From Yale Climate Connections: According to a new study, one of the first estimates of sea level rise made by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change closely matches what actually happened over the past 30 years. Torbjorn Tornqvist of Tulane University: "What we found was that they did remarkably well." In the 90s, the IPCC released a report with different scenarios for carbon emissions and what each would mean for global sea-level rise. Tornqvist's study found that real-world emissions have closely tracked one of the report's middle-of-the-road scenarios; global sea levels have risen about 9 cm " very close to the 8 cm the UN report predicted. Those early predictions were made without today's advanced computer models, and they over- or underestimated the impacts of some drivers of sea-level rise. read more
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that U.S. forces have seized a "very large" oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, a major escalation of the administration's months of efforts to punish the South American petrostate. "As you probably know we have just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually," Trump said at an event at the White House. "It was seized for a very good reason." read more
The ranks of U.S. government statisticians have been gutted in the past year due to layoffs and buyouts. That along with diminished funding and attacks on their independence have put at risk the data used to make informed decisions about everything from the nation's economy to its demographics, according to a new report from outside experts released Wednesday. One agency lost 95% of its staff, while others dropped by about quarter to more than a third, due to government downsizing this year during President Donald Trump's first months in office, according to the report released by the American Statistical Association. Besides veteran employees with deep institutional knowledge, some of the cuts hit new hires meant to infuse new blood into the agencies, said the annual report. read more
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) -- A Brazilian woman with family ties to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will be released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody while she fights potential deportation, an immigration judge ruled Monday. Bruna Ferreira, 33, a longtime Massachusetts resident, was previously engaged to Leavitt's brother, Michael. She was driving to pick up their 11-year-old son in New Hampshire when she was arrested by ICE agents in Revere, Massachusetts, on Nov. 12. Ferreira later was moved to a detention facility in Louisiana, where an immigration judge ordered that she be released on $1,500 bond, her attorney Todd Pomerleau said. "We argued that she wasn't a danger or a flight risk," he said in a text message. "The government stipulated to our argument and never once argued that she was criminal illegal alien and waived appeal."
Reversing declines seen in some tech hubs, such as San Francisco and San Jose, during the pandemic, all 30 markets experienced growth in independent workers in the past year. The surge aligns with other data showing that U.S. businesses have increased freelance hiring by 260 percent in recent years. The U.S. now has an estimated 6.9 million independent professionals and nearly 4 million freelancers concentrated in the top 30 cities -- an annual increase of 4.3 percent. The report also shows independent professionals in the U.S. are estimated to generate $319 billion in revenue, representing 1.1 percent of U.S. GDP, and $208 billion in just the top 30 markets. read more
No matter the font, it all will have sounded better in the original German.