Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Note: There won’t be a Friday edition of OSN this week as I’ll be on a little roadtrip, but I’ll talk to you again on Monday!

Record rains flood Greece just as wildfires let up

Summary: Heavy rainfall has triggered floods in central Greece and in neighboring Bulgaria and Turkey, causing untold damage and at least seven deaths, so far.

Context: These floods are hitting just as wildfires, which have plagued Greece for weeks, began to subside, mimicking a pattern we’ve seen in other places around the world over the past year or two, and further straining already drained national and regional rescue services; local authorities have warned that heavy rains could continue through today, and that more rivers might overflow as a consequence, leading to more destruction and possibly more deaths, as well.

—The New York Times

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World likely has hottest summer on record

Summary: The first batch of global temperature data for August has arrived, and it’s looking like August of 2023 may be the hottest one on record, as was the case with June and July of this year.

Context: If confirmed, that would make the summer of 2023 the hottest summer on record, and though there are confounding factors—like the ocean-warming El Niño phenomenon and ongoing wildfires across Canada—that could be temporarily tipping the heat-scales this year, some scientists are worried that this might be the beginning of an overall hotter climactic period, rather than an unusual one-off.

—Axios

Scientists cryopreserve and revive coral fragments in a world first for conservation

Summary: A new study in Nature Communications indicates that for the first time scientists have been able to freeze fragments of coral into a glasslike state, before then thawing them and returning them to seawater, the coral reviving and functioning as normal after 24 hours.

Context: This is notable because of what it might mean for cryopreserving other organisms in the same way (including maybe human organs, for transport and preservation), but it also suggests we may be able to help preserve coral species at a moment in which warming oceans are threatening their health, which in turn threatens the health of the many other species that rely upon them and the reef systems they create; half the planet’s coral reefs disappeared due to overfishing and pollution from 1950 through the 2020s, and we lost about 14% of our global coral population between 2009 and 2018, alone; research has suggested that we could lose another 70-90% of our reefs if the climate warms to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, which we’re projected to hit sometime between 2030 and mid-century—so this preservation method could be vital to saving an ecosystem-rooting species, if we reach that milestone.

—Smithsonian Magazine

In the US, Medicare expenses have been increasing ever since the program was introduced, and these costs were expected to increase dramatically over the past few years; strangely, though, actual Medicare costs have flatlined during a period in which one would think such costs would balloon (a global pandemic!); no one is certain why this is happening, but it’s been called, by one Harvard professor of health policy and medicine, “the most important thing that has happened to the federal budget in the last 20 years.”

—The New York Times

66.11%

Amount by which deforestation in the Brazilian portion of the Amazon rainforest decreased in August, which brought it down to its lowest monthly level since 2018.

That’s down from an all-time high under previous Brazilian President Bolsonaro (who was an enthusiastic deforester), and it shows that current President Lula’s efforts to reduce deforestation (and ostensibly at least, improve the overall health of the Amazon) seem to be working.

—Reuters

Trust Click

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