Revenge Scorn—Trump Cancels a Water Pipeline in Colorado

The development includes a 130-mile pipeline to provide clean water for municipal and industrial uses serving about 50,000 people in the southeastern part of Colorado located in congressional districts that voted heavily for Trump. Many of the 39 communities in the area have been waiting for the project for decades because they have been relying on groundwater that can contain salt, radium, and uranium, which require expensive treatment or alternatives like bottled water. The pipeline was the last part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project that was started in 1962.

In his veto message to Congress, Trump said that he was committed to saving American taxpayers from expensive and unreliable policies and ending handouts. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the project would have an effect on direct spending of less than half of a million dollars.  

Soon after, Trump signaled that his veto may have been about politics. In a social media post, he referred to Colorado's governor, Jared Polis, as a “scumbag” and wished that he and the local prosecutor who brought the criminal case against former county clerk, Tina Peters, would “rot in hell.” The governor has refused to release Peters from prison after her conviction for allowing unauthorized access to state voting machines.

The water project legislation was sponsored by Colorado Republican Congress member, Lauren Boebert, who represents a district where a major part of the pipeline is situated. Boebert said that the effort to keep the project going was not over, adding that she hoped the veto had nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability in an apparent reference to the release of the Epstein files. Trump had unsuccessfully pressured Boebert to vote against the release of the files last November. 

Most weather agencies don’t recognize Category 6 and use Category 5 for a storm that exceeds 157 mph. Scientists have argued that there should be a higher category for storms that have sustained winds above 192 mph.

According to new research from National Taiwan University, most of the strongest Category 6 tropical cyclones have occurred in hot spots that are expanding. Climate change caused by humans could be responsible for as much as 70 percent of the expansion of the areas of stronger storms driven by warmer water that can reach well below the surface. When warmer waters occur in what would have been cooler subsurface areas, cyclones and hurricanes don’t have as much a chance to ratchet down. 

The study says that the largest hot spots are east of the Philippines in the Pacific and in the Atlantic around Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Florida.  

New research suggests we might want to give clouds their due. In a paper presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union last month, George Tselioudis, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that the world’s reflective cloud cover has shrunk in the past two decades by a small but tangible degree, allowing more light in and boosting global warming. 

In his research based on 35 years of satellite data, Tselioudis found that subtropical zones, where fewer clouds occur, have expanded. This is worrisome because in these areas close to the equator, it will allow more solar energy to hit the earth’s surface year round. In contrast, Earth’s cloudiest zones over the oceans, which typically cool the planet, have shifted toward the poles and shrunk, allowing more of the sun’s energy to reach and warm the seas. 

Because of increased human-caused greenhouse gases, Earth has a growing energy imbalance where the planet is absorbing more solar radiation than it reflects back into space. These new findings suggest that the loss of reflective oceanic storm clouds is a significant driver of that imbalance. Climate scientists like Tselioudis will next investigate whether increased greenhouse gases have caused cloud coverage to change and if we should expect the trend to continue. One possibility, long predicted by climate models, is that different rates of warming in the Arctic compared to the equator in recent decades may be the cause.

A new study has found that offspring of medium-sized sparrows called dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) developed longer bills during the COVID-19 pandemic when lockdowns were imposed. Juncos have historically lived in mountain forests near Southern California, but because of climate change and habitat loss many birds moved into urban areas such as around UCLA in the early 2000s. Juncos in the wild have long bills to help them dig and forage for bugs and seeds, but the urban birds developed short, stubby beaks because that’s all they needed to pick up food scraps, crumbs, and other morsels left by people. 

How quickly could they evolve their anatomy? Now, we know. Researcher co-authors Eleanor Diamant and Pamela Yeh at UCLA found that when everyone went into lockdown during the pandemic, the easy snacks left by students and staff disappeared, so the urban birds were forced to forage in shrubbery and grasses like their cousins in the mountains do.

In an example of the survival of the fittest, the juncos that still had slightly longer bills got more bugs and seeds and were able to survive and have babies. The team says that during the nearly two years (in 2021 and 2022) of reduced human activity during COVID—an “anthropause” as researchers call it—juncos were born with longer beaks. Remarkably, that adaptation didn’t last. Once campus life returned to normal, the bills in youngsters born in 2023 and 2024 had returned to the previous shorter shape, underscoring the immediate effect that humans can have on wildlife. 

Given that an estimated three billion birds have vanished over the past 50 years—of which about 168 million are juncos—this evolutionary versatility offers hope for their survival.

The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.