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National Climate Report: 5 Trends for the Pacific Northwest

Following the release of the federal National Climate Assessment last week, experts in Washington state say that although the window for countering the negative impacts of climate change is narrowing, there’s still time.

The trend is clear: Earth is warming because of our longstanding reliance on fossil fuels.

As our cars, buildings, refineries, large industries and power plants burn fossil fuels, emitting harmful and noxious greenhouse gasses, the planet will continue to warm, according to the federal government’s latest National Climate Assessment, published last week. Like the rest of the world, the Northwest is at risk. Washington, Oregon and Idaho are home to some 14 million people and 43 Native American tribes. The region is already experiencing climate change and more will come in the decades ahead, the state’s climatologist and one of the report’s authors told The Seattle Times.

States like Washington are scrambling to cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly and painlessly as possible, with mixed degrees of success and local opposition. Others resist the change or even lay the groundwork for the continued reliance on the fossil fuels that have brought us to this point.

The faster the U.S. and the rest of the world cuts emissions, the quicker the risks diminish, the report says. The immediate benefit — and the benefit to future generations — will “far outweigh” the costs those changes would impose.

We still have time to shape our future, for better or for worse.

“Although the window is narrowing, it’s still open,” said Deepti Singh, a climate scientist with Washington State University and one of the assessment’s many authors.

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Seattle Times
GovTech.com

Big data play a huge role in US presidential elections. Do they have the same impact in Australia?

Travis Ridout is a political scientist who studies political advertising in the United States, and he spent the first six months of 2023 in Australia as a Fulbright scholar. He interviewed campaign staff and political consultants about their use of various campaign techniques in state and federal elections.

A key reason Barack Obama won the 2012 US presidential election was his campaign’s use of “big data” to target specific voters. His team created multiple versions of ads aimed at niche audiences, taking care to test every message. Naturally, some have worried about the potential power of these data-driven campaign techniques to manipulate voters. But have these methods taken over election campaigns in Australia?

In short, not really. Australian campaigns typically rely on much less data-intensive techniques due to a lack of resources, doubts about the data, and ethical and philosophical concerns about the approach.

One reason is that [Australian] campaigns do not have unlimited money and staff resources. At the end of the day, hiring a data scientist or creative staff to design ads for multiple audiences is a luxury most campaigns cannot afford. In contrast, more than US$6.6 billion (A$10.2 billion) was spent on the 2020 presidential election.

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The Conversation

Meet the WSU student designing gameday posters hidden around campus

Collin Scott had to look twice. Scott had just hopped on his bike, riding away from Gesa Field, the site of Washington State’s home matchup with Northern Colorado, when he noticed something: two girls, laughing as they held up a 13×9 poster, which showed an illustration of a Cougar and a Bear, the two mascots squaring off that afternoon in September.

It was Scott’s poster. Not even 24 hours prior, he had designed the thing himself.

“I was like, ‘Oh, this is pretty cool,’ ” Scott said. “They were smiling, like dang, we found it.”

Scott, a junior majoring in art at Washington State, doesn’t always get to see the people who find the printouts of the posters he designs – but he feels fulfilled either way. An intern in WSU’s creative media department, Scott uses an app called Procreate on his iPad to illustrate a poster for the Cougars’ home games, which gets printed out then hidden somewhere around campus a few hours before the game for one lucky person to find.

The spot can be anywhere around campus, like the Cougar statue or The Coug, but to get to that stage, Scott has to design the poster first.

A few hours before each home game, WSU director of creative media Dallas Hobbs (’21 DTC) and his team do the same routine: Airdrop the poster from Scott’s iPad to Hobbs’ iPad, which connects to a printer in their office. Out comes the finished project, which they take to some place around campus. Then Hobbs snaps a picture of the poster – showing enough context around the location to give hints, but not enough to make it obvious.

Then Hobbs posts the picture on the WSU football Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts, asking readers to post a picture of the poster if they find it.

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Spokesman-Review
Yahoo News

Working to help make college accessible to all

Xóchitl López motivates students to attend college and works to make college more accessible to underserved communities, she says.

She is an organizer for the coalition Communities for Our Colleges in Central Washington, an advocacy group. She is currently studying for a bachelor’s degree in sociology online at Washington State University after getting her associate degree from Yakima Valley College.

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Yakima Herald-Republic

New climate assessment shows stark reality of global warming

Our changing climate is affecting nearly every facet of life in every corner of the country, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, released by the Biden administration on Tuesday.

The expansive report details how carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, is warming the planet and causing more intense heat waves, wildfires and droughts.

“We have more evidence and more certainty that the changes that we’re seeing are because of human activities,” said Deepti Singh, an assistant professor at Washington State University’s School of the Environment and a contributing author of the report.

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to the report. That carbon acts like a blanket, trapping heat and intensifying extreme weather events.

“Many of the climate conditions and impacts people are experiencing today are unprecedented for thousands of years,” the report says.

Singh also pointed out that the Earth is seeing the “cascading and compounding” effect of multiple extreme weather events. In 2020, Oregon was rocked by unprecedented wildfires, followed by an ongoing drought, which was followed by the record-shattering heat dome of 2021.

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KGW8
KVUE
Seattle Times