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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has signed a new directive that prevents scientists that are receiving grants from the EPA from serving on the agency’s advisory committees. Pruitt says that this unprecedented move is to remove what he perceives to be a potential bias from the committees, stating that the members of three key EPA boards — the Science Advisory Board, Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, and Board of Scientific Counselors — have received an estimated $77 million in agency funding. The move was quickly criticized by scientists and environmentalists as one that would bar the country’s most qualified scientists from these committees, and at the same time leave the door open for Pruitt to appoint industry-friendly members to advise the EPA.read more

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The second-largest tropical cyclone on record, Typhoon Lan, made landfall early on Monday, leaving 7 people dead and 100 injured as it passed near Tokyo. The storm was fueled by warm sea surface temperatures (86ºF/30ºC), and caused extensive flooding and mudslides, dumping nearly 32 inches of rain over 48 hours on Wakayama Prefecture alone.
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A massive hole the size of Lake Superior has opened in the ice that covers Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, a phenomenon that hasn’t been seen since the mid-1970s. This hole, called a polynya, opens up 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of ocean in the middle of the Weddell Sea’s ice pack, hundreds of miles from shore. "This is hundreds of kilometers from the ice edge. If we didn’t have a satellite, we wouldn’t know it was there," explains professor Kent Moore, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto.
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If the news of a major hurricane tearing for the coast of Ireland seems odd, as was the case for Hurricane Ophelia, that’s because the phenomenon of hurricanes surviving as organized storms that far east in the Atlantic Ocean is extremely rare. As it is, Ophelia now holds the record for the easternmost major hurricane in the Atlantic, and if it had maintained its strength it would have been only the third known tropical storm to make landfall in Europe, following 2005’s Hurricane Vince, making landfall in Spain, and Hurricane Debbie, brushing the west coast of Ireland in 1961.
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