TV News LIES

Ever wondered if your asthma attacks can be tied to the fracking wells near your house? You are probably right.

Asthma patients are 1.5 to four times more likely to have asthma attacks if they live near bigger or a larger number of unconventional natural gas development wells, according to a study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine.

Many of the toxic chemicals escaping from fracking and natural gas processing sites and storage facilities may be present in much higher concentrations in the bodies of people living or working near such sites, new research has shown.

In a first-of-its-kind study combining air-monitoring methods with new biomonitoring techniques, researchers detected volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released from natural gas operations in Pavillion, Wyoming in the bodies of nearby residents at levels that were as much as 10 times that of the national averages.

Some call it pink snow, some call it watermelon snow — and now, a new study is calling it yet another symbol of the drastic melting in the Arctic.

The appearance of the so-called pink snow, which Arctic explorers have observed for centuries, is the result of a red algae that likes to bloom in the frozen water. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications, researchers found that those algal blooms are causing the ice to melt faster, and the algae is likely to grow more rapidly as climate change melts even more of the Arctic into the liquid water that feeds them.

On Thursday, environmental health groups and community members from Pavillion, Wyoming released the first study of its kind linking chemicals released from gas and oil production sites to those in bodies of residents living near the wells.

In the town of 240 residents and another 200 living east of the town, community members have railed against the EPA and state agencies to act on fracking activities in their communities for years. This report, however, is the first to track air pollutants from the gas wells in the residents themselves.

The fracking party is over, and a quiet desperation has descended on the state's once-booming communities and the thousands of people who were drawn to them.

Dave Van Assche didn't fret too much when oil prices started to slide in late 2014. The postal services business he had built over three short years was thriving, catering to the tens of thousands of people who, like him, had streamed into North Dakota to strike it rich during an unprecedented oil boom.

But the price drop quickened, due in part to a supply glut from the 1.2 million barrels of oil North Dakota was pumping each day. Within a year, oil prices were down more than 70 percent, and North Dakota's oil rush stalled. The daily take at Van Assche's business has sunk from a peak of $2,500 to at best $600 now.

Sound like something you’ve heard before? It’s probably because you have.

Based on NASA data, April was the seventh month in a row that global temperatures set a new record high. It was also the third consecutive month that the record was broken by the largest margin ever.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has yet to reveal its analysis of April temperatures, but if their findings line up with NASA’s, that’ll mean one full year of record-hot months. (The two agencies use slightly different dates to determine the long-term temperature average.)