisdiction belongs to the Finance Ministry, with the government leasing space on prime spots to private operators although there are many that have unlawfully taken over beaches…

Using ‘recycled plastic’ in construction materials may not be a great idea after all – Grist Magazine

Asphalt (by katsuuu 44 CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

Last month, the American Chemistry Council, a petrochemical industry trade group, sent out a newsletter highlighting a major new report on what it presented as a promising solution to the plastic pollution crisis: using “recycled” plastic in construction materials. At first blush, it might seem like a pretty good idea — shred discarded plastic into tiny pieces and you can reprocess it into everything from roads and bridges to railroad ties…

DeSantis’s Florida Approves Climate-Denial Videos in Schools – Scientific American

Governor Ron DeSantis speaking with attendees at the 2022 Student Action Summit at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida (by Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr).

Florida’s Department of Education has approved classroom use of videos that spout climate disinformation and distort climate science

Climate activists are like Nazis.

Wind and solar power pollute the Earth and make life miserable.

Recent global and local heat records reflect natural temperature cycles.
These are some of the themes of children’s videos produced by an influential conservative advocacy group…

A River Runs above Us – Hakai Magazine

Atmospheric rivers occur all over the world in this global view from February, 2017. Illustration courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio - Lead Animator: Horace Mitchell (NASA/GSFC), VIRRS Suomi NPP natural color image courtesy of NASA/Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen)

In mid-November 2021, a great storm begins brewing in the central Pacific Ocean north of Hawai‘i. Especially warm water, heated by the sun, steams off the sea surface and funnels into the sky.

A tendril of this floating moisture sweeps eastward across the ocean. It rides the winds for a day until it reaches the coasts of British Columbia and Washington State. There, the storm hits air turbulence, which pushes it into position—straight over British Columbia’s Fraser River valley….

There Might Be Less Plastic in the Sea Than We Thought. But Read On – the New York Times

Plastic input into the oceans: Despite knowledge of the role played by rivers, there are no global estimates of the amount of man-made debris reaching the ocean at river mouths. Therefore, of the estimated 4.8 to 12.7 million tonnes of litter which enter the marine environment in 2010 from land-based sources within a 50 km-wide coastal zone (Jambeck et al., 2015) Illustration by Maphoto/Riccardo Pravettoni, courtesy of GRID-Arendal CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via https://www.grida.no/resources/6906).

There’s less plastic pollution flowing into the ocean from land than scientists previously thought, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The researchers estimated that about 500,000 metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year, with about half from land. The other half comes from the fishing industry in the form of nets, ropes, buoys and other equipment…

Northern Manhattan Wetland Faced with Climate-Change-Induced Erosion is Reimagined – Inside Climate News

Groundsel Tree (Baccharis halimifolia) Swindler Cove, Inwood Hill Park, New York City (by Steve Guttman CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

When the New York Restoration Project first started working in the late 1990s to clean the unnamed shoreline along the Harlem River in northern Manhattan, the intertidal mudflat and wetlands weren’t just a neglected area, but a former illegal dumping ground. How the cove, the largest wetland left in Manhattan, has become a bountiful greenspace where migrating birds, crabs, tadpoles and toads are all thriving, despite the existential threat posed by climate change in shoreline communities, is a story of robust community involvement and skillful coastline management…

The race to defuse an oil ‘time bomb’ disaster threatening the Red Sea – Grist Magazine

A 1992 file photo of FSO Safer off the coast of Yemen (by Maasmond Maritime/Piet Sinke CC BY-NC-SA 2.0via Flickr).

Ten days ago, the crew of a ship called the Nautica lifted anchor in Djibouti and motored north in the Red Sea. Two tugboats met the vessel about five and a half miles off the coast of Yemen, then guided it into place alongside the FSO Safer, a crumbling, abandoned oil tanker thought to hold 1 million barrels of crude.

Thus began an operation that’s the ecological equivalent of placing the pin back into a hand grenade…