
Voters across the political and demographic spectrum find Trump increasingly objectionable and Millennials in particular are refusing to support the Republican nominee because of his position on climate change. While a USA Today / Rock the Vote poll just released shows that Clinton is "trouncing Trump 56 percent - 20 percent among those under 35," a Washington Post analysis of the reasons why former supporters are abandoning Trump shows that the issue of climate change plays prominently with millennials.
In a piece over the weekend, Former supporters describe their 'last straw' when it came to Trump, the Post took a look at Millennial reddit users and found trends represented by examples like the following:
"I was on the fence until he said global warming was a hoax," WubbaLubbaDubStep said.
"When he and Clinton both got the nomination for their respective parties, I was actually leaning more toward Trump," Scratch_That_Itch said. "However, his denial of climate change completely changed my mind. I'm not one to get caught up in the doom and gloom of many articles about the climate changing, but there is absolutely ZERO reason not to invest time, money and energy into renewable/cleaner power sources."
Trump doubled down on his absurd position Friday, telling the Miami Herald that he's "not a big believer in manmade climate change."
If elected, Trump would be in the ridiculous international position of being the only world leader of any nation to deny climate science and the dangers posed by the climate crisis. Just as he is alienating voters of every age and demographic due to his total ignorance on climate, he would alienate world leaders from every country, harming our alliances and relationships around the world and making America weaker.
In contrast, Secretary Hillary Clinton has proven she is a climate champion with the track record and experience to work with our allies and move climate action forward on a global scale. She wants to end the debate once and for all surrounding offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic oceans and she is pushing for much-needed reform of the antiquated, Nixon-era rules governing coal mining on public lands. She is committed to protecting our forests and public lands, while also doubling the American outdoor economy, which creates jobs and generates billions of dollars.
Millennials want a president who holds justice and equality among their top priorities. Clinton has demonstrated her commitment to progressive values time and again, from her work as an advocate at the Children's Defense Fund, to making history by holding the first hearing on environmental justice ever in the U.S. Senate.
While Trump will drag us backwards toward the dirty fuels of the past and cook the planet in the process, Clinton will build on the progress we've already achieved in moving America and the world, towards a 21st century clean energy economy under President Obama.
Sweden's reindeer have a problem. In winter, they feed on lichens buried beneath the snow. But the climate crisis is making this difficult. Warmer temperatures mean moisture sometimes falls as rain instead of snow. When the air refreezes, a layer of ice forms between the reindeer and their meal, forcing them to wander further in search of ideal conditions. And sometimes, this means crossing busy roads.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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In many schools, the study of climate change is limited to the science. But at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, students in one class also learn how to take climate action.