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A solar-powered society is not as unreasonable as it may seem. While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told state governors about how the United States could easily switch to sun power using a small patch of land, only around 10 percent of the country's energy is renewable. A new analysis published last week shows how most countries around the world could make the switch using just a tiny fraction of national space.

Price comparison website Finder.com has produced an interactive map that shows how the world could move onto solar energy. The group found that around 87 percent of countries could meet their power demands with solar panels covering less than five percent of the land area. The world could power itself on just 1.1 million square kilometers of solar panels, less than the size of South Africa.

"While, of course, we can't replace South Africa with solar panels, spreading this area out across the world does seem like something we could achieve in the future," the team writes.

Just three countries would need more solar panels than its land area to meet its energy needs: Bahrain would need 156 percent of its land space, Hong Kong needs 213 percent of its land space, and the city-state of Singapore would need a staggering 830 percent of its land space to go all-solar.

On the whole, though, the findings show how an all-solar future would use surprisingly little land for many countries. The United States, for example, would use a small block for power production:

It's a small amount, but still notably larger than the figure Musk gave at the National Governors Association meeting in July, where he told 30 representatives that the country needs just 100 square miles of solar panels (or 259 square kilometers), combined with a battery pack around one square mile.

Canada would also use very little space to provide energy for its 37 million people:

China, the world's most populous country, would require a small patch of land for its 1.4 billion people. The country has made big strides in the switch, including the 850 megawatt-capacity Longyangxia Dam Solar Park by the Tibetan plateau, one of the largest solar farms in the world stretching over 10 square miles, enough for 140,000 homes. A full switch would look something like this:

The same goes for Russia, the world's largest country:

Not every country would find it straightforward to switch. Germany has an impressive track record with renewables, reaching a level of 85 percent usage in April 2017, but its 82 million people would need to cover most of the country to meet their energy needs from solar alone:

North Korea would require very little land:

South Korea, on the other hand, would have a much harder time:

The team used the following equation to work out the number of solar panels required:

Energy (kilowatt-hours) equals total solar panel area (square meters) multiplied by solar panel yield or efficiency (percent) multiplied by annual average solar radiation on tilted panels not including shadings multiplied by performance ratio

For energy the group looked at consumption based on the CIA World Factbook, yield and performance ratio used the standard figures provided on the Photovoltaic Software website that recommends the equation, while annual average solar radiation came from OpenSolarDB. Countries with missing data in the World Factbook or OpenSolarDB were left out of the map - which notably leaves out a large section of Latin America.

See the full list of countries below:

Afghanistan - 470 square km (0.1 percent)

Albania - 150 square km (0.6 percent)

Algeria - 3,010 square km (0.1 percent)

Andorra - 2 square km (0.3 percent)

Angola - 480 square km (0 percent)

Argentina - 7,380 square km (0.3 percent)

Armenia - 250 square km (0.9 percent)

Australia - 6,270 square km (0.1 percent)

Austria - 2,530 square km (3.1 percent)

Azerbaijan - 1,680 square km (2 percent)

Bahrain - 1,200 square km (156.3 percent)

Bangladesh - 2,810 square km (2.2 percent)

Belarus - 3,640 square km (1.8 percent)

Belgium - 6,240 square km (20.6 percent)

Benin - 140 square km (0.1 percent)

Bhutan - 30 square km (0.1 percent)

Bosnia and Herzegovina - 280 square km (0.6 percent)

Botswana - 80 square km (0 percent)

Brunei Darussalam - 280 square km (5.3 percent)

Bulgaria - 840 square km (0.8 percent)

Burkina Faso - 60 square km (0 percent)

Burundi - 10 square km (0 percent)

Cambodia - 140 square km (0.1 percent)

Cameroon - 200 square km (0 percent)

Canada - 24,010 square km (0.3 percent)

Cape Verde - 20 square km (0.4 percent)

Central African Republic - 10 square km (0 percent)

Chad - 10 square km (0 percent)

Chile - 2,040 square km (0.3 percent)

China - 106,200 square km (1.1 percent)

Comoros - 3 square km (0.2 percent)

Republic of the Congo - 220 square km (0.1 percent)

Democratic Republic of the Congo - 130 square km (0 percent)

Cote DIvoire - 300 square km (0.1 percent)

Croatia - 730 square km (1.3 percent)

Cyprus - 150 square km (1.6 percent)

Czech Republic - 2,360 square km (3.1 percent)

Denmark - 1,600 square km (3.8 percent)

Djibouti - 20 square km (0.1 percent)

Egypt - 6,400 square km (0.6 percent)

Eritrea - 10 square km (0 percent)

Estonia - 330 square km (0.8 percent)

Ethiopia - 200 square km (0 percent)

Fiji - 60 square km (0.3 percent)

Finland - 2,450 square km (0.8 percent)

France - 13,120 square km (2.4 percent)

Gabon - 130 square km (0.1 percent)

Gambia - 10 square km (0.1 percent)

Georgia - 350 square km (0.5 percent)

Germany - 86,460 square km (24.8 percent)

Ghana - 320 square km (0.1 percent)

Greece - 1,590 square km (1.2 percent)

Guinea - 50 square km (0 percent)

Guinea-Bissau - 10 square km (0 percent)

Hong Kong - 2,230 square km (212.5 percent)

Hungary - 2,230 square km (2.5 percent)

Iceland - 360 square km (0.4 percent)

India - 22,730 square km (0.8 percent)

Indonesia - 8,750 square km (0.5 percent)

Iran - 17,620 square km (1.1 percent)

Iraq - 3,060 square km (0.7 percent)

Ireland - 1,600 square km (2.3 percent)

Israel - 1,520 square km (7 percent)

Italy - 10,950 square km (3.7 percent)

Japan - 29,170 square km (8 percent)

Jordan - 740 square km (0.8 percent)

Kazakhstan - 2,340 square km (0.1 percent)

Kenya - 270 square km (0 percent)

North Korea - 140 square km (0.1 percent)

South Korea - 19,130 square km (19.6 percent)

Kuwait - 3,100 square km (17.4 percent)

Kyrgyzstan - 230 square km (0.1 percent)

Laos - 30 square km (0 percent)

Latvia - 460 square km (0.7 percent)

Lebanon - 530 square km (5.2 percent)

Lesotho - 20 square km (0.1 percent)

Liberia - 20 square km (0 percent)

Libya - 1,100 square km (0.1 percent)

Liechtenstein - 3 square km (1.9 percent)

Lithuania - 620 square km (1 percent)

Luxembourg - 460 square km (17.9 percent)

Macedonia - 160 square km (0.6 percent)

Madagascar - 50 square km (0 percent)

Malawi - 30 square km (0 percent)

Malaysia - 5,350 square km (1.6 percent)

Maldives - 30 square km (10.1 percent)

Mali - 30 square km (0 percent)

Malta - 130 square km (40.8 percent)

Mauritania - 50 square km (0 percent)

Mauritius - 80 square km (3.9 percent)

Mexico - 27,890 square km (1.4 percent)

Moldova - 360 square km (1.1 percent)

Mongolia - 140 square km (0 percent)

Morocco - 1,030 square km (0.2 percent)

Mozambique - 250 square km (0 percent)

Myanmar - 610 square km (0.1 percent)

Namibia - 80 square km (0 percent)

Netherlands - 9,720 square km (28.9 percent)

New Caledonia - 60 square km (0.3 percent)

New Zealand - 1,520 square km (0.6 percent)

Niger - 40 square km (0 percent)

Nigeria - 2,320 square km (0.3 percent)

Norway - 4,230 square km (1.2 percent)

Oman - 2,150 square km (0.7 percent)

Pakistan - 4,380 square km (0.6 percent)

Palestinian Territory - 50 square km (0.9 percent)

Philippines - 1,760 square km (0.6 percent)

Poland - 6,550 square km (2.1 percent)

Portugal - 1,490 square km (1.6 percent)

Qatar - 3,070 square km (26.5 percent)

Romania - 2,210 square km (1 percent)

Russia - 60,980 square km (0.4 percent)

Rwanda - 20 square km (0.1 percent)

Sao Tome and Principe - 3 square km (0.3 percent)

Saudi Arabia - 14,410 square km (0.7 percent)

Senegal - 150 square km (0.1 percent)

Sierra Leone - 20 square km (0 percent)

Singapore - 5,890 square km (830.2 percent)

Slovakia - 1,220 square km (2.5 percent)

Slovenia - 410 square km (2 percent)

Somalia - 20 square km (0 percent)

South Africa - 3,310 square km (0.3 percent)

Spain - 7,940 square km (1.6 percent)

Sri Lanka - 410 square km (0.7 percent)

Sudan - 310 square km (0 percent)

Swaziland - 20 square km (0.1 percent)

Sweden - 3,130 square km (0.8 percent)

Switzerland - 1,660 square km (4.2 percent)

Syria - 780 square km (0.4 percent)

Taiwan - 6,860 square km (18.9 percent)

Tajikistan - 160 square km (0.1 percent)

Tanzania - 260 square km (0 percent)

Thailand - 10,820 square km (2.1 percent)

Togo - 40 square km (0.1 percent)

Trinidad and Tobago - 2,370 square km (46.2 percent)

Tunisia - 810 square km (0.5 percent)

Turkey - 9,420 square km (1.2 percent)

Turkmenistan - 4,520 square km (1 percent)

Uganda - 90 square km (0 percent)

Ukraine - 5,390 square km (0.9 percent)

UAE - 9,980 square km (11.9 percent)

UK - 29,690 square km (12.3 percent)

US - 129,390 square km (1.4 percent)

Uzbekistan - 1,100 square km (0.3 percent)

Vietnam - 2,880 square km (0.9 percent)

Yemen - 410 square km (0.1 percent)

Zimbabwe - 120 square km (0 percent)

Hello! You've made it to the end of the article. Nice. Here's a related video you might like: "Three Times Elon Musk Failed Harder Than You Ever Will"

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Map Reveals How the World Could Switch to Solar Using a Tiny Amount of Land

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A solar energy-powered society is not that unreasonable. While Tesla CEO ELon Musk is pushing a change in the United States, a Finder.com map shows how most countries could switch to renewable energy with a small amount of land usage enabled by solar panel technology.

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Solar Energy: Finder.com Map Reveals How the World Could Make the Switch | Inverse

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In case you missed it, the President of the United States called Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries "shitholes," then pretended like he didn't say it, but basically said it all over again.

This matters not just because it's racist (the President is racist, in fact, he is professionally racist), because it's vulgar ("shithole," one of the all-time great swear words, is forever sullied by this), and because it's catastrophically bad for foreign and domestic relations. It matters in part because of the history of Haiti, and the history of racist discourse about Haiti.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, a professor of education and scholar who's closely studied these narratives, writes:

The reason why White nationalists like 45 always name Haiti because the Haitian nation & people are unique. Haiti defeated Napoleon, threw off the chains of slavery, and exposed the lie of White supremacy & European imperialism. So there's no end to their hatred for Haiti.

Jonathan Katz, a journalist and former AP correspondent in Haiti who wrote The Big Truck That Went By about Haiti's 2010 earthquake and the cholera epidemic that followed, has a longer thread spelling out how these narratives about Haiti were generated and how they work. Here's a thick excerpt:

In order to do a victory lap around the GDP difference between, say, Norway and Haiti, you have to know nothing about the history of the world. That includes, especially, knowing nothing real about the history of the United States... You'd have to not know that the French colony that became Haiti provided the wealth that fueled the French Empire - and 2/3 of the sugar and 3/4 of the coffee that Europe consumed...

You'd have to not realize that Haiti was founded in a revolution against that system, and that European countries and the United States punished them for their temerity by refusing to recognize or trade with them for decades. You'd have to not know that Haiti got recognition by agreeing to pay 150 million gold francs to French landowners in compensation for their own freedom. You'd have to not know that Haiti paid it, and that it took them almost all of the 19th century to do so.

You'd then have to not know that Haiti was forced to borrow some money to pay back that ridiculous debt, some of it from banks in the United States. And you'd have to not know that in 1914 those banks got President Wilson to send the US Marines to empty the Haitian gold reserve... [You'd] have to not know about the rest of the 20th century either-the systematic theft and oppression, US support for dictators and coups, the US invasions of Haiti in 1994-95 and 2004...

In short, you'd have to know nothing about WHY Haiti is poor (or El Salvador in kind), and WHY the United States (and Norway) are wealthy. But far worse than that, you'd have to not even be interested in asking the question. And that's where they really tell on themselves... Because what they are showing is that they ASSUME that Haiti is just naturally poor, that it's an inherent state borne of the corruption of the people there, in all senses of the word.

And let's just say out loud why that is: It's because Haitians are black.

Racists have needed Haiti to be poor since it was founded. They pushed for its poverty. They have celebrated its poverty. They have tried to profit from its poverty. They wanted it to be a shithole. And they still do.

If Haiti is a shithole, then they can say that black freedom and sovereignty are bad. They can hold it up as proof that white countries-and what's whiter than Norway-are better, because white people are better. They wanted that in 1804, and in 1915, and they want it now.

The history of Haiti is weird because it is absurdly well-documented, yet totally poorly known. It's hard not to attribute that to ideology. We don't teach the Haitian Revolution the way we teach the American, or the French, or the Mexican, because it's a complicated story. Kids are more likely to hear variations of "Haiti formed a pact with the devil to defeat Napoleon" (this is real thing, I swear) than Toussaint Louverture's or Jean-Jacques Dessalines's names.

Also, while Haiti's revolution was an early, signature event in world history-the first time a European power would be overthrown by an indigenous army (but not the last)-the causes of Haiti's poverty are basically identical with those of almost every poor nation around the world: a history of exploitation, bad debt, bad geopolitics, and bad people profiting off of that poverty (almost all of them living elsewhere). And this is basically true about poverty in American cities as well (with all the same attendant racist myths).

Some recommended reading:

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In case you missed it, the President of the United States called Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries "shitholes," then pretended like he didn't say it, but basically said it all over again.

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The impacts of climate change are among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities across the Islamic republic.

At least 20 people have died in the uprising, driven by the sudden collapse of financial institutions, low wages and mistrust of national leaders. Rising temperatures are seen by some experts as an underlying condition for the economic hardships that led to the unrest.

A severe drought, mismanaged water resources and dust storms diminished Iran's economy in recent years, according to experts who study the region. While the protests are largely driven by resistance to the country's hardline conservative government, such environmental factors might have contributed to the largest protests inside Iran in years.

Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understood that climate change and water mismanagement was ravaging family farms, and his government provided subsidies to families who struggled to put food on the table, said Amir Handjani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center. When the current president, Hassan Rouhani, signaled that he would reduce those benefits, enraged Iranians across the nation's arid countryside joined the wave of protests.

"You have climate change, shortage of water, they can't grow their crops, and now they're getting their cash handouts taken away," said Handjani. "It's a panoply of issues coming together at once."

Among the sparks of activism are corruption, nepotism, rippling effects of low oil prices and sour reactions to the Trump administration's denunciations of Iran, said Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

She said the role of climate change on the protests is "massive" and underreported by the media. The protests have largely sprung from provincial cities that climate refugees now call home, instead of the capital, Tehran. Those areas have traditionally been more conservative and less willing to speak out against the ayatollahs, she said.

"Iran has had a drought for 14 years, and many of these people who come into these provincial cities and towns are there because they could not function as farmers anymore; there was no water for their farms," Slavin said.

While the unrest in recent weeks was initially sparked by rising egg prices and anger over planned cuts to subsidies, one of Iran's biggest economic challenges has been a cycle of extreme droughts that started in the late 1990s, said Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Energy Security and Climate Initiative.

"The drought has certainly impacted Iran's economy broadly, and it's impacted quality of life and living patterns, migration patterns around Iran quite considerably," she said. "It's an issue of huge political importance, one that factored into the presidential election last year, so it's certainly something I think one can say has had a role in shaping frustrations and driving some of the underlying grievances around the protests."

Iran is increasingly vulnerable to climate change, experts say. Rainfall in the Middle East is expected to fall 20 percent by the end of the century, and temperatures could rise by as much as 5 degrees Celsius, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

By 2070, the Persian Gulf could experience a spike in heat waves that are hard for humans to survive, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study published in 2015. The worst effects of such extremes could be curtailed with a drop in emissions from fossil fuels, a large percentage of which come from fossil fuels derived from the Middle East.

This summer, Iran recorded one of the highest temperatures witnessed on Earth, at 128.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

A series of man-made challenges, such as a rush to put dams on many of the country's primary rivers, also complicated water access problems. Reduced water supplies placed economic pressures on rural areas and smaller cities that have suffered some of the most severe environmental impacts, observers say.

There is a growing sense of environmentalism in Iran, in response to the drought and deadly heat waves, said Kaveh Ehsani, a professor at DePaul University and an expert on Iranian politics. Extreme heat waves have hit a large percentage of impoverished Iranians in particular, he said.

While middle- and upper-class people can afford air conditioners in a region where temperatures reach 110 degrees for several days in a row, many others cannot. They are forced to work in deadly temperatures or lose paid work hours, Ehsani said. In addition, increased desertification has caused enormous dust storms that engulf cities and freeze activity, sometimes killing people caught in them, he said.

Environmental issues have brought some protesters into the streets, Ehsani said, in part because climate change is now seen as a contributor to inequity. Newscasts on the environment are potentially reinforcing Iranian views, since that topic is not generally censured by government officials. Environmental issues aren't seen through the same political lens as they are in the United States, he said.

The Trump administration's retreat from the Paris climate agreement and its larger rejection of climate policy mean that Iranian citizens are increasingly blaming environmental problems on the United States, Ehsani said.

"Environmentalism has become much more of a class issue, not just middle class anymore, but really affecting poor people," he said. "It's become a big part of everyday awareness. There are a lot of websites, a lot of activism around, and because it's not openly political and who can morally object to this or say it's Trump's doing, there has been a revolution about this in the past decade and a half."

In recent years, there's been a recognition at the highest levels of the Iranian government that climate change poses an acute threat.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called on the country to address climate change. In a 2015 letter, he wrote that Iran must "manage climate change and environment threats such as desertification, especially dust pollution [and] drought."

The directive from the ayatollah and was addressed to President Rouhani, came just before world leaders met in Paris to craft the groundbreaking climate agreement. Such directives are typically used to set policy goals. Iran signed onto the Paris initiative and agreed to reduce its emissions 12 percent and to spend $5 billion on conservation efforts.

Trump has praised the Iranian protesters on Twitter, but has been less clear about what the United States would do to support the rebellion.

"The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime," Trump tweeted. "All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their 'pockets.' The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The U.S. is watching!"

Iran's increasingly desperate situation is an opportunity for the United States to help the Islamic republic address its ecological challenges, said Slavin of the Atlantic Council. Moving away from climate investment could compound those challenges, she said.

"If the United States really cared about the welfare of the Iranian people, it would allow organizations like the U.N. environmental program to make loans to Iran, to provide expertise to Iran to help them with these issues," Slavin said. "Instead, our sanctions forbid this kind of cooperation. We really should be thinking long-term. This affects Afghanistan; this affects other countries around Iran whose welfare we're concerned with."
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

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Climate Change May Have Helped Spark Iran's Protests

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The impacts of climate change are among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities across the Islamic republic. At least 20 people have died in the uprising, driven by the sudden collapse of financial institutions, low wages and mistrust of national leaders.

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Climate Change May Have Helped Spark Iran's Protests - Scientific American

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Whatever you call it - climate change, global warming, or the greenhouse effect - it's increasing the frequency and severity of heatwaves. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

How we talk about climate change has a lot to do with how we feel about it, and what we're willing to do to act on it. Recent research from the US found that the terms "global warming" and "climate change" evoke different reactions: global warming is perceived as far more threatening.

While there is no similar research in Australia, over the past 25 years we've seen debate shift from the greenhouse effect to climate change to climate variability - with a corresponding decrease in action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Global warming, the US research found, is more likely to be associated with melting glaciers, world catastrophe, flooding and extreme weather than climate change. It is also perceived to be scientifically more certain.

Climate change, on the other hand, is perceived as less threatening, particularly among liberal and moderate voters in the US. Conservative voters on average don't distinguish between the two, but, to some, global warming is perceived as the greater threat.

The man behind "climate change"

Frank Luntz, a pollster and political advisor for the US Republicans, realised this phenomena several years ago. In a 2002 memo to Republicans Luntz advised:

"Climate change" is less frightening than "global warming" ... While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.

Luntz also urged Republican politicians to encourage the public to believe there was no consensus on global warming:

The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science... Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate...

Subsequently President George Bush dropped the term global warming from his speeches on the environment and the White House took up use of the term climate change. Climate change began to be used increasingly often in US documents.

What the science says

In scientific terms global warming refers to the increase in the earth's average surface temperature.

Climate change refers to the consequent range of changes in climate including changed rainfall patterns, increasing droughts and heat waves, and more extreme weather such as flooding, storms and cyclones.

Many scientists actually prefer to use the term climate change because they are concerned that global warming gives the misleading impression that there will be warmer weather everywhere. The use of the term climate change had in fact started to overtake global warming in other parts of the world even before the Luntz memo.

An even earlier term that gained popular currency in the 1980s was the "greenhouse effect". The greenhouse effect had merit in that it was educational: it explained the mechanism for global warming and gave it a physical reality for laypeople. But the greenhouse effect is also a natural and benign effect that protects the earth's atmosphere. There was a short-lived effort to change the name to enhanced greenhouse effect or anthropocentric greenhouse effect.

Around 1990 the term greenhouse effect began to be replaced by global warming and climate change. A search of the millions of English language books catalogued by Google demonstrates the changing preference for the new euphemisms.

Google

From climate change to climate variability

The upswing and downturn of the term greenhouse effect seems to coincide with the willingness of the Australian government to introduce measures to reduce greenhouse gases.

In 1988, when the National Greenhouse 88 Conference was held in Australia, there was unprecedented public interest in the issue. At the time, Australia was acclaimed as one of the most progressive governments on the issue. Now it is a climate change pariah.

Even the term climate change is too much for some present day governments. Earlier this year Professor Kate Auty, the Victorian Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, told The Age newspaper that public servants in Victoria have been instructed to use the term climate variability rather than climate change. Because the climate is naturally variable, climate variability is a more soothing term than climate change and therefore less likely to incite calls for government action.

This squeamishness about the term climate change is apparently not confined to government circles. Gabrielle Chan reported in the Guardian:

There is a term that is not generally used in polite company in the bush. That term is climate change ... In most cases, though, the community tends to prefer the term "climate variability" than "climate change".

Names do matter. The US research quotes scholars who point out that "the terms we use to describe the world determine the ways we see it, those who control the argument, and those who control the argument are more likely to successfully translate belief into policy".

The evolution of names from greenhouse effect to global warming to climate change reflects the ongoing battle over the public perception of this phenomenon. This latest iteration into climate variability may indeed bury public concern. Perhaps in Australia it's time to resurrect the greenhouse effect.

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We need to talk about how we talk about climate change

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How we talk about climate change has a lot to do with how we feel about it, and what we're willing to do to act on it. Recent research from the US found that the terms "global warming" and "climate change...

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We need to talk about how we talk about climate change

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'Such Brutality Cannot be the New Normal.' Children Faced a Shocking Scale of Violence in 2017 - TIME

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'Such Brutality Cannot be the New Normal.' Children Faced a Shocking Scale of Violence in 2017 - TIME

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Children are on the front lines on conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Myanmar, and eastern Ukraine, UNICEF said

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'A Disproportionate Hit.' 2017's Weather Disasters Are Among the Worst in U.S. History - TIME

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'A Disproportionate Hit.' 2017's Weather Disasters Are Among the Worst in U.S. History - TIME

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Powerful Iran-Iraq earthquake is deadliest of 2017 - CNN

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Powerful Iran-Iraq earthquake is deadliest of 2017 - CNN

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Powerful earthquake in Iraq kills at least 100 in Iran - CNN

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A powerful 7.3 magnitude earthquake Sunday in the Iraqi city of Halabja, close to the Iraq-Iran border, killed at least 61 people, injured hundreds in Iran.

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In just months, more than 600,000 members of Myanmar's ethnic Muslim minority, the Rohingya, have fled persecution into neighboring Bangladesh. When that many people move on earth, you can see it from space.

The imagery below comes from Planet, a satellite imaging company that photographs the entire landmass of earth daily. It shows Kutupalong refugee camp, spreading over an area a little larger than ten square miles. The left side of the photo is Bangladesh; the right side, Myanmar.

In the space of a few weeks between Sept. 21 and Nov. 10, you can see the "massive expansion of the camp over a short amount of time," Micah Farfour, who analyzes imagery like this for Amnesty International, said in an email. "You can see there were once trees/vegetation where there are now structures (lighter colors)."

Farfour says that the rapid growth of the camp confirms a large exodus from Myanmar, and suggests, "the situation in Myanmar for the people fleeing is likely desperate and widespread to cause so many people to leave so quickly." It also suggests that migrants are getting through despite reports that the Bangladesh government tried to halt the mass movement.

Amnesty International has sent teams of researchers to Bangladesh to interview the refugees, documenting a government-led crack down on the Rohingya that began during the summer. Soldiers, accompanied by citizen militias, have burned Rohnigya towns, shot refugees as they fled and raped Rohingya women. The United Nations top human rights' official has called it ""a textbook example of ethnic cleansing."

One challenge for the UN and human rights organizations has been getting access to Rakhine state, the Myanmar province where the Rohingya made their home. That has made satellite imagery an increasingly important tool for human rights monitors. Amnesty has used satellite imagery to track burnt villages in Myanmar.

"Many times, I am able to work with researchers that receive reports from the ground from locals and then I can attempt to confirm or deny things with satellite imagery," Farfour writes, noting that Planet's frequent imaging of the same areas is critical because "I am looking at areas of the world that the higher resolution satellites rarely document until it may be too late."

On Nov. 10, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on Myanmar to allow the Rohingya to return to their homes and allow UN inspectors access to Rakhine state. "What has happened is an immense tragedy and the levels of violence and the atrocities committed are something that we cannot be silent about," he said.

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The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is visible from space

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In just months, more than 600,000 members of Myanmar's ethnic Muslim minority, the Rohingya, have fled persecution into neighboring Bangladesh. When that many people move on earth, you can see it from space. The imagery below comes from Planet, a satellite imaging company that photographs the entire landmass of earth daily.

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The company photographing every spot of land on earth, every single day

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The company photographing every spot of land on earth, every single day

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Planet, the American satellite company, is now snapping a picture of every part of earth's landmass every single day.

Analyzing the imagery over time promises to unlock critical information about the economy and the environment for Planet's customers, which range from investors to activists. It's also a milestone in humanity's ongoing efforts to understand the planet it calls home.

Last year, Planet said it was photographing a third of the world's land each day. In February of this year it launched 88 satellites on an Indian rocket, and last week it launched 10 more satellites on an Orbital ATK rocket from California. Most of the images they take are at a resolution of three meters (10 feet) per pixel. By taking images daily, the company can track changes in the physical world, like how quickly the temporary city of Burning Man rises out of the desert:

Planet's imagery can track the effects of sudden events like Hurricane Harvey or long-term problems like California's drought, among many other applications.

Planet is seven years old and launched its first satellites only in 2014, but it now has more commercial satellites in orbit than any other: 182 of its Dove satellites, each of which weighs 5 kg (11 lb), plus 19 larger satellites that it acquired by buying two other earth-imaging companies.

The firm's founders-Will Marshall, Robbie Shingler, and Chris Boshuizen, now an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture fund Data Collective-met at NASA's Ames research center in Mountain View, California. They took their understanding of small spacecraft to a garage in nearby Cupertino, and made daily imaging of the entire earth their "mission one." Designing low-cost but effective cubesats to snap pictures in orbit, they launched their satellites in waves, adding new features to each wave, and raising over $150 million to back their business.

Planet's speed and fundraising success allowed it to get ahead of a potential glut of competitors by buying them out. It purchased a satellite constellation from the German firm Blackbridge in 2015 and bought TerraBella, formerly SkyBox, from Google in 2016. These satellites take sharper pictures than the Doves, at one meter per pixel.

When I visited to Planet's San Francisco headquarters this summer, Marshall said that Planet's ultimate goal is to answer questions with the data it collects; developing space technology is just a means to that end. "We are not an aerospace company," he told me. If "mission one" was to collect the data, "mission two" appears to be making it available to and useful for people who aren't experts in geospatial information analysis.

On the software side, that means figuring out what kind of questions possible users-from a farmer in Iowa or a forest manager in Brazil to a hedge fund in Singapore or a government ministry in Nigeria-will need answered, and how to deliver that information in the most useful format. Planet will also add higher-resolution imagery from the satellites it acquired to its platform, and continue upgrading the Dove-now on its 13th operational version-to take clearer images, last longer in space, and transmit more data back to earth.

"Planet will index physical change on Earth the same way Google indexed text on the internet," CEO Marshall wrote yesterday on Planet's blog. "Questions will typically be framed to search an area for a feature (such as a plane or a road), a count of features (how many planes at San Francisco Airport), a time that a feature appeared, or to quantify some aspect of temporal or spatial change (sq km of land damaged by wildfire)."

Space market observers like Hoyt Davidson, who runs Near Earth LLC, a boutique, space-focused investment bank, tend to see Planet as the likeliest of a new generation of space companies to list on stock exchanges. The company hasn't commented on such speculation. But if that is its goal, being able to say it can now take a picture of the whole earth every day will no doubt bolster its case for getting investors, and the case for investing in space more generally.

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The company photographing every spot of land on earth, every single day

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Planet, the American satellite company, is now snapping a picture of every part of earth's landmass every single day. Analyzing the imagery over time promises to unlock critical information about the economy and the environment for Planet's customers, which range from investors to activists. It's also a milestone in humanity's ongoing efforts to understand the...

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Most scientists now reject the idea that the first Americans came by land - Ars Technica

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Most scientists now reject the idea that the first Americans came by land - Ars Technica

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Most scientists now reject the idea that the first Americans came by land - Ars Technica

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Researchers embrace the kelp highway hypothesis in "a dramatic intellectual turnabout."

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Carbon dioxide in the air is skyrocketing to record levels, U.N. warns

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Carbon dioxide in the air is skyrocketing to record levels, U.N. warns

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Although many countries are making progress in slowing their emissions of carbon dioxide, a global warming pollutant, the amount of the gas in the air surged at a record pace in 2016, a new report found.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air increased at an extreme rate last year to reach the highest amount in at least 800,000 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. Globally averaged concentrations of carbon dioxide reached 403.3 parts per million in 2016, which was up from 400.00 ppm the year before. The culprit? Human activities, such as the clearing of rainforests and burning of fossil fuels, as well as a strong El Niño event.

During strong El Niño years, when ocean temperatures are milder than average in the tropical Pacific Ocean, altering weather conditions around the world, carbon dioxide tends to increase at a faster rate. The El Niño helped cause droughts in tropical regions and reduced the capacity of carbon "sinks," such as forests and the oceans, that soak up carbon dioxide.

Image: scripps institution of oceanography

According to the report, the rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the air during just the past 70 years is about 100 times higher than at the end of the last ice age.

"As far as direct and proxy observations can tell, such abrupt changes in the atmospheric levels of CO2 have never before been seen," the report found. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is now a staggering 145 percent of pre-1750 levels, the report found.

The observations were gathered at dozens of locations around the world, from the Arctic to a mountaintop in Hawaii and a station in Antarctica.

"Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, we will be heading for dangerous temperature increases by the end of this century, well above the target set by the Paris Climate Change Agreement," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, in a statement. "Future generations will inherit a much more inhospitable planet," he said.

"The laws of physics mean that we face a much hotter, more extreme climate in the future. There is currently no magic wand to remove this CO2 from the atmosphere," Taalas added.

Scientists have found that throughout history, carbon dioxide levels and the height of the Earth's oceans, existence of its ice sheets, and other key indicators of the planet's climate have marched in near lockstep. The last time Earth had a concentration of carbon dioxide comparable to today's, the report found, was 3 to 5 million years ago.

At that time, known to geologists as the mid-Pliocene Epoch, the planet's average temperature was 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than it is now, and sea levels were up to 20 meters, or 65 feet higher than they are currently. The entire Greenland Ice Sheet melted during that time, as did the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and parts of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

If similar changes were to occur today, coastal megacities around the world would become uninhabitable. Much of the state of Florida would be lost to the sea, and extreme heat waves would become the norm rather than the exception each summer.

"The numbers don't lie. We are still emitting far too much and this needs to be reversed. The last few years have seen enormous uptake of renewable energy, but we must now redouble our efforts to ensure these new low-carbon technologies are able to thrive. We have many of the solutions already to address this challenge. What we need now is global political will and a new sense of urgency," said Erik Solheim, head of the U.N. Environment Program, in a statement.

United Nations climate negotiators will meet beginning November 7 in Bonn to iron out some of the rules under the Paris Agreement, and may commit to further emissions reductions despite the June announcement by President Donald Trump that the U.S. would exit the treaty. The U.S. is still sending a delegation to the negotiation.

Every nation in the world with the exception of just two countries: Syria and the U.S. are intent on implementing the treaty.

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Carbon dioxide levels surged at record rate in 2016, haven't been this high in 3 million years

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Although many countries are making progress in slowing their emissions of carbon dioxide, a global warming pollutant, the amount of the gas in the air surged at a record pace in 2016, a new report found.

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Mapping Poverty to Save More Than a Billion Lives in the World's Most Remote Slums

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Mapping Poverty to Save More Than a Billion Lives in the World's Most Remote Slums

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Early on a recent morning, woodsmoke wafted above the murmur of village life in Gorama, Sierra Leone, as Rupert Allen sat sweating in the shade of a concrete veranda. A member of Missing Maps-a humanitarian project that maps parts of the world vulnerable to natural disasters, conflicts and disease-Allen tapped away on a small laptop next to a black goat and a small, tame monkey. Connected by a smartphone hotspot, Allen was in charge of mapping the nearby area.

This summer, the Missing Maps team spent months traveling to remote parts of Sierra Leone by motorcycle to chart them for the first time. Despite the ubiquity of Google Maps, there are many places on Earth where people and the terrain they live on haven't been mapped. Globally, over a billion people are unaccounted for-literally not attached to a physical address in cartography or databases, which means they often don't receive basic services. That number is growing; by 2020, there will be 1.5 billion people living in slums, the majority of whom are unmapped. Accounting for these people is important not just to better understand our world but also because there's a direct link between people being not accounted for on maps and the risk of catastrophe for them-and, as the Ebola outbreak demonstrated, for the rest of us.

Ivan Gayton, the founder of Missing Maps, says his crew ventured so far into the bush in Sierra Leone this summer that even local team members were sometimes astonished when they came across villages where their maps had showed blank spaces. "You're watching light dawn in their eyes, as they see no one has ever been here-no one has ever cared enough to come here," he says. "There's just people living in the forest hacking their own roads with machetes, essentially unknown to anyone."

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Gayton first became interested in cartography in 2010 when he was battling one of the worst cholera epidemics in history in post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Then a field logistician for Doctors Without Borders, Gayton and the other medics in Port-au-Prince asked all the patients who walked in where they lived. But because the team didn't have accurate maps of the city, they couldn't send help-to trace contacts or find other sick people-to the right places.

Knowing where patients are coming from, and therefore being able to track the progress of a disease spatially, may seem like common sense now, but modern epidemiology itself is comparatively new. It wasn't founded until 1854, when Dr. John Snow mapped an outbreak of cholera in London. The developed world has since taken spatial epidemiology-the study of the distribution of health outcomes-to an extreme. By comparing geographic data to medical records in Europe and the United States today, health workers can now predict life expectancy by mailing address. But in vast swaths of the world, it's still impossible to trace disease outbreaks even the way Snow did more than 150 years ago, because there are no accurate maps.

Back in Haiti, feeling desperate about the fast-moving epidemic, Gayton asked Google to help chart which slums had cholera patients-"like calling the Bat Cave," he jokes. Luckily, Google was already working with earthquake disaster relief, like the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team that had been mapping destroyed areas of Port-au-Prince. With the use of these new maps, Gayton was able to pin where groups of patients were coming from and identify potential contamination sources, such as infected wells. The effect was like magic, he says. "The conversion rate instantly turned around."

This success spurred Gayton to help organize a map-making collaboration between tech-industry volunteers like Google and OpenStreetMap and nongovernmental organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross. Missing Maps now regularly holds "mapathons," in which volunteers look at satellite photos to find towns and villages in regions at risk of disease or conflict. That data are then sent to locals in those areas, who often go out with printed copies of the satellite images and label street names and neighborhoods in their own language. (To be useful, the maps have to be locally relevant. Imagine a doctor trying to locate a patient in a slum without knowing how to spell or even pronounce the street names.)

Over the past few years, Missing Maps has made much progress, but in many places satellite photos are either obscured or inaccurate. That's why Gayton decided to privately fund an expedition to Sierra Leone this summer, collecting donations but mostly paying out of his own pocket. For weeks, a small team on motorcycles mapped remote parts of the country and trained locals to use their smartphones and bikes to record geographic information about their environs. All that spatial data will be connected to local place names and then shared online. Since Sierra Leone was part of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, says Gayton, "ultimately our proof of concept is that we make a map that will [be able to] stop Ebola. I like maps, but what I care about is access to health care. The outcome I'm looking for is tangible evidence that it helps saves lives."

A review recently published in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that the lack of spatial data was, in fact, a key factor in West Africa's Ebola outbreak. "Infectious diseases have a spatial structure," the author, Tom Koch, writes, so mapping these areas has become a low-tech race against time-and the next epidemic.

Gayton's already putting his initial data to use in collaboration with Dr. Ed Monk, a visiting resident at a small hospital in Segbwema, a town in eastern Sierra Leone that serves 30,000 people. "As soon as you walk on the wards, you can tell there's been a better time for the hospital," Monk says. When Segbwema had a bustling diamond mine, it was the home of a renowned Lassa fever virus center, but during the civil war on and off from 1991 through 2002, the railroad was gutted and the hospital where Monk now works was temporarily closed. Today, the old water tower outside the hospital has a shrapnel hole through it, and the wards are sprawling rows of cots with improvised mosquito netting. But what the hospital does have is surprisingly good patient records, thanks in part to Gayton's efforts.

This summer, Gayton mapped all the dwellings in the catchment area, finding 3,000 hamlets by going door to door and "asking them, 'What do you call this village?'" He produced a gazetteer, a map with both statistical and geographical information, for the hospital registrar. Now, when patients come in, their homes can be identified on a map.

Ka-Ping Yee, a former Google software engineer who visited Port-au-Prince in 2010, came to the hospital to help train the staff on how to use the gazetteer. Ping also built a program to collect medical data, making it possible to track where patients are coming from. "Let's say one village has so many malaria cases," says Solomon Musa Vandi, a community health nurse at the hospital. "We go there, we find out why. That's what we lacked in the time of Ebola in this country. If people had this sort of facility, that disease would not have spread."

Gayton's team in Sierra Leone has, of course, run into challenges, large and small. In June, a team on motorcycles was very deep in the diamond hills, after hand-poling a ferry across a river and navigating flooded roads where the bikes were up to their gas tanks in water. A team member came down with a fever. "In the back of my mind, I was thinking, If he gets worse, what do I do? There's no one to call," says Allen. They mapped the village, and the stricken man, shaking with malaria, had to be held upright on the back of a motorcycle for the return trip.

The team also had to struggle with the enormous physical challenges of a technologically sophisticated project in a country where neither electricity nor network signals are reliable. "We're building a playbook so anyone else in the world who wants to can replicate it," says Gayton, who's kept careful logs of the process. "This is how much it costs, this is how much we pay mappers, this the technology, the training manuals-you can just adapt it to the local context. I have one goal from this, and it's to get the rest of Africa mapped."

The communities Missing Maps are working in are often isolated and undereducated, far from government oversight or opportunities for education-places where, when something goes wrong, people have small chance to recover. "Local names are important," Allen says. "Geotags are critical. Terror spreads as fast as the epidemic itself in these communities."

He pauses. "The enemy is the unknown."

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One man's quest to put 1 billion people on a map for the first time

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Early on a recent morning, woodsmoke wafted above the murmur of village life in Gorama, Sierra Leone, as Rupert Allen sat sweating in the shade of a concrete veranda. A member of Missing Maps-a humanitarian project that maps parts of the world vulnerable to natural disasters, conflicts and disease-Allen tapped away on a small laptop next to a black goat and a small, tame monkey.

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Saudi Arabia wants to build a $500 billion mega-city spanning 3 countries - Oct. 24, 2017

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Saudi Arabia wants to build a $500 billion mega-city spanning 3 countries - Oct. 24, 2017

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Saudi Arabia plans to build a new $500 billion metropolis that spans three countries.

The development, called NEOM, was announced at a conference on Tuesday by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It's the latest in a series of mega projects designed to reshape the kingdom's economy.

It is nothing if not ambitious.

"We try to work only with the dreamers," the young crown prince told investors gathered in Riyadh. "This place is not for conventional people or companies."

Plans call for the city to be powered entirely by regenerative energy, while also making use of automated driving technology and passenger drones. Wireless hi-speed internet will be free.

"All services and processes in NEOM will be 100% fully automated, with the goal of becoming the most efficient destination in the world," the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund said in a statement.

Related: Saudi crown prince promises 'a more moderate Islam'

The city, which will be independent of the kingdom's "existing governmental framework," will be built across 26,500 square kilometers (10,231 square miles) near the Red Sea. According to the fund's statement, its land mass "will extend across the Egyptian and Jordanian borders."

"NEOM will be constructed from the ground-up, on greenfield sites, allowing it a unique opportunity to be distinguished from all other places that have been developed and constructed over hundreds of years," the fund said in a statement.

The project will be backed by $500 billion from the Saudi government and its investment fund, as well as local and international investors.

It has caught the attention of foreign investors including SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who joined the crown price on a panel dedicated to the project.

Related: Women driving could rev up Saudi economy

"NEOM is a fantastic opportunity," Son said on Tuesday. "In the beginning, I didn't understand. But when I visited the location, I said 'Wow.' "

Son said his Softbank Vision Fund, which counts Saudi Arabia as its biggest investor, would put money toward the new project.

The crown prince said there no set timeline for the development.

"This is a challenge," he said. "We know this takes time ... we are under pressure to deliver something new and to give innovative ideas."

Saudi Arabia has made a string of big announcements recently that are aimed at diversifying its economy away from oil.

The country said in September that it would pump almost $3 billion into its entertainment industry.

Related: Saudi Arabia is investing billions in fun

In August, it launched a tourism project that consists of 100 miles of sandy coastline and a lagoon with 50 islands. The project even caught the eye of billionaire Richard Branson.

A year and a half into the efforts, officials have made progress on some parts of the broader plan -- known as Vision 2030 -- but also flip-flopped on others.

The government has cut some subsidies, announced new taxes and lifted a controversial ban on women driving. It also tapped global bond markets three times in less than a year, borrowing billions to balance its books.

CNNMoney (Riyadh) First published October 24, 2017: 9:05 AM ET

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Saudi Arabia wants to build a $500 billion mega-city spanning 3 countries

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The development, called NEOM, was announced at a conference on Tuesday by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It's the latest in a series of mega projects designed to reshape the kingdom's economy. It is nothing if not ambitious. "We try to work only with the dreamers," the young crown prince told investors gathered in Riyadh.

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Catalonia crisis: Spain triggers direct rule process - CNN

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Catalonia crisis: Spain triggers direct rule process - CNN

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Puigdemont demanded Spain end its "repression" of Catalan independence leaders, in a letter sent shortly before a Madrid-imposed deadline for the region to drop its independence bid.

The Spanish government, led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, is expected to respond shortly.

Rajoy has warned that if the situation is not resolved, Spain could invoke Article 155 of its 1978 constitution. This allows Madrid to impose direct rule on autonomous regions in a crisis but it has never been invoked.

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catalonia leader threatens independence declaration - cnn

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Puigdemont demanded Spain end its "repression" of Catalan independence leaders, in a letter sent shortly before a Madrid-imposed deadline for the region to drop its independence bid. The Spanish government, led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, is expected to respond shortly.

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MAPPED: The US cities with the biggest economies http://flip.it/zDDKpd

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MAPPED: The US cities with the biggest economies http://flip.it/zDDKpd

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The U.S. economy is massive on a global scale, and much of the country's economic capabilities can be traced back to the innovation, knowledge, and productivity that tends to be clustered in urban areas.

The fact is that 80% of Americans live in cities - and the 10 largest metro areas alone combine for a whopping 34% of the country's total GDP.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

THE 10 LARGEST METRO AREAS BY GDP

Today's map comes to us from HowMuch.net, and it highlights recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis that estimates the GDP for each U.S. metro area in 2016:

Note: figures in chained 2009 dollars

Not surprisingly, New York City and its surrounding area is the breadwinner here with an annual economic output of $1.43 trillion - the largest for any city in the United States. Impressively, the GDP of the NYC metro area is even higher than those of most of the world's countries, including Australia, Mexico, and Spain.

It's also interesting that some metro areas punch above their weight in relation to their population figures. San Francisco is #7 on the list with a GDP of $406 billion, despite having the lowest population total of all of the top 10. Boston and D.C. can be classified similarly, each with a high economic output per capita.

TRENDING UP, TRENDING DOWN

While they can't quite compete with cities like New York and Chicago in terms of GDP or population, there are actually 300+ other metro areas in the country.

Here's a recent snapshot from the BEA of which cities are growing - and which are shrinking in terms of GDP:

Bureau of Economic Analysis via Visual Capitalist

The BEA noted that real gross domestic product (GDP) increased in 267 out of 382 metropolitan areas in 2016.

The biggest increase was a tie between Lake Charles, LA and Bend-Redmond, OR, each which had GDP climb by 8.1% from the last year. The city that saw the biggest drop was Odessa, TX, which fell -13.3%.

Read the original article on Visual Capitalist. Get rich, visual content on business and investing for free at the Visual Capitalist website, or follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn for the latest. Copyright 2017. Follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter.

More from Visual Capitalist:

SEE ALSO: This infographic lists all the cognitive biases humans experience

NOW WATCH: Why you won't find a garbage can near the 9/11 memorial

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MAPPED: The US cities with the biggest economies

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The U.S. economy is massive on a global scale, and much of the country's economic capabilities can be traced back to the innovation, knowledge, and productivity that tends to be clustered in urban areas. The fact is that 80% of Americans live in cities - and the 10 largest metro areas alone combine for a whopping 34% of the country's total GDP.

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Astonishing satellite images reveal islands stripped by Hurricane Irma - ABC News

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Astonishing satellite images reveal islands stripped by Hurricane Irma - ABC News

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A series of satellite images taken before and after Hurricane Irma carved a path through the Caribbean detail the extent of widespread damage left by the storm.

At least 37 people died in the Caribbean, and at least another seven in Florida, as a result of the hurricane which had wind speeds as strong as 160 miles per hour when it made landfall in Cuba.

Here's a look at the aftermath of Hurricane Irma at three locations in the Caribbean:

U.S. and British Virgin Islands

The widespread browning of the landscape across the U.S. Virgin Islands and British Virgin Islands is pictured in two images taken just over two weeks apart, before and after Irma. According to NASA, the browning is caused either by the green vegetation being ripped away or salt water being whipped up and killing leaves still on trees.

Barbuda

Homes just north of Barbuda Codrington Airport are pictured in various states of disrepair after the storm passed through the island in the eastern Caribbean. Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne compared the destruction on the island to "having a bomb literally thrown on a city."

Nanny Cay, Tortola, British Virgin Islands

Formerly lush vegetation near Nanny Cay on Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, was stripped and browned by the hurricane. Some boats docked at Nanny Cay Marina in the center of the image became unmoored.

Paraquita Bay, Tortola, British Virgin Islands

Paraquita Bay, on Tortola's southeastern coast, saw the destruction of several large structures on the left side of the image.

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Satellite images show destruction left by Hurricane Irma in Caribbean

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A series of satellite images taken before and after Hurricane Irma carved a path through the Caribbean detail the extent of widespread damage left by the storm. At least 37 people died in the Caribbean, and at least another seven in Florida, as a result of the hurricane which had wind speeds as...

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Hurricane Irma: Aerial photos show scale of devastation in Sint Maarten

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Hurricane Irma: Aerial photos show scale of devastation in Sint Maarten

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Aerial photos show enormous devastation caused by Hurricane Irma on Sint Maarten, the Dutch side of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. The photos, released by the Dutch Ministry of Defence, show smashed hotels, a damaged marina with boats tossed into piles, submerged streets and flooded homes.

Images of the country's Juliana Airport showed the landing strips appear intact, though the navy said the airport is "unreachable" for now. Andre van der Kamp, commander of the Dutch ship Zeeland, tweeted that the Zeeland and Pelikaan would be trying to moor on Sint Maarten to deliver emergency aid on Thursday (7 September), but they needed to complete a safety check of the port first.

Dutch Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk said he briefly had contact with Saint Martin's prime minister but communications are sporadic. Sint Maarten is an independent nation within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with a population of around 40,000 - about the same as the French side. "It is an enormous disaster, 95 percent of the island is destroyed. I am in shock," Daniel Gibbs, chairman of a local council on Saint Martin, told Radio Caribbean International.

French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said eight people were killed and the toll was likely to rise. "We did not have the time yet to explore all the shores," Collomb told Franceinfo radio, adding that 23 people were also injured.

Irma, a Category 5 storm packing winds of 185 miles per hour (295 km per hour), is the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean and one of the most powerful storms to hit the Atlantic basin in a century.

In all, at least 10 people were reported killed by Irma on four islands. The island of Barbuda is a scene of "total carnage" and the tiny two-island nation will seek international assistance, said Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda. Browne told the BBC about half of Barbuda's population of some 1,800 were homeless while nine out of 10 buildings had suffered some damage and many were destroyed.

The hurricane is on track to reach Florida, becoming the second major hurricane to hit the US mainland in as many weeks after Hurricane Harvey. There are another two major storms, named Jose and Katia currently swirling in the Atlantic.

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Hurricane Irma: Aerial photos show scale of devastation in Sint Maarten

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Aerial photos show enormous devastation caused by Hurricane Irma on Sint Maarten, the Dutch side of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. The photos, released by the Dutch Ministry of Defence, show smashed hotels, a damaged marina with boats tossed into piles, submerged streets and flooded homes.

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In latest test, North Korea detonates its most powerful nuclear device yet - The Washington Post

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In latest test, North Korea detonates its most powerful nuclear device yet - The Washington Post

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In latest test, North Korea detonates its most powerful nuclear device yet - The Washington Post

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The detonation detected Sunday was seven times as powerful as the Hiroshima blast and suggests that the device would be a "city buster" if it landed near an urban area, analysts said.

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Satellite images show before and after Harvey - CNN

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Satellite images show before and after Harvey - CNN

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Satellite images show before and after Harvey - CNN

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Satellite images show before and after photos of the flood devastation in Texas cities following Hurricane Harvey.

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Satellite images show Harvey's impact on Texas towns - CNN

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Satellite images show Harvey's impact on Texas towns - CNN

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Satellite images show Harvey's impact on Texas towns - CNN

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Satellite images show before-and-after photos of the flood devastation in Texas communities following Hurricane Harvey.

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The U.S. Is in Denial About the Civilians It’s Killing in Syria | Foreign Policy

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The U.S. Is in Denial About the Civilians It’s Killing in Syria | Foreign Policy

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The number of civilians killed by the U.S.-led coalition assault on the Islamic State's de facto capital in Syria is mounting, but the coalition's commanding general has cast doubt on the toll his forces are inflicting on innocents there. The monitoring group Airwars currently assesses that 1,700 or more civilians have likely been killed by U.S.-led air and artillery strikes in Raqqa governorate since March. A minimum of 860 civilians, including 150 children, are credibly reported to have been killed in Raqqa since the official start of operations to capture the city on June 6.

Despite these findings and corroborating evidence from U.N. bodies and nongovernmental organizations, Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend has described reports of large-scale civilian death as hyperbole. In one instance, the general prematurely called allegations not credible even before the coalition had completed its own investigation.

Citing an estimated 20,000 civilians who remain trapped in Raqqa, U.N. humanitarian advisor Jan Egeland asked last week for consideration of a humanitarian pause in the city, similar to the respites organized last year in eastern Aleppo, where regime forces were fighting rebels. Despite a number of major investigations into the civilian death toll in Raqqa by multiple human rights organizations in recent months, there is no sign either side is considering any sort of pause.

In a report released Aug. 24, the same day Egeland made his appeal, Amnesty International described the hell facing civilians, including thousands of children, at Raqqa. Survivors who fled the city said Islamic State fighters have been "laying landmines and booby traps along exit routes, setting up checkpoints around the city to restrict movement, and shooting at those trying to sneak out." But the report also described a "constant barrage of artillery strikes and airstrikes" by the coalition that further restricts movement and has injured and killed hundreds of people.

Witnesses told of how shells ripped through civilian homes and killed those seeking to escape. "Artillery shells are hitting everywhere, entire streets," one witness said. "It is indiscriminate shelling and kills a lot of civilians." (Russian air raids in support of pro-regime forces have also left many civilians dead south of the city.)

Throughout operations to capture Mosul and Raqqa, the coalition has argued that defeating the terrorist group quickly would ultimately save more lives. After Egeland's comments, the coalition quickly tamped down expectations that the tempo of fighting might slow in Raqqa or anywhere else.

"Any pause in operations will only give ISIS more time to build up their defences and thus put more civilians in harm's way," coalition spokesman Col. Joseph Scrocca said. "What is more, it will further reinforce ISIS's tactic of using civilians as human shields."

But Townsend, the coalition forces' commander, has gone further. He has suggested on several occasions that civilian death tolls are exaggerated - no matter how well investigated they may be.

In June, after a U.N. commission of inquiry warned that civilian casualties around Raqqa were already "staggering," Townsend took issue with their phrasing, calling it "hyperbolic."

"Show me some evidence of that," he told the BBC.

On Aug. 22, Townsend again played down civilian deaths, this time at a press conference with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis in Baghdad.

"It's probably logical to assume that there has been some increase in the civilian casualties, because our operations have increased in intensity there," said Townsend, when asked by a reporter about the uptick in deaths. "[But] I would ask someone to show me hard information that says that civilian casualties have increased in Raqqa to some significant degree."

Such hard information is freely available from multiple sources. Large numbers of civilian casualties from coalition actions have been reported in local outlets and by Syrian monitoring organizations since well before the official start of operations inside Raqqa itself. In the three months leading up to June, Airwars researchers estimated that more than 700 civilians were likely killed by coalition strikes as the Syrian Democratic Forces surrounded the city. Airwars currently assesses that more than 5,100 civilians have likely been killed in coalition actions in both Iraq and Syria since 2014.

These estimates are only compiled from reporting rated as "fair" by Airwars researchers. This classification requires there to be two or more reliable sources indicating civilian casualties and citing the coalition as having launched the strike, no conflicting attribution (for instance, the presence of Russian or regime strikes), and acknowledgement by the coalition that it did launch strikes in the vicinity on that day. Among accounts monitored by Airwars, more than 1,900 civilian deaths in Raqqa have been blamed on the coalition since June 6, but less than 40 percent was considered "fair."

Reports of the damage wrought by coalition strikes have been corroborated by investigators on the ground. Researchers from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have recently visited the cities, towns, and camps around Raqqa and interviewed survivors, who all tell similar stories of terrifying air and artillery strikes, as well as Islamic State actions. The U.N. commission of inquiry for Syria has also been able to speak with survivors and witnesses to a number of strikes in the area.

One reason for the disconnect between public allegations and the military's claims is the pace of official investigations. The coalition itself has so far finished examining just a fraction of civilian casualty allegations reported in Raqqa since the assault began. Since the latest coalition monthly casualty report was published this month, only three incidents in Raqqa dating to after June 6 had been assessed by the U.S.-led alliance. Another 13 allegations are pending review. Airwars has informed the coalition of 101 individual alleged incidents at Raqqa for June alone.

Airwars monitoring shows that the civilian death toll in Raqqa is closely linked to the intensity of the assault. Put simply: When fewer coalition bombs fall, fewer civilians are killed. In July, for example, estimated civilian deaths from coalition strikes fell in Raqqa by about 33 percent compared with June. Munitions fired at the city by the coalition also fell by almost exactly the same amount - 32 percent.

Children in particular are suffering in Raqqa. Though some civilians are able to bribe their way out of the city, local monitors like the Syrian Network for Human Rights say children are often marooned with their families. According to UNICEF, thousands remain trapped.

"With no access for humanitarian agencies, the city is completely cut off from lifesaving assistance," said Fran Equiza, the UNICEF representative in Syria. "Children and families have little or no safe water while food supplies are running out fast."

At least 150 children have credibly been reported killed in Raqqa since June, with more casualties reported every week by groups like Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. Many of them are named, with photographs posted on social media by surviving family members. Jana al-Hariri, a baby girl, was reportedly killed along with four family members in a raid on July 6; on Aug. 2, 1-year-old Saad al-Shabshol was killed, also along with family members; and on Aug. 17, four children from the Sayer family were reported killed in an alleged coalition strike. Photographs showed them together in happier times - the youngest no more than a baby.

Against this backdrop, Gen. Townsend has been dismissive of deaths he says are not as numerous as widely reported and in any case unavoidable. In one instance, the general's comments have preceded the conclusion of the coalition's own investigations into reported civilian casualty incidents, raising the possibility that their outcome might be influenced. After a coalition raid hit a school building reportedly sheltering displaced families near Raqqa on March 21, Townsend said he thought "that was a clean strike."

"My initial read is: not credible," he told reporters on March 28, using the official coalition term for a strike determined to not have killed civilians. Investigators with the U.N. commission of inquiry for Syria later determined that the strike may in fact have been one of the deadliest of the air campaign for civilians. The coalition ultimately concluded that no civilians were killed.

In the most serious criticism of the coalition commander to date, Townsend has been accused by Amnesty International of unlawful action after he recently boasted of the coalition's deadly firepower at Raqqa. In early July, the general told a reporter from the New York Times that "we shoot every boat we find" on the Euphrates River. "If you want to get out of Raqqa right now, you've got to build a poncho raft," he added.

According to local reports, civilians have frequently been killed as they try to escape the city by river or fetch water from it to drink. In early July, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently reported the deaths of more than two dozen people who were attempting to reach the Euphrates or wells nearby. In its report, Amnesty profiled a 15-year-old boy, Mohamed Nour, who attempted to flee the city with a friend in order to avoid being forcibly conscripted by the Islamic State. As they attempted to cross the Euphrates, a suspected coalition strike hit their boat, killing both children and others on board.

"Lt. General Townsend's statement appears not to take into account the difficulties civilians face in trying to escape the city, as by then it was well known that civilians wanting to flee the city had few options but to cross the river," Amnesty noted in its report. "Strikes on 'every boat' crossing the river on the assumption that every boat carries [Islamic State] fighters and weapons, without verifying whether that was indeed the case on each separate occasion, are indiscriminate, and as such unlawful."

Amnesty researcher Ben Walsby, who co-authored the group's Raqqa report, told Foreign Policy that virtually everyone they spoke with had fled across the Euphrates to escape Islamic State-held areas.

Gen. Townsend's latest comments have drawn criticism from local groups monitoring the civilian toll. The Syrian Network for Human Rights, which estimates that at least 800 civilians have been killed by coalition operations since June 5, said it would provide the names of those killed to Townsend if he liked. The people behind Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which has documented the Islamic State's brutalities in the city for years, tweeted that Townsend's comments "reminds me of Syrian regime lies same lies."

U.S. officials have gone to great lengths to tout their care in avoiding civilian casualties. Now, however, those efforts threaten to be undermined by the Raqqa campaign.

"There has been no military in the world's history that has paid more attention to limiting civilian casualties and the deaths of innocents on the battlefield than the coalition military," Mattis said while sitting next to Townsend during the Baghdad press conference.

"We're not the perfect guys," he told reporters. "We can make a mistake, and in this kind of warfare, tragedy will happen. But we are the good guys, and the innocent people on the battlefield know the difference."

Many of those lucky enough to escape Raqqa told Walsby and his colleagues at Amnesty very different stories.

"For all the technology, the military tactics belong in another century," Walsby told Airwars. "There is no place for firing battlefield weapons into populated cities in the 21st century, and this in the future will be looked back on as pretty barbaric."

Photo credit: BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images

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The U.S. Is in Denial About the Civilians It's Killing in Syria

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The number of civilians killed by the U.S.-led coalition assault on the Islamic State's de facto capital in Syria is mounting, but the coalition's commanding general has cast doubt on the toll his forces are inflicting on innocents there.

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The countries most likely to survive climate change in one infographic

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The countries most likely to survive climate change in one infographic

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Climate change is real, and it's coming.

The leaders of 150 nations, along with thousands of representatives of nearly 200 countries, meet today in Paris for the 20th time to try and come up with a master plan to stave off the global catastrophe ahead.

Scientists have known for decades that the problem on our generation's hands is serious, but recent reports find that even those dire warnings likely underestimated the scope of the issue.

Of course, all of us will be affected in different ways. How will your country fare?

The folks at Eco Experts put together a great infographic in June based on data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation (ND-Gain) Index, an annual ranking of which countries are best poised to adapt to a warming world.

While the maps provide a great zoomed-out perspective of what will happen globally as the earth warms, there are a few caveats to keep in mind when checking it out:

The map is based on rankings, not comprehensive evaluations of each country. In other words, the best-ranked countries are only as great as they seem compared against the countries that aren't performing so well.

The map looks only at the country-level. All of the state-specific, region-specific, or city-specific data is somewhat lost in this zoomed-out perspective. While the US gets a green light on this map, for example, specific parts of the country are far less equipped to handle climate change, including Miami and New York City.

Developed countries as a whole have far more infrastructure to adapt to a warming planet. The government can force people in coastal cities such as Miami Beach to move inland; we can also build new airports and transit hubs closer to the center of the country. The map reflects countries' abilities to do just that.

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Erin Brodwin and Matt Johnston, Business Insider

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The countries most likely to survive climate change in one infographic

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Climate change is real, and it's coming. The leaders of 150 nations, along with thousands of representatives of nearly 200 countries, meet today in Paris for the 20th time to try and come up with a master plan to stave off the global catastrophe ahead.

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FAA warns to keep drones out of the sky as Tropical Storm Harvey rescues mount - Chron.com

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FAA warns to keep drones out of the sky as Tropical Storm Harvey rescues mount - Chron.com

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FAA warns to keep drones out of the sky as Tropical Storm Harvey rescues mount - Chron.com

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Houstonians with drones mounted with cameras might want to use their machines to get footage of flood waters but the Federal Aviation Administration has bad news.

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Harvey could be 1st hurricane to hit Texas since 2008 - CNN

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Harvey could be 1st hurricane to hit Texas since 2008 - CNN

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national oceanic and atmospheric administration

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'Life-threatening' rainfall expected in Texas, hurricane center says | CNN

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Highways in Texas filled with cars Thursday into the night as coastal residents made their way north and out of the path of a hurricane that forecasters say will bring "life-threatening" amounts of rain.

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Jimmy Kimmel Asks Folks Where North Korea Is. They Have No Clue. - HuffPost

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Jimmy Kimmel Asks Folks Where North Korea Is. They Have No Clue. - HuffPost

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Jimmy Kimmel Asks Folks Where North Korea Is. They Have No Clue. - HuffPost

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After President Donald Trump answered North Korea's reported escalation of its nuclear capability with a threat to unleash "fire and fury" on the isolated nation, Jimmy Kimmel thought it was worth finding out if folks even know where the country is. ...

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Where are the most diverse parts of the US? - Business Insider

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Where are the most diverse parts of the US? - Business Insider

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Tomasz Stepinski

The United States is sometimes billed as a melting pot of racial and ethnic diversity.

But a new map created by astrophysicist Tomasz Stepinski shows how much racial segregation persists in many American towns, cities, and suburbs.

Using census data and NASA satellite maps, Stepinski created a detailed map that shows racial composition levels in nearly every neighborhood in the US.

Six categories of race - non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, and other - are represented by six different colors on the map (as indicated on the key to the right).

Tomasz Stepinski

If an area has a high density of a particular race and low overall diversity, it is shaded a dark tone of that color (from the left column in the key to the right).

If an area has a high density of a certain race but medium overall diversity, it's shaded in a less dark color (from the right column in the key). For example, neighborhoods with a high density of white residents and low overall diversity are shaded orange. Places with a high density of Hispanic residents are dark purple. The lighter the shade, the less densely populated that group is.

Areas with high racial diversity levels overall are shaded gray.

The interactive map chronicles data from 1990 to 2010, so users can zoom in and see how areas have changed over time. Stepinski presented his work in April at the annual Population Association of America conference in Chicago.

Here is the state of diversity in seven US cities as of 2010, according to Stepinski's map.

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Fascinating maps show where the most and least diverse parts of the US are

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The United States is sometimes billed as a melting pot of racial and ethnic diversity. But a new map created by astrophysicist Tomasz Stepinski shows how much racial segregation persists in many American towns, cities, and suburbs. Using census data and NASA satellite maps, Stepinski created a detailed map that shows racial composition levels in nearly every neighborhood in the US.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why The Term “GMO” Is Misleading

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why The Term “GMO” Is Misleading

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why The Term "GMO" Is Misleading

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Food & Wine goes way beyond mere eating and drinking. We're on a mission to find the most exciting places, new experiences, emerging trends and sensations.

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Why Oklahoma is getting so many more earthquakes - Business Insider

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Why Oklahoma is getting so many more earthquakes - Business Insider

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USGS

In less than 28 hours, Oklahoma has been pummeled by earthquakes.

The wave started on Tuesday night, when five quakes struck the central part of the state, and extended into the early hours of Thursday as two more hit, according to the United States Geological Survey.

All of the earthquakes were between magnitude two and five and no significant damage was reported. However, the shaking is part of a troubling recent phenomenon. The disposal of wastewater from hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking), appears to have spiked the likelihood of earthquakes in Oklahoma, potentially raising the state to the same earthquake threat level as California, according to a recent USGS forecast.

Until recently, earthquakes in Oklahoma were few and far between. In 2010, the state experienced just 41 tremors. By comparison, each year the southern California area alone has about 10,000 earthquakes.

But "seismic activity has surged in [Oklahoma] in recent years," reporter Joe Wertz of StateImpact Oklahoma told NPR on Thursday. In the last few years, Oklahoma has weathered hundreds of significant quakes each year, along with parts of several other Midwestern states.

"Scientists link the quake boom to the widespread oil industry practice of pumping waste fluid into underground disposal wells," Wertz told NPR.

The rise in earthquakes, in other words, can be attributed to the injection of large quantities of wastewater into wells deep below the Earth's surface. According to USGS, the majority of the underground wastewater comes from oil and gas operations - it is created when clean water mixes with dirt, metals, and other toxins below the Earth's surface during extraction operations.

The contaminated water becomes too dangerous to dump anywhere, since it could seep into regular groundwater, so companies shoot the wastewater deep into the earth, between layers of hard rock. That buried water can fracture and move previously stable rock, causing earthquakes under certain circumstances.

Much ( but not all) of that wastewater injection is associated with the fracking boom, which has led the practice to become more common in recent years, especially in Oklahoma. Although the state isn't the only one experiencing a spike in wastewater injections, Oklahoma is full of eons-old fault lines that went quiet long ago. Wastewater operations seem to be shaking some of those faults loose, making the land especially vulnerable to earthquakes.

The 2017 USGS predictions for Oklahoma are actually less intense than they were in 2016, because earthquakes were somewhat less frequent there than expected last year. USGS scientists suggest that might be due to stricter regulations that have been put in place to control wastewater injection.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt previously served as Oklahoma's attorney general, and has come under fire from some in the state for failing to take action against wastewater injection and fracking.

Rafi Letzter contributed to an earlier version of this post.

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7 earthquakes struck Oklahoma in 28 hours for a disturbing reason

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In less than 28 hours, Oklahoma has been pummeled by earthquakes. The wave started on Tuesday night, when five quakes struck the central part of the state, and extended into the early hours of Thursday as two more hit, according to the United States Geological Survey.

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Meat industry runoff has created a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico / Boing Boing

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Meat industry runoff has created a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico / Boing Boing

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Over 8,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico has been turned into a dead zone, thanks to manure and chemical runoff from massive meat processing factories spilling into the Mississippi River delta.

The report by nonprofit Mighty Earth links the record-breaking dead zone to clearance of prairie grassland to make room for factory farms. Once they overlaid locations of processing facilities on maps of grassland losses, they pinpointed the key culprit:

America's largest meat company, Tyson Foods, stood out for its expansive footprint in all the regions suffering the worst pollution impacts from industrial meat and feed production. Tyson produces one out of every five pounds of meat produced in the United States, and owns brands like Jimmy Dean, Hillshire Farm, Ball Park, and Sara Lee, in addition to selling to fast food retailers like McDonalds. The company is consistently ranked among the top polluters in America, although Tyson's new CEO has declared that a focus on sustainability will be at the center of the company's future plans. The report found:
* Tyson is the only meat company with major processing facilities in each of the states listed by the USGS as contributing the highest levels of pollution to the Gulf;

* Tyson and Smithfield have the heaviest concentration of meat facilities in those regions of the country with the highest levels of nitrate contamination;

Read the full report.

* New Investigation Identifies Companies Responsible for Massive Dead Zone in Gulf of Mexico (mighty via The Guardian)

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Meat industry runoff has created a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico

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Over 8,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico has been turned into a dead zone, thanks to manure and chemical runoff from massive meat processing factories spilling into the Mississippi River delta.

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Yemen food crisis is man-made; economic strangulation used as war tactic: UN – The Indian Express

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Yemen food crisis is man-made; economic strangulation used as war tactic: UN – The Indian Express

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The UN development chief in Yemen says the crisis that has left millions hungry and on the brink of famine. It is "a man-made disaster" driven not only by decades of poverty and lack of investment but also by economic strangulation used as a tactic of war.

Auke Lootsma told UN reporters yesterday by video conference from the capital of Sanaa that "there is no end in sight" to the civil war, which began in September 2014.

He said about 70 per cent of the country's 27 million people need humanitarian aid and nearly 7 million are close to famine. He said the UN has recorded almost 400,000 cases of cholera and nearly 1,900 related deaths the past four months. There also has been a meningitis outbreak in the last two weeks.

For all the latest World News, download Indian Express App

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Yemen food crisis is man-made; economic strangulation used as war tactic: UN

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The UN development chief in Yemen says the crisis that has left millions hungry and on the brink of famine. It is "a man-made disaster" driven not only by decades of poverty and lack of investment but also by economic strangulation used as a tactic of war.

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Earth Overshoot Day: Mankind has already consumed more natural resources than the planet can renew throughout 2017

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Earth Overshoot Day: Mankind has already consumed more natural resources than the planet can renew throughout 2017

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Humans have already used up their allowance for water, soil, clean air and other resources on Earth for the whole of 2017.

Earth Overshoot Day is on 2 August this year, according to environmental groups WWF and the Global Footprint Network.

The date, earlier this year than in 2016, means humanity will survive on "credit" until 31 December.

"By August 2 2017, we will have used more from Nature than our planet can renew in the whole year," the groups said in a statement.

"This means that in seven months, we emitted more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb in a year, we caught more fish, felled more trees, harvested more, and consumed more water than the Earth was able to produce in the same period."

According to campaigners, the equivalent of 1.7 planets would be needed to produce enough natural resources to match our consumption rates and a growing population.

Uh oh, it's #EarthOvershootDay 🌏 This means we've used more resources than our planet can renew in the whole year! pic.twitter.com/e5TQinbe3c
- WWF_Australia (@WWF_Australia) August 1, 2017

The Earth Overshoot Day measure has been calculated since 1986 and the day has never fallen so early as in 2017. It looks at the balance between global footprint - what humans take from the earth - and biocapacity, which allows us to produce resources and absorb our waste.

In the 1980s, the overshoot day fell in November, shifting back to October by 1993 and to September just after the millennium.

By 2016 it had reached 8 August.

The grim mark may have reversed throughout the calendar, but campaigners said the move had slowed down.

Scientists also calculate the overshoot day for individual countries, providing a measure of where the day would fall if the whole world consumed the same as one country.

In the UK, the day is even earlier, on 4 May.

Campaigners and charities advised individuals to help reverse the trend by eating less meat, burning less fuel and cutting back on food waste.

The Global Footprint Network reported that food makes up 26 per cent of our global footprint, and if we cut food waste in half, ate less protein-intensive foods and consumed more fruit and vegetables, it could be reduced to 16 per cent.

Our carbon footprint has the largest impact at 60 per cent.

You can calculate your own overshoot day here.

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Today is Earth Overshoot Day: From today we have used more natural resources than the planet can produce

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Humans have already used up their allowance for water, soil, clean air and other resources on Earth for the whole of 2017. Earth Overshoot Day is on 2 August this year, according to environmental groups WWF and the Global Footprint Network. The date, earlier this year than in 2016, means humanity will survive on "credit" until 31 December.

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Meat industry blamed for largest-ever 'dead zone' in Gulf of Mexico | Environment | The Guardian

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Meat industry blamed for largest-ever 'dead zone' in Gulf of Mexico | Environment | The Guardian

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The global meat industry, already implicated in driving global warming and deforestation, has now been blamed for fueling what is expected to be the worst "dead zone" on record in the Gulf of Mexico.

Toxins from manure and fertiliser pouring into waterways are exacerbating huge, harmful algal blooms that create oxygen-deprived stretches of the gulf, the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay, according to a new report by Mighty, an environmental group chaired by former congressman Henry Waxman.

It is expected that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will this week announce the largest ever recorded dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It is expected to be larger than the nearly 8,200 square-mile area that was forecast for July - an expanse of water roughly the size of New Jersey.

Nutrients flowing into streams, rivers and the ocean from agriculture and wastewater stimulate an overgrowth of algae, which then decomposes. This results in hypoxia, or lack of oxygen, in the water, causing marine life either to flee or to die.

Some creatures, such as shrimp, suffer stunted growth. Algal blooms themselves can cause problems, as in Florida last summer when several beaches were closed after they became coated in foul-smelling green slime.

America's vast appetite for meat is driving much of this harmful pollution, according to Mighty, which blamed a small number of businesses for practices that are "contaminating our water and destroying our landscape" in the heart of the country.

"This problem is worsening and worsening and regulation isn't reducing the scope of this pollution," said Lucia von Reusner, campaign director at Mighty. "These companies' practices need to be far more sustainable. And a reduction in meat consumption is absolutely necessary to reduce the environmental burden."

The Mighty report analyzed supply chains of agribusiness and pollution trends and found that a "highly industrialized and centralized factory farm system" was resulting in vast tracts of native grassland in the midwest being converted into soy and corn to feed livestock. Stripped soils can wash away in the rain, bringing fertilisers into waterways.

Arkansas-based Tyson Foods is identified by the report as a "dominant" influence in the pollution, due to its market strength in chicken, beef and pork. Tyson, which supplies the likes of McDonald's and Walmart, slaughters 35m chickens and 125,000 head of cattle every week, requiring five million acres of corn a year for feed, according to the report.

This consumption resulted in Tyson generating 55m tons of manure last year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with 104m tons of pollutants dumped into waterways over the past decade. The Mighty research found that the highest levels of nitrate contamination correlate with clusters of facilities operated by Tyson and Smithfield, another meat supplier.

This pollution has also been linked to drinking water contamination. Last week, a report by Environmental Working Group found that in 2015 water systems serving seven million Americans in 48 states contained high levels of nitrates. Consuming nitrates has been linked to an increased risk of contracting certain cancers.

Large parts of America are being plowed up for corn and soy to raise meat. There is very little regulation

Lucia von Reusner, Mighty

"Large parts of America are being plowed up for corn and soy to raise meat," said von Reusner. "There is very little regulation so we can't wait for that.

"The corporate agriculture sector has shown it is responsive to consumer concerns about meat production so we hope that the largest meat companies will meet expectations on this."

The report urges Tyson and other firms to use their clout in the supply chain to ensure that grain producers such as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland employ practices that reduce pollution flowing into waterways. These practices include not leaving soil uncovered by crops and being more efficient with fertilizers so plants are not doused in too many chemicals.

The US is an enormous consumer of meat, with the average American chewing through 211lbs in 2015. A study released earlier this year found that US beef consumption fell by nearly one fifth from 2005 to 2014, possibly due to concerns over health or the environment. A new increase is now expected.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, beef and pork production is forecast to grow significantly over the next decade, driven by lower feed costs and healthy demand. By 2025, the average American is expected to eat 219lbs of meat a year. Just 3% of Americans follow a vegetarian or vegan diet.

This voracious appetite for meat has driven the loss of native forests and grasslands in the US and abroad, releasing heat-trapping gases through deforestation and agricultural practices. Agriculture produced 9% of US greenhouse gas emissions in 2015, according to the EPA.

A spokesman for Cargill said the company was an "industry leader" for sustainable practices, pointing to its efforts with environment groups to address air, water and soil quality in Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

"Protein consumption is growing globally and we are working to meet increased consumer demand with sustainably and responsibly produced foods and supply chains," said the spokesman. "We are dedicated to protecting animal welfare, reducing environmental impact, increasing transparency and keeping workers and consumers safe.

"We also continue to improve livestock feed efficiency. Over the last 15 years we have seen an overall trend in reducing the volume of feed for each pound of beef produced."

A Tyson spokeswoman said "we don't agree with the group's characterization of our company but share its interest in protecting the environment."

"It's true the livestock and poultry industry is a major buyer of grain for feed, however, the report fails to note that a large percentage of corn raised in the US is used for biofuel and that a significant portion is used for human consumption," she added.

"Tyson Foods is focused on continuous improvement. We are constantly looking to improve and lead the industry, so that we can deliver sustainable food to people every day at a scale that matters to the world."

Archer Daniels Midland were also contacted for comment prior to publication.

This article was amended on 1 August 2017 to clarify a previous version of the standfirst that incorrectly identified the source of the toxins.

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Meat industry blamed for largest-ever 'dead zone' in Gulf of Mexico

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A new report shows toxins from suppliers to companies like Tyson Foods are pouring into waterways, causing marine life to leave or die

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Half of All Plastic Was Made in the Past 13 Years - The Atlantic

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Half of All Plastic Was Made in the Past 13 Years - The Atlantic

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Packaging is now the largest plastic market, and it's still tied to fossil fuels. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported on how the United States' natural gas boom was translating into cheaper plastic pellets. The Dow Chemical Company wants to send its plastic pellet to places like Brazil, where it's betting that a rising middle class will want the convenience of single-use plastic baby-food containers. Developing countries in South America and Asia account for much of the recent growth in plastics consumption.

These economic forces also govern how plastic gets recycled-or doesn't. It's often cheaper just to make virgin plastics, especially if you need plastic of a certain hardness or durability. Plus, there are so many different types of plastics that need to be sorted. "Plastic recycling just suffers from poor economics," says Geyer.

It wasn't always obvious that petroleum-based plastics would dominate. In the early 20th century, scientists experimented with plastics made from plant-derived carbon-based molecules. Henry Ford unveiled the " soybean car " in 1941. The car had a hard plastic shell, made of soybean fiber. The field of chemurgy-dedicated to turning agricultural materials into industrial products-rose and quickly fell, thanks to the ascendance of petroleum. It's come full circle in a way. Now there are bioplastics, made out of biological materials like corn starch.

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A Remote Paradise Island Is Now a Plastic Junkyard
I asked Geyer if he thought we would eventually move beyond petroleum-based plastics, given a long-term move away from fossil fuels. "Unfortunately, my answer will be no," he said. He gave two reasons. First, plastic production uses only a tiny fraction of the fossil fuel that we currently use for energy, so there will be plenty to go around for a long time. And second, he's not convinced that bioplastics have less of an environmental impact. They aren't necessarily more biodegradable, and they divert crops away from food. Since large-scale agriculture also relies on fossil fuels for fertilizer, there's no way to go completely fossil fuel-free yet.

So our plastic age goes on. We will keep adding plastiglomerate to the geological record of the Anthropocene.

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Half of All Plastic That Has Ever Existed Was Made in the Past 13 Years

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Packaging is now the largest plastic market, and it's still tied to fossil fuels. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported on how the United States' natural gas boom was translating into cheaper plastic pellets.

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18 maps that explain America - Business Insider

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18 maps that explain America - Business Insider

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A series of maps illustrating various aspects of American life.

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Good News, Despite What You’ve Heard - NYTimes.com

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Good News, Despite What You’ve Heard - NYTimes.com

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GANTA, Liberia - Cheer up: Despite the gloom, the world truly is becoming a better place. Indeed, 2017 is likely to be the best year in the history of humanity.

To explain why, let me start with a story. I'm on my annual win-a-trip journey with a university student, who this year is Aneri Pattani, a newly minted graduate of Northeastern University. One of the people we met is John Brimah, who caught leprosy as a boy.

At the age of 12, Brimah was banished by his village and forced to live in an isolated grass hut. His father would bring food and water once a day to a spot halfway between the village and the hut, and then pound a stick on the ground to let him know that it was there.

For a year and a half, he lived in complete isolation even as his leprosy worsened. Then a missionary from Ohio, Anthony Stevens, happened to pass by. "He heard me crying and investigated," Brimah recalled. Stevens took him to a leprosy center where he received treatment, and Brimah has never seen his family since.

Brimah was cured, received a missionary education and became a nurse. Now he is in charge of the leprosy hospital here in Ganta, on the Liberia-Guinea border. He presides over men and women missing fingers, toes and sometimes feet, gnarled reminders of why leprosy has terrified people since biblical times.

Yet we are defeating leprosy. Worldwide, cases have dropped 97 percent since 1985, and it is now easily treatable. A global plan set 2020 as a target for no more children to become deformed by leprosy.

The progress against leprosy reflects the larger gains against poverty and disease - which I believe may be the most important trend in the world today. Certainly it's the best news nobody knows about.

Perhaps the optimism doesn't feel right. You're alarmed by President Trump (or Nancy Pelosi), terrorism and the risk of rising seas, if we're not first incinerated by North Korean nukes. Those are good reasons for concern, but remember that for most of history humans agonized over something more elemental: Will my children survive?

Just since 1990, more than 100 million children's lives have been saved through vaccinations and improved nutrition and medical care. They're no longer dying of malaria, diarrhea or unpleasant causes like having one's intestines blocked by wriggling worms. (This is a good news column, but I didn't say it wouldn't be a bit gross.)

"There are deworming campaigns now, so it's much rarer that we go into surgery for obstruction and see a big mass of worms," explained Agatha Neufville, the nursing director at the Ganta United Methodist Hospital.

Nine out of 10 Americans say in polls that global poverty has been staying the same or worsening. So let's correct the record.

There has been a stunning decline in extreme poverty, defined as less than about $2 per person per day, adjusted for inflation. For most of history, probably more than 90 percent of the world population lived in extreme poverty, plunging to fewer than 10 percent today.

Every day, another 250,000 people graduate from extreme poverty, according to World Bank figures. About 300,000 get electricity for the first time. Some 285,000 get their first access to clean drinking water. When I was a boy, a majority of adults had always been illiterate, but now more than 85 percent can read.

Family planning leads parents to have fewer babies and invest more in each. The number of global war deaths is far below what it was in the 1950s through the 1990s, let alone the murderous 1930s and '40s.

Aneri and I are reporting from a country whose name, Liberia, evokes Ebola, civil war and warlords like General Butt Naked. That's partly because we journalists have a bias toward bad news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.

Together in Liberia, Aneri and I saw children missing school or suffering from excruciating ailments, but the larger narrative is the opposite - less death and more literacy.

Journalists and aid organizations need to highlight conflicts, disease and suffering, but we also need to acknowledge the backdrop of progress. Otherwise, people perceive global poverty as hopeless and simply tune out.

The truth is that the world today is not depressing but inspiring. We met a man named Fanha Konah who had lost all his fingers and toes to leprosy, yet somehow has managed to become a master wood carver: He grips a piece of wood between his knees, holds the chisel between the stubs that are left of his hands, and art ensues.

Konah reflects the tenacity and resilience of so many survivors in the world's poorest countries, and the consequences will be enormous as they enjoy better health and education.

Aneri and I also met an 18-year-old who had never been to school but had somehow built an astonishing three-foot electrical fan mostly out of cardboard scraps. It had a little motor, powered by a battery, and it worked. When kids like him are educated, imagine what they can accomplish - for themselves and for their countries!

So let's pause from our pessimism for a nanosecond of celebration about a world that is actually getting better. The most important historical force in the world today is not President Trump, and it's not terrorists. Rather, it's the stunning gains on our watch against extreme poverty, illiteracy and disease; it's all those 12-year-olds out there who never catch leprosy and instead go to school.

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Opinion | Good News, Despite What You've Heard

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GANTA, Liberia - Cheer up: Despite the gloom, the world truly is becoming a better place. Indeed, 2017 is likely to be the best year in the history of humanity. To explain why, let me start with a story.

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This Map Shows How Badly Climate Change Will Impact Each County In The US

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This Map Shows How Badly Climate Change Will Impact Each County In The US

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US counties face steep economic damages tied to future global warming, with the poorest counties to be hit hardest, according to a county-by-county analysis published on Thursday.

The warmer it gets, the worse that farms, businesses, and people will be hammered.

"As temperatures goes up, the economy gets damaged," study author Amir Jina of the University of Chicago told BuzzFeed News, adding that "for each additional degree, there's increasing damages done."

The world has already warmed more than 1 degree Celsius in the industrial era, and scientists say manmade climate change is largely to blame. How much warmer it gets in this century depends on how quickly humans can bring down their greenhouse gas emissions. Most countries have set a shared goal of limiting future global warming below 2 degrees Celsius to prevent the worst climate impacts, under 2015 Paris climate accord. The Trump administration announced his intention to withdraw from that accord in May.

The new findings, published in the journal Science, offer the most detailed breakdown available of the local economic impacts of climate change in the US.

The negative economic impacts won't be felt equally by everyone. Poorer counties, which are largely clustered in the southern half of the US, are expected to experience the brunt of the damages. Unless country's meet their Paris goals, the poorest third of US counties could potentially see damages between 2% to 20% of their income in the second half of this century, according to the study.

One surprise, Jina said, "is the fact that the southern counties, which are already on average poorer, are going to suffer large damages." Northern counties, in contrast, see only some damages and potentially even benefit from global warming.

Jina and his 11 colleagues analyzed how a changing climate would impact six area of the US economy-agriculture, crime, coastal properties, electricity demand, human mortality and labor supply-on a county-by-county level. The researchers focused on economic areas where the most complete data was available.

"This is truly an amazing study," said Don Fullerton, a finance professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It's the most detailed, comprehensive analysis anywhere ever of climate change damages in the United States."

In the study, the scientists used real-world data to measure how weather and climate currently affect key areas of the economy. Using this same relationship, and holding population and economy constant at 2012 levels, they turned their attention to the future. They calculated different future warming scenarios using global climate models and projecting possible economic impacts.

When it comes to what sector is driving future damages, "the major impact is on mortality from heat," said Fullerton, where higher temperatures can lead to more heat exhaustion and strokes. This largely explains the glaring gap between economic damages predicted for northern US counties versus southern US counties.

In many southern states, for example, summer daytime temperatures can frequently reach or exceed 95 or 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Those are already life-threatening temperatures for some people. With continued climate change, summer days there will get hotter and more deadly. In contrast, summer temperatures in the North are lower and won't reach the same high temperatures as quickly.

Hsiang, Kopp, Jina, Rising, et al. (Science)

Estimated total direct damage to US economy due to temperature rise.

While Fullerton doesn't dispute the finding that soaring temperatures will threaten human health triggering negative economic impacts, he suggested the study may be overstated. That's in part because it does not account for how communities can-and likely will-adapt to future climate changes. More families and businesses may invest in air conditioning, for example, to handle the heat.

For countries in southern states such as Florida, Georgia and Texas, it's not just the impacts of rising temperatures on human health that threaten to take a high economic toll. It's also how sea level rise and increasing storm intensity threatens the economies of coastal communities. Jina described these places as facing a "perfect storm" of climate risks.

Meanwhile, in the Midwest, where Jina now lives, the big threat to the economy is how climate change impacts local agriculture.

"If you want to avoid the worst effects, we should aim to keep warming as low as possible," Jina said.

Zahra Hirji is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco

Contact Zahra Hirji at zahra.hirji@buzzfeed.com.

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These Scientists Mapped How Badly Climate Change Will Impact Each County In the US

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US counties face steep economic damages tied to future global warming, with the poorest counties to be hit hardest, according to a county-by-county analysis published on Thursday. The warmer it gets, the worse that farms, businesses, and people will be hammered.

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What the World Will Look Like 4°C Warmer | Big Think - bigthink.com

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What the World Will Look Like 4°C Warmer | Big Think - bigthink.com

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Micronesia is gone - sunk beneath the waves. Pakistan and South India have been abandoned. And Europe is slowly turning into a desert. This is the world, 4°C warmer than it is now.

But there is also good news: Western Antarctica is no longer icy and uninhabitable. Smart cities thrive in newly green and pleasant lands. And Northern Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia produce bountiful harvests to feed the hundreds of millions of climate refugees who now call those regions home.

This map, which shows some of the effects a 4°C rise in average temperature could have on the planet, is eight years old, but it seems to get more contemporary as it ages (and the planet warms). Antarctica is white with snow and ice, on the ground and, traditionally, on most maps. This map has turned the continent's western end incongruously green. And recent reports confirm that Antarctica is indeed turning green.

Few serious scientists doubt that climate change is happening, or that it is man-made. But the fact remains that many still have a hard time grasping global warming, partly as a convenient way of ignoring the destructive impact it is predicted to have.

Those on the fact-based side of this argument should realise that continuously bombarding the opposition with doom and gloom is likely to reinforce their resistance to accepting the new paradigm.

This map offers an alternative: lots of misery and disaster, but also plenty of hope and solutions. Not solutions that will lead us back to the climate of a few decades ago - costly and pointless - but solutions that work for the world as it will be, when it will be much warmer than it is now.

First, the bad news. Brown indicates 'Uninhabitable due to floods, drought or extreme weather'. Say goodbye to the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., to Mexico and Central America, to the middle third of South America. In Africa, Mozambique and Madagascar are gone; Asia loses much of the Indian subcontinent, including all of Pakistan; Indochina is abandoned, as is most of Indonesia. As the map mentions, "The last inhabitants of (the South-west U.S. are) migrating north. The Colorado river is a mere trickle"; "Deglaciation means (Peru) is dry and uninhabitable"; and "Bangladesh is largely abandoned, as is South India. (In) Pakistan, isolated communities remain in pockets".

Orange is not much better: 'Uninhabitable desert'. That's most of the U.S. and the rest of South America, almost the entirety of Africa and the southern halves of Europe and Asia. "Deserts have encroached on (Southern Europe), rivers have dried up and the Alps are now snow-free. Goats and other hardy animals are kept at the fringes", the map predicts.

Red is for lands lost to the rising tide (assuming +4°C adds two metres to ocean levels). This may not seem a lot, but this is where populations are concentrated. In the U.S. for instance, counties directly on the shoreline constitute less than 10% of the total land area (not including Alaska), but account for 40% of the total population.

But there is a flipside. Light-green stands for food-growing zones, and compact high-rise cities. That's Western Antarctica, "unrecognisable now. Densely populated with high-rise cities". New Zealand, sparsely populated in our time, will also be transformed into a high-density population centre. There will be a lot more room for this in the northern hemisphere: Siberia and Canada, where "reliable precipitation and warmer temperatures provide ideal growing conditions for most of the world's subsistence crops." And the UK, Scandinavia, Greenland and northern Russia, which will be dotted with compact high-rise cities to "provide shelter for much of the world's population".

A warmer climate could even lead to reforestation in certain areas of the world, including the Sahel and Western Australia. The regions abandoned to desertification are empty, but not useless: they will be used for solar farming (green dots) and geothermal energy (red dots). Giant wind farms off the coasts of South America, Alaska and in the North Sea will generate the remainder of the planet's energy needs.

This map was first published by New Scientist, and republished by Parag Khanna for his book Connectography. Khanna speculates: "The entire population of the Arctic region today is less than 4 million. Could it be 400 million within the coming 20 years?"

Now is the time to buy property in Greenland - before it too turns green...
Strange Maps #842 Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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What the world will look like 4°C warmer

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Micronesia is gone - sunk beneath the waves. Pakistan and South India have been abandoned. And Europe is slowly turning into a desert. This is the world, 4°C warmer than it is now. But there is also good news: Western Antarctica is no longer icy and uninhabitable.

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Extraordinary Photographs by Women on Forefront of Conflict - National Geographic

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Extraordinary Photographs by Women on Forefront of Conflict - National Geographic

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Extraordinary Photographs by Women on Forefront of Conflict (National Geographic)

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Stephanie Sinclair is the newest recipient of an international award honoring dedication and bravery of women photojournalists.

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The Mercator projection distorts countries - Business Insider

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The Mercator projection distorts countries - Business Insider

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Maps shape our understanding of the world - and in an increasingly interconnected and global economy, this geographic knowledge is more important than ever.

The funny thing is, almost everyone actually has a skewed perception of the true size of countries thanks to a cartographic technique called the Mercator projection.

Used just about everywhere, from textbooks to Google Maps, the Mercator projection map is the way most of humanity recognizes the position and size of Earth's continents.

Visual Capitalist

In 1569, the great cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, created a revolutionary new map based on a cylindrical projection. The new map was well-suited to nautical navigation since every line on the sphere is a constant course, or loxodrome. In modern times, this is particularly useful since the Earth can be depicted as seamless in online mapping applications.

That said, the true sizes of landmasses become increasingly distorted the further away from the equator they get. Mercator's map inadvertently pumps up the sizes of Europe and North America. Visually speaking, Canada and Russia appear to take up approximately 25% of the Earth's landmass, when in reality they occupy a mere 5%. When Antarctica is excluded (as it often is), Canada and Russia's visual share of landmass jumps to about 40%!

Canada is the second largest country in the world, but not by much. Here is an " at scale " look at Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Visual Capitalist

Africa, South Asia, and South America all appear much smaller in relation to countries further from the equator.

And from a North American perspective, countries such as Australia and Indonesia appear much smaller than they actually are. Comparing the landmasses on the same latitude as Canada helps put sizes into perspective.

Visual Capitalist

Greenland is the world's largest island, but looking at its hyper-exaggerated depiction in the map below, you'd be forgiven for wondering why it isn't a stand-alone continent. In reality, Greenland is about fourteen times smaller than Africa.

Visual Capitalist

IS BIGGER BETTER?

Though Mercator's map was never intended for use as the default wall map in schools around the world, it has shaped the worldviews of billions of people. Critics of the map - and similar projections - suggest that distortion reinforces a sense of colonialist superiority. As well, the amount of territory a country occupies is often correlated with power and access to natural resources, and map distortions can have the effect of inadvertently diminishing nations closer to the equator.

A prime example of this argument is the "True Size of Africa" graphic, which demonstrated to millions of people just how big the continent is.

Visual Capitalist

Growing awareness of map distortion is translating into concrete change. Boston public schools, for example, recently switched to the Gall-Peters projection , which more accurately depicts the true size of landmasses.

Visual Capitalist

Visual Capitalist

THE ROAD TO EQUAL-AREA MAPPING

In 1805, mathematician and astronomer, Karl Mollweide, created a namesake projection that trades accuracy of angles and shape for accuracy of proportion. The Mollweide projection has inspired many other attempts at a user-friendly equal area map.

Visual Capitalist

John Paul Goode's attempt, known as the Goode Homolosine Projection, took this concept a step further by adding interruptions at strategic locations to help reduce the distortion of continents. The resulting shape is sometimes referred to as an "orange peel map".

Visual Capitalist

Another evolution in cartography was the Dymaxion map, invented by Buckminster Fuller and patented in 1946. In this version, the continents are no longer in their familiar positions - however, there is more spacial fidelity than in previous projection methods. We're able to see the true proportions of Africa, Northern Canada, Antarctica, and other distortion hot spots.

The Dymaxion map wasn't created for purely practical purposes. Fuller believed that humans would be better equipped to address global challenges if they were given a way to visualize the Earth's continents in a contiguous manner.

Visual Capitalist

THE AUTHAGRAPH MAP

Using a new map-making method called AuthaGraph, Japanese architect, Hajime Narukawa, may have created the most accurate map of the world yet. AuthaGraph divides the globe into 96 triangles, transfers them to a tetrahedron and unfolds into a rectangle.

The end result? Landmasses and seas are more accurately proportioned than in traditional projections.

Visual Capitalist

The biggest downfall of the AuthaGraph map is that longitude and latitude lines are no longer a tidy grid. As well, continents on the map are repositioned in a way that will be unfamiliar to a population that is already geographically challenged.

That said, depicting our round world on a flat surface will always come with some trade-offs. As demand grows for a true equal-area map, it will be exciting to see what the next generation of map projections have to offer.

Read the original article on Visual Capitalist. Get rich, visual content on business and investing for free at the Visual Capitalist website, or follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn for the latest. Copyright 2017. Follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter.

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SEE ALSO: 15 overlay maps that will change the way you see the world

NOW WATCH: Here's why the American flag is reversed on military uniforms

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Maps shape our understanding of the world - and in an increasingly interconnected and global economy, this geographic knowledge is more important than ever. The funny thing is, almost everyone actually has a skewed perception of the true size of countries thanks to a cartographic technique called the Mercator projection.

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Qatar Airways banned from crucial airspace - Business Insider

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Qatar Airways banned from crucial airspace - Business Insider

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REUTERS/Fadi Al-Assaad

As Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates sever diplomatic relations with Qatar, the nations have also closed their airspace to their neighbor.

The lack of access to Bahraini, Emirati, and Saudi airspace could have a devastating effect on Qatar Airways' operations.

"Losing Saudi, Bahrain, and UAE airspace would effectively ground Qatar Airways," the CAPA Center for Aviation wrote in a report.

That's because Qatar actually has very little airspace relative to the size of the country.

"It is largely surrounded by Bahrain airspace (the Bahrain FIR), a slither on the south is managed by Saudi Arabia while the UAE is on the eastern border," CAPA said.

While losing access to Saudi airspace would force Qatar Airways into the costly maneuver of rerouting its Africa-bound flights, losing access to Bahraini airspace could be catastrophic because the country almost encircles Qatar.

That means, should the ban hold up, Qatar Airways flights would need to fly through airspace they are now barred from to reach their home base in Doha.

BI Graphics

Qatar Airways did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how it plans to overcome this challenge.

While the countries are free to refuse landing rights, it is unclear whether Bahrain and the UAE can legally bar Qatar Airways from their airspace. The International Air Services Transit Agreement, of which Bahrain, the UAE, and Qatar are part of, says the countries can't legally shut off their airspace to fellow signatories. The countries, however, could exit the treaty or try to enforce the ban with the treaty in place.

Saudi Arabia, however, is not an IASTA member country and can legally shut Qatar Airways out of its airspace.

According to Flightradar24, Bahrain notified pilots that it would limit flights to and from Qatar by Qatari aircraft through its airspace to a single air route. This means even if Qatar Airways isn't grounded, it would be subject to heavy air-traffic congestion.

Over the past two decades, Qatar Airways has grown to become one of the most influential international airlines in the world. In 2015, the consumer aviation website Skytrax named it the best airline in the world.

SEE ALSO: One of the best airlines in the world has been banned from its biggest market

NOW WATCH: Take a look inside Qatar Airways' innovative new business class

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One map shows how much trouble Qatar Airways may be in

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As Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates sever diplomatic relations with Qatar, the nations have also closed their airspace to their neighbor. The lack of access to Bahraini, Emirati, and Saudi airspace could have a devastating effect on Qatar Airways' operations.

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These 20 images of Earth over the past 70 years show why countries signed the Paris Agreement

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These 20 images of Earth over the past 70 years show why countries signed the Paris Agreement

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President Donald Trump is expected to announce on Thursday whether the US will withdraw from the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change.

The international accord, which was signed by every country except Nicaragua and Syria, lays out a framework for countries to reduce their fossil-fuel emissions to help keep the planet's overall temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have had an unmistakable impact on Earth that has accelerated over time. This impact pops out in sharp relief when you look at this collection of images of what specific areas look like now compared with about 70 years ago.

In some cases, the images - mostly from NASA, unless otherwise noted - were taken as far as 50 years apart; in others, they were snapped within 10 to 15 years of each other.
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These 20 images of Earth over the past 70 years show why countries signed the Paris Agreement

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President Donald Trump is expected to announce on Thursday whether the US will withdraw from the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change. The international accord, which was signed by every country except Nicaragua and Syria, lays out a framework for countries to reduce their fossil-fuel emissions to help keep the planet's overall temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius.

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Half of All Languages Come from One Root Language. How it Spread Is Something of Debate | Big Think

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Half of All Languages Come from One Root Language. How it Spread Is Something of Debate | Big Think

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The sheer variety of languages on Earth is dizzying in their array and divergence. What's more intriguing, is that about half of them spoken today by some three billion people, come from a single root language, used thousands of years ago. Hindi, Bengali, Persian, English, German, Spanish, and Greek, all come from the same root, known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). In total, 400 languages and dialects originate from PIE.

German linguist August Schleicher reconstructed its vocabulary back in 1868. He wondered what PIE sounded like. So he created a fable called "The Sheep and the Horses." Over the years, as more information has been unearthed about the Bronze Age cultures who spoke this language, the fable has been updated. Of course, scholars argue over what PIE actually sounded like. Nothing is definitive. But we have an approximation.

Here's the latest recording of spoken PIE performed by University of Kentucky linguist Andrew Byrd:

Here is the English translation:

The Sheep and the Horses

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Linguists, anthropologists, and other scholars are working on piecing together what seems a near impossible puzzle. Despite the difficulties in studying a long forgotten tongue, they've made great progress. How it began and when other languages began to break off is still a mystery. Today, there are two prevailing theories.

One says PIE formed in an area known as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a sprawling grassland north of the Black and Caspian Seas, which today encompasses parts of Russia, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Beginning circa 6,500-5,500 bp (before present), a tribe of nomads began speaking PIE, the theory states. They domesticated horses and learned to ride them.

Two studies help support the so-called Steppe Hypothesis. One is linguistic the other genetic. In this view, the nomads moved West conquering lands and peoples, and spreading their "cultural innovations," including wheeled vehicles, horse domestication, and wool weaving.

UC Berkeley researchers, led by linguist Will Chang, completed one study published in 2015 in the journal . It offers compelling evidence supporting the Steppe Hypothesis. He and colleagues took 207 words from 150 Indo-European languages. Some were from dead languages, others are still spoken today.

Researchers used these words as data and evaluated them using statistical modeling. They wanted to find out how quickly the words changed over time. From there, Chang and colleagues discovered that the first linguistic divergence occurred c. (circa) 6,500 years ago. By cross-referencing these findings with an analysis of the Indo-European language tree, Chang and colleagues concluded that conquering Indo-Europeans spread PIE as they moved westward.
The Steppe Hypothesis. By: Joshua Jonathan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Another study adds evidence to the Steppe side of the argument. Published in the journal in 2015, researchers, led by David Reich of Harvard, conducted genetic testing on 69 ancient Eurasian mummies, who lived 8,000 to 3,000 years ago. Reich distinguished himself recently by discovering that certain ailments, including hay fever, derive from Neanderthal genes.

He and his team included the famous glacier mummy Ötzi, who has something of a cult following. Discovered in the Alps, Ötzi met his ghastly end 5,300 years ago. Researchers also poured through all previous genomic research of this kind. They found that European hunter-gatherers came from the Yamnaya steppe in Russia, appearing around 6,000 to 5,000 years ago. These herders originated in the Near East.

Then, somewhere around 4,500 years ago, a group known as the Corded Ware people, famous for their pottery, could be found living in parts of northern Europe, including Germany. This study suggests that the Yamnaya Steppe people swept through from the East, settling Europe, and so in essence became the Corded Ware people. Most Europeans today can actually trace their ancestry back to the Corded Ware people, genetic evidence suggests.
Indo-European expansion according to the Anatolian Hypothesis. via Wikimedia Commons
In 2012, a team of evolutionary biologists from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, produced evidence disputing the Steppe Hypothesis. Instead of the grasslands of Asia, their research points to Turkey as the place where PIE took root, c. 9,500-8,000 bp. This is known as the Anatolian Hypothesis.

Using linguistic data and computational methods, researchers determined that PIE was spoken among settled farmers who had domesticated animals. As their innovations spread, so did their language. Both camps offer compelling evidence. Though the Harvard study may add just a tad more credence to the Steppe Hypothesis, these two are currently still locked in a scholarly "tug of war."

To learn how language itself may have spread, click here:

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Half of All Languages Come from One Root Language. How it Spread Is Something of Debate

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The sheer variety of languages on Earth is dizzying in their array and divergence. What's more intriguing, is that about half of them spoken today by some three billion people, come from a single root language, used thousands of years ago. Hindi, Bengali, Persian, English, German, Spanish, and Greek, all come from the same root, known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

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More Than 31 Million People Were Internally Displaced In 2016: Report

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More Than 31 Million People Were Internally Displaced In 2016: Report

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Crises of violence, conflict and disaster caused more than 31 million people to flee their homes in 2016. That's about one person internally displaced per second, a new joint report from the Norwegian Refugee Council and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reveals.

There are currently twice as many internally displaced persons, or IDPs, as refugees worldwide, but the issue of internal displacement remains largely neglected on the global policy agenda, the organizations warned Monday. Many people who flee their countries as refugees are later forced to return home, only to become displaced internally, the report said.

Last year, natural disaster was by far the largest source of displacement.

Violence and conflict together resulted in nearly 7 million new cases, at a rate of about 15,000 per day. This included some 922,000 cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 824,000 in Syria and 659,000 in Iraq. The global population of such IDPs has been on the rise since 2003, and now exceeds 40 million.

Natural disasters led to a sobering 24.2 million internal displacements in 2016, including more than 7.4 million in China, 5.9 million in the Philippines and 2.4 million in India.

In countries like Nigeria, South Sudan and Somalia, the combined detrimental effects of disaster and violent conflict are fueling rapid displacement and extreme food shortages.

Did you know that most people displaced by conflict are displaced in their home country? #InternalDisplacement pic.twitter.com/NteaqEFqJv
- NRC (@NRC_Norway) May 19, 2017

The NRC and IDMC stress that insufficient monitoring practices make it impossible to reflect the true scale, nature and patterns of the global internal displacement phenomenon. The humanitarian groups identify issues like poverty, inequality, weak systems of governance, rapid urbanization, climate change and environmental degradation as some of the primary triggers of forced displacement.

"Significant new internal displacement associated with conflict and disasters takes place every year, mainly in low and lower-middle income countries," the report said. "Those affected join the many millions of people already living in displacement, reflecting the intractable nature of the phenomenon, and the inability of governments to cope."

Without adequate attention and response to the underlying factors driving internal displacement around the globe, these numbers will continue to rise, the report warns. It calls on members of the international community to commit to "a conscious, deliberate and sustained political effort to improve the many millions of lives blighted by internal displacement and preventing others from suffering the same upheaval and trauma in the future."

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More Than 31 Million People Were Internally Displaced In 2016: Report

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Crises of violence, conflict and disaster caused more than 31 million people to flee their homes in 2016. That's about one person internally displaced per second, a new joint report from the Norwegian Refugee Council and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reveals.

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The power of geography. The power of maps. 

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The power of geography. The power of maps. 

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If Americans Can Find North Korea on a Map, They’re More Likely to Prefer Diplomacy (Published 2017)

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Most Americans could not identify the country in a survey, and those people tended to view military action more favorably.

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The Bubble Is Real: Half of US Population Lives in Less Than 5% of Nation's Counties

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The Bubble Is Real: Half of US Population Lives in Less Than 5% of Nation's Counties

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In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the narrative of 'Two Americas' was validated. One red, one blue. One right, one left.

While Trump ended up winning a vast majority of the land mass in the country, along with the Electoral College, Hillary carried the popular vote by a couple million. She did this by winning decisively deep blue counties in deep blue states, particularly on the coasts of the country. These counties carried by Clinton have an enormous population advantage compared to the middle of the country.

A series of maps, produced by the website Dadaviz, show the extreme variance of U.S. population. The creators sought to break the country up evenly by population and where it tends to live. Below, you can see the U.S. population split evenly, 159.5 million vs. 159.3 million, between the most and least populated counties.

The data shows that one-half of the population is packed into only 5% of America's counties.

If you get rid of the less-populated half of the country, our nation becomes unrecognizable:

The data becomes even more compelling when you balance the most populated county in America, Los Angeles county, against similar pools of the population around the country.

Los Angeles county equals the population of 11 states combined:

Los Angeles county has the same population as nearly 1,200 other smaller counties across the nation combined:

Combine the fact that Hillary Clinton won Los Angeles county by nearly 2 million votes and it begins to becomes clear how Clinton could walk away with the popular vote, by sweeping just a handful of counties across the country, while still losing the election in stunning fashion.

As SNL put it, The Bubble is real.

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The Bubble Is Real: Half of US Population Lives in Less Than 5% of Nation's Counties

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In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the narrative of 'Two Americas' was validated. One red, one blue. One right, one left. While Trump ended up winning a vast majority of the land mass in the country, along with the Electoral College, Hillary carried the popular vote by a couple million.

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WASHINGTON - The Syrian regime has built a crematorium 45 minutes outside of Damascus where the U.S. government believes they are burning the bodies of the thousands of prisoners executed inside the walls of the Saydnaya military prison - an institution nicknamed "the slaughterhouse".

The prison is believed to kill at least 50 detainees a day often by mass hangings, acting assistant Secretary for Middle Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones briefed reporters on Monday. Jones also presented aerial photos of the prison complex showing the crematorium's construction in 2013.

The international community previously believed that the bodies were were being disposed of in mass graves. The building of a crematorium allows the regime to cover up the extent of mass murders they undertake while leaving behind little evidence, Jones said.

The executions were carried out "seemingly with the unconditional support of Russia and Iran", Jones said, adding that the U.S. does not believe Russia or Iran are involved with the crematorium.

"This information has been developing and with the meeting last week between Foreign Minister Lavrov and the Secretary, this was an opportune time to remind people about the atrocities that are being carried out inside of Syria," Jones said.

Related: At Least 13,000 Hanged in Mass Executions at Syrian Prison: Amnesty International

The findings are part of declassified information available to the intelligence community and humanitarian organizations. An Assad former regime photo documentarian working under the name "Ceaser" shared more than 10,000 photos of Assad's victims with the international community, Jones said.

Non government organizations and human rights groups have long asserted that the Assad regime has abducted and detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people between 2011-2015 as that nation's bloody civil war rages on.

Once detained, prisoners are often beaten, tortured, electrocuted and raped, officials said.

Sometimes as many as 70 prisoners are crammed into cells that were meant to hold five people.

During his meeting with President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed their nations' differences on how to best proceed in the six-year Syrian war which has left more than 500,000 dead and displaced millions.

Russia supports Assad, while Washington has said Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad can't remain in power.

"We do not have a notion of an exit strategy," Lavrov said during the press conference at the Russian embassy on Wednesday. The "obsession with ousting particular leaders - look what it has led to. Why don't we try to learn from our mistakes, focus on process, defeating terrorism."

The U.S. and Russia also disagree on Assad's role in last month's chemical gas attack, which left dozens of civilians dead. Trump ordered the launch of 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in retaliation.

Heather Nauert, the new State Department spokeswoman, in her first time at the podium said "Tillerson was firm and clear with Minister Lavrov, Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al-Assad, a key point that took place in that meeting was telling Russia to use its power to reign in the regime. Simply put the killing and devastation has gone on for far too long in Syria."

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The State Departments say Assad's regime built a crematorium to burn the bodies of executed Syrian prisoners

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WASHINGTON - The Syrian regime has built a crematorium 45 minutes outside of Damascus where the U.S. government believes they are burning the bodies of the thousands of prisoners executed inside the walls of the Saydnaya military prison - an institution nicknamed "the slaughterhouse".

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An Ebola outbreak has been declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A cluster of cases have so far been identified, and although the virus has only been confirmed in one of these, medical professionals are preparing for the worst.

The outbreak is thought to have begun on April 22, in the Likati Health Zone, Bas Uele Province, a remote area in the far north of the country that borders with the Central African Republic. Nine people have been found displaying hemorrhagic symptoms indicative of the virus, and three of these have died. Of the tests so far carried out, only one has tested positive for the Zaire subtype Ebola virus (a different strain to the 2014 epidemic), though the results from other tests are currently being awaited.

Even though there has only been a single confirmed case, as the co-discoverer of Ebola, Peter Piot, has said: "All epidemics start with one case." This is the first outbreak of the disease to have occurred since the epidemic that claimed the lives of more than 11,000 people in West Africa two years ago. The response by the Health Ministry and the WHO has been swift, mobilizing experts and biologists to work fast to contain the outbreak.

"The first teams of epidemiologists, biologists, and experts in the areas of social mobilization, risk communication, and community engagement, and also personnel specializing in water, hygiene, and sanitation, are scheduled to reach the affected area today or tomorrow," explained Dr Yokouidé Allarangar, the WHO representative in the DRC. "The Likati health district is in a remote area, but contact tracing is essential to contain the outbreak in its focus; the DRC can rely on very experienced health workers for this purpose."

The first case is thought to have been a 39-year-old man who was admitted to the health care facility on April 22, with blood in his diarrhea and urine, bleeding from the nose, and vomiting blood, and who subsequently died. Professionals worked quickly to identify who was caring for him on the way to the facility. That person has now developed symptoms themselves, as well as the moto-taxi driver who took them there, and who is now also dead.

The fear is that as the patient traveled to the health facility in the back of the moto-taxi, he may have spread the disease. In response to the West African outbreak, research into an effective vaccine was fast tracked, and concluded with the development of one that appeared to work in trials held in 2015 in Guinea. The maker of the vaccine, Merck, has stated that they are ready and prepared to ship them to the DCR as soon as the government requests it.

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Ebola Outbreak Has Been Confirmed In The Democratic Republic Of Congo

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An Ebola outbreak has been declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A cluster of cases have so far been identified, and although the virus has only been confirmed in one of these, medical professionals are preparing for the worst.

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10 Things You're Not Doing (But Should) To Help The Ocean

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10 Things You're Not Doing (But Should) To Help The Ocean

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Plastics are overwhelming our oceans and landfills. Every year, an estimated 19 billion pounds of plastic garbage end up in the sea. In the U.S. alone, approximately 56 billion pounds of plastic are dumped annually in landfills.

Worryingly, it remains unknown exactly how all these plastics ― which don't biodegrade and could linger in the environment for centuries ― could impact human health and the world around us. But here's a heartening truth: We can all do something to mitigate this growing plastics crisis. Yes, all. From entrepreneurs and corporations who need to rethink the way plastic products are designed and manufactured; to lawmakers who can push for the protection of fragile environments from plastic pollution; to individuals (that means you) whose seemingly small daily actions can add up to something huge, we all have a role to play.

"The one thing I've learned in doing my research is that population density is a huge driver of ocean pollution, so especially in places with high population densities, our individual choices really do matter," said Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer and plastics expert. "Things that may seem mundane, like using a reusable bottle or a reusable bag - when taken collectively, these choices really do make a difference."

Here's what you can do right now to reduce your personal plastic footprint:

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10 Things You're Not Doing (But Should) To Help The Ocean

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Plastics are overwhelming our oceans and landfills. Every year, an estimated 19 billion pounds of plastic garbage end up in the sea. In the U.S. alone, approximately 56 billion pounds of plastic are dumped annually in landfills.

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U.S. spy agencies wimp out on science of climate change, but still say it’s a security threat | Science | AAAS

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U.S. spy agencies wimp out on science of climate change, but still say it’s a security threat | Science | AAAS

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U.S. national security is being threatened by improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and genome editing, as well as the impacts of climate change, overfishing, and biodiversity loss, concludes the latest edition of an annual report released today by the U.S. intelligence community. But the report tries to avoid the increasingly politicized fight over climate science-without denying the existence of global warming.

Dropping off the threat list from last year's report are worries about gains in analyzing big data by other nations, as well as improvements in virtual reality. But new this year are concerns about the slowing pace of advances in the U.S. semiconductor industry and China's continued efforts to grow their own computer chip capabilities.

The 2017 Worldwide Threat Assessment, delivered to Congress today by Daniel Coats, U.S. director of national intelligence, is a 32-page rundown of global and regional threats that the nation's spy agencies believe demand attention from policymakers. Along with familiar warnings about terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and cyberattacks, the report flags a number of science-related issues.

On climate change, the intelligence agencies go out of their way to state that "we assess national security Implications of climate change but do not adjudicate the science of climate change." That's a big change from last year's blunt assertion that "human activities, such as the generation of greenhouse gas emissions and land use, have contributed to extreme weather events including more frequent and severe tropical cyclones, heavy rainfall, droughts, and heat waves."

We assess national security Implications of climate change but do not adjudicate the science of climate change.

2017 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community

Still, this year's report notes that 2017 "is likely to be among the hottest years on record," and that global warming "is projected to fuel more intense and frequent extreme weather events that will be distributed unequally in time and geography. Countries with large populations in coastal areas are particularly vulnerable to tropical weather events and storm surges, especially in Asia and Africa."

The report also devotes a special section to four "emerging and disruptive technologies" that could pose challenges to U.S. interests. They are:

AI. "Although the United States leads AI research globally, foreign state research in AI is growing," the report notes. "The implications of our adversaries' abilities to use AI are potentially profound and broad. They include an increased vulnerability to cyber attack, difficulty in ascertaining attribution, facilitation of advances in foreign weapon and intelligence systems, the risk of accidents and related liability issues, and unemployment."

Genome editing. "[T]he fast pace of development and broad range of applications are likely to challenge governments and scientific communities alike to develop regulatory and ethical frameworks or norms to govern the responsible application of the technology," the report states.

Internet of Things. Smart devices that communicate with each other-including phones, cars and even electric grids-will bring benefits, the analysis notes. But the technology has also "introduced vulnerabilities into both the infrastructure that they support and on which they rely, as well as the processes they guide ... in the future, state and non-state actors will likely use [Internet of Things] devices to support intelligence operations or domestic security or to access or attack targeted computer networks."

Next-generation semiconductors. By the mid-2020s, industry experts worry that U.S. firms will no longer be able to improve the speed and capabilities of computer chips, "potentially eroding U.S. national security advantages" in this field. At the same time, "China is increasing its efforts to improve its domestic technological and production capabilities through mergers and acquisitions."

The first three items on the new list-AI, genome editing, and the Internet of Things-also made last year's report.

The report also flags wildlife trafficking and poaching, illegal fishing, and biodiversity loss as potential threats to international stability. "Africa increasingly acknowledges the links among poaching, wildlife trafficking, instability, corruption, crime, and challenges to the rule of law," the report states. And "global fisheries face an existential threat in the decades ahead from surging worldwide demand, declining ocean health, and continued illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing." Illegal fishing "can also heighten tensions within and between countries and encourage piracy and frequently Involves forced labor, a form of human trafficking."

Missing from this year's report are warnings that advances in "foreign data science" and augmented and virtual reality could reshape the security landscape. For example, the 2016 edition noted that "foreign countries are openly purchasing access to published U.S. research through aggregated publication indices, and they are collecting social media and patent data to develop their own indices." This year, that concern is missing, although the new report makes numerous mentions of cyber espionage and attacks.

DOI: 10.1126/science.aal1181

David is a Deputy News Editor specializing in coverage of science policy, energy and the environment.

More from News

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U.S. spy agencies wimp out on science of climate change, but still say it's a security threat

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U.S. national security is being threatened by improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and genome editing, as well as the impacts of climate change, overfishing, and biodiversity loss, concludes the latest edition of an annual report released today by the U.S. intelligence community.

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Column: Why geography matters for students now more than ever | PBS NewsHour

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Column: Why geography matters for students now more than ever | PBS NewsHour

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Editor's note: As teens scroll through their news feeds, catching glimpses of conflict and atrocities taking place in Syria, South Sudan, or even violence here in America, what are they learning about our interconnected world? How can teachers help students understand how they're affected by and connected to people in far away places that they might never see? Chris Heffernan, a teacher of 20 years, says the answer lies in a subject that many think has gone by the way side, but is more vibrant than ever: geography. Heffernan, who is a seventh grade social science and math teacher at Jefferson Junior High School in Naperville, Illinois, says he no longer thinks about map quizzes when he thinks about geography class, but rather "human geography," the study of culture, economy and politics, which ends up affecting all of us.
When I was hired as a geography teacher in 2001, I was out of my element. I was a history person. I knew bizarre bits of American history and ancient civilization, but nothing about geography. In that first year, my career plan was simple: wait it out. Wait until there was an opening in ancient civilizations or U.S. history, and then move to that curriculum.

The only geography class I ever took was in the seventh grade. I remember learning basic map skills - latitude and longitude, cardinal directions, scale and how to interpret the key. We learned about landforms like peninsulas, straits and mountains. We discussed climate and biomes. Most important (apparently), we took map quizzes.

But since I started my geography career in August 2001, I experienced a "Sputnik" moment for geography in the wake of 9/11.

Like everyone else, I have vivid memories of that day. I remember my students doing an activity using road maps to find the best route across the state of Illinois. But while my students sat in groups with giant Illinois road maps, trying to figure out interstates and state routes, the world had changed dramatically.

As we began to process who had done this, a more important question emerged. Why? Why did people want to do this to us? I remember the Newsweek cover story a few weeks after by Fareed Zakaria called "Why they hate us." Most of us had no idea.

Geography matters more now than ever because students need to know human geography. They need to understand the relationships that exist between cultures.

It became obvious that it wasn't just my students who needed to learn about the world, but that I did too. I knew where Afghanistan was on a map, but I didn't know much more than that. I didn't know what the Taliban was. I didn't understand that the government was one of the most repressive governments in the world. In my mind, Afghanistan was the country that had fought off the Soviet Union in the 1980s, so therefore, they must be our ally. I may have known the physical geography of Afghanistan, but I was ignorant to the human geography that existed there.

Geography matters today more than ever, but only if we are looking at the right things. Google has changed our world, and geography is included in that. I haven't given my students a map quiz in years because there isn't really a need to memorize where countries are. Students can Google any country in the world to find its location.

Geography matters more now than ever because students need to know human geography. They need to understand the relationships that exist between cultures. They need to see not just the differences in cultures, but the similarities. Students need to know that the kid sitting in a school in Afghanistan today probably doesn't speak the same language, practice the same religion or live in a home that looks anything like a student in the United States, but they have a lot of things in common. They both love their families, the both want to play and they both want to learn. When we focus on the similarities instead of the differences, it changes the picture.

Geography matters today more than ever because our students are growing up in a globalized world. Nearly all business is international. Our students will never work in isolation. They need to know that the other people they work with, whether in a cubicle down the hall or on a screen halfway around the world, all have ideas and value. While they might see the problem and solution differently, they still see the problem and have solutions.

Geography matters now more than ever because of global crises that range from migration to climate change to pandemics.

Geography matters because learning about problems isn't enough; we have to take action to solve them.
The original version of this story appeared on the #worldgeochat blog here.
Geography matters because we are all connected. Geography matters because this is our world.

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Column: Why geography matters for students now more than ever

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Editor's note: As teens scroll through their news feeds, catching glimpses of conflict and atrocities taking place in Syria, South Sudan, or even violence here in America, what are they learning about our interconnected world? How can teachers help students understand how they're affected by and connected to people in far away places that they might never see?