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U.S. Government Ceases Monitoring Costs of Extreme Weather Events

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on Thursday that they will cease tracking the nation’s most costly disasters, those inflicting damages of at least $1 billion.

This decision means insurance firms, researchers, and policymakers will lack crucial data necessary for understanding trends associated with significant disasters like hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires, which have become more prevalent this year. While not all disasters stem from climate change, such occurrences are intensifying as global temperatures rise.

This latest move marks another step by the Trump administration to restrict or eliminate climate research. Recently, the administration has rejected contributions to the country’s largest climate study, proposed cuts to grants for national parks addressing climate change, and unveiled a budget that would significantly reduce climate science funding at the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense.

Researchers and lawmakers expressed their disapproval of this decision on Thursday.

Jesse M. Keenan, an associate professor and director of climate change and urbanism at Tulane University in New Orleans, stated that halting data collection will hinder federal and state governments in making informed budgetary and infrastructure investment decisions.

“It’s illogical,” he remarked. Without a comprehensive database, “the U.S. government will be blind to the financial impacts of extreme weather and climate change.”

In comments on Bluesky, Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, described this move as “anti-science, anti-secure, and anti-American.”

Virginia Iglesias, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado, emphasized that few organizations can replicate the unique information provided by this database. “This represents one of the most consistent and trustworthy records of climate-related economic losses in the nation,” she said. “The database’s strength lies in its reliability.”

The so-called billion-dollar disasters—those with costs exceeding ten digits—are on the rise. In the 1980s, there were, on average, three such events annually, adjusted for inflation. By contrast, between 2020 and 2024, the average rose to 23 per year.

Since 1980, the U.S. has experienced at least 403 of these incidents. Last year, there were 27, and this year is projected to see the second-highest number (28 events).

Last year’s incidents included Hurricane Helen and Milton, which together resulted in approximately $113 billion in damages and over 250 fatalities in Colorado. Additionally, drought conditions that year caused around $3 billion in damages and claimed more than 100 lives nationwide.

NOAA’s National Environmental Information Center plans to cease tracking these billion-dollar disasters as priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing change, according to an email from the agency.

When asked whether NOAA or another branch of the federal agency would continue to publicly report data on such disasters, the agency did not respond. The communication indicated that archived data from 1980 to 2024 would be available, but incidences from 2025, such as the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, will not be monitored or published.

“We can’t address problems that we don’t measure,” noted Erinsikorsky, director of the Climate Security Centre. “Without information regarding the costs of these disasters, Americans and Congress will remain unaware of the risks posed by climate change to our nation.”

Sikorsky highlighted that other agencies may struggle to replicate this data collection as it involves proprietary insurance information that companies are reluctant to share. “It’s a remarkably unique contribution.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

Gaia ceases operations after completing decade-long mapping of the Milky Way

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From ancient creeks of stars to the innards of white dwarfs, the Gaia Space Telescope has seen it all.

On Thursday, the European Space Agency’s mission specialists will send the low-fuel Gaia into orbit around the Sun, turning it off to astronomers around the world after more than a decade of service.

Gaia has been charting the universe since 2014, creating a vast encyclopedia of the position and movement of celestial objects from the Milky Way and beyond. It is difficult to grasp the breadth of development and discovery that a spinning observatory is enabled. But here are a few numbers: nearly 2 billion stars, millions of potential galaxies, and around 150,000 asteroids. These observations were brought Over 13,000 studies so far by astronomers.

Gaia changed the way scientists understand the universe, and that data became the reference point for many other telescopes on the ground and in the universe. Additionally, less than a third of the data collected has been released to scientists so far.

“It now supports almost everything in astronomy,” says Anthony Brown, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, heading Gaia’s data processing and analysis group. “If you were to ask my astronomy colleagues, I don’t think they could have imagined that Gaia would have to do her research even if she wasn’t there.”

Starting in 2013, Gaia’s main goal was to uncover the history and structure of the Milky Way by constructing the most accurate, three-dimensional map of the position and velocity of 1 billion stars. As there is only a small portion of that data, astronomers Halo mass of dark matter We swallowed and identified our galaxy Thousands of trespassing stars ingested from another galaxy 10 billion years ago.

Dr. Brown measures continuous vibrations on the Milky Way disk and measures a kind of galactic seismology – evidence Of encounters with satellite galaxies that have put ourselves in orbit much more recently than scientists believed. That may be the reason for the Milky Way It looks distorted When viewed from the side.

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Source: www.nytimes.com

Google Ceases Notification of Publishers Regarding Removal of ‘Right to be Forgotten’ from Search Results

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Google will inform publishers quietly that it has removed websites from search results under Europe’s “right to be forgotten” rules, following a Swedish court ruling that the search engine applies globally. Stopped.

Previously, when an individual requested that records about them be deleted under EU data protection law, Google would notify the publisher of the original article.

Media companies, including the Guardian, are largely exempt from regulation, but links to journalistic content can be removed from databases such as search engines.

Currently, Google only notifies publishers that a URL has been removed, without providing details about what or why.

As a result, journalists are unable to identify situations in which the right to be forgotten is being misused to obscure legitimate reporting about serial offenders, hampering their ability to challenge the most serious rights violations.

A Google spokesperson said: “We have introduced a new approach to notifications following a decision by the Swedish Data Protection Authority. It came into force.”

“Although we did not agree with this decision at the time, it is binding and supports EU-wide regulatory guidance. We have therefore made strong efforts to comply with it. Ta.”

One of the changes introduced by the GDPR in 2016 was to ensure that EU national court decisions on data protection set precedent across the bloc.

A Swedish court ruled in December that notifying webmasters that search engines have removed links to their content is itself a violation of the privacy of people who have requested the right to be forgotten.

“Thus, the Administrative Court found that once Google granted the deletion of search results, the interests of individuals in privacy and effective protection of personal data generally outweighed Google’s interests. [sic] Send a message to the webmaster, concludes. according to International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Upheld a 50 million Swedish kronor (£3.8 million) fine against search engines for failing to remove URLs they were asked to remove from their lists.

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Within weeks of the first judgment in May 2014, which ruled that the right to be forgotten applied to Google, six Guardian articles were removed from the European version of the search engine.

Three of the charges related to now-retired Scottish Premier League referee Dougie McDonald, who was found to have lied about his reasons for awarding penalties in a football match in 2010. . Others included his 2002 article about a lawyer facing a fraud trial and his 2011 article about a French office worker who makes his art Post-It Notes.

Over the next five years, the search engine received about 1 million unique forgotten requests, and even though more than half were rejected, it still removed about 1.5 million unique URLs.

Source: www.theguardian.com