
During an on-the-record meeting with editors and reporters at the New York Times, Donald Trump said he has an "an open mind" with regards to climate change science and policies.
Worth the read: Donald Trump’s New York Times Interview, in Full - Transcript https://t.co/B4QQ9HRb3e— Michael M. Grynbaum (@Michael M. Grynbaum)1479907280.0
"It's one issue that's interesting because there are few things where there's more division than climate change," he told the assembled staff. While Trump said he believed "there is some connectivity" between human activity and climate change, he also claimed "a lot of smart people disagree" with the idea, mentioning that "the hottest day ever was in 1890-something." (2016 is currently on track to be the hottest year ever recorded).
"Talk is cheap, and no one should believe Donald Trump means this until he acts upon it," Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said.
"We're waiting for action, and Trump is kidding nobody on climate as he simultaneously stacks his transition team and cabinet with climate science deniers and the dirtiest hacks the fossil fuel industry can offer. Prove it, President-elect. The world is watching."
As for climate policies, Trump reiterated his belief in the importance of clean air and water and alluded that U.S. climate action "depends on how much it will cost our companies." Two transition team advisors on energy and environment told Reuters they were "caught off guard by his remarks." Trump's transition team appointees and rumored cabinet picks mostly consist of figures with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, many of whom deny human-made climate change and advocate for pulling out of the Paris agreement.
'Don't Let a Climate Denier Take Over the EPA' https://t.co/JI8w8QrSix (@ecowatch @350)— Sierra Club (@Sierra Club)1479842103.0
"Actions speak louder than words," May Boeve, 350.org executive director, said.
"As long as Trump has a climate change denier like Myron Ebell running his transition team, you know this is all a bunch of empty rhetoric. If Trump is changing is tune, maybe it's because he's realized that far more Americans support climate action than voted for him in this election. The public is clamoring for a renewable energy economy that will create millions of jobs while saving our planet. Instead of delivering, Trump is going on about fantasies like 'clean coal' and flip-flopping around on whether there's 'some connectivity' between humans and climate change. The president-elect needs to get up to speed, and fast."
For a deeper dive:
News: New York Times, Climate Home, Huffington Post, CNN, Reuters, LA Times, The Hill, Hollywood Life, NPR, Politico, Gizmodo, New York Post, Morning Consult, The Atlantic, Independent, New York Magazine, Guardian
Commentary: Washington Post, Philip Bump column; Guardian, George Monbiot column; Slate, Will Oremus column
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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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