Climate & Environment

The highlight of the Museum of Ice Cream — the absurdly popular, made-for-Instagram installation that opened last month in Miami Beach — is the pool filled waist-deep with millions of rainbow-colored plastic sprinkles. It’s the stuff of social media dreams. But the sprinkles are turning into a real-life problem for the Beach, where city staff have gone as far as fining the organizers for creating an “environmental hazard.”

Bad sign: Twenty seventeen tied for the hottest year in Miami history, according to National Weather Service data. The mean average temperature for the year ticked up to 79.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

Before Miami Beach was the city of Miami Beach, pioneer John S. Collins planted a row of Australian pine trees along the barrier island to shield his avocado and mango groves from the wind. More than 100 years later, those pines are still standing — a remarkable feat, considering the average lifespan is 40 to 50 years.

Life in 2017 means grappling with the knowledge that manmade climate change is, at most, a few decades away from flooding Miami. Wedged between a threatened Everglades and a warming Atlantic Ocean and jeopardized by rising seas, salty water tables, and strengthening hurricanes, the Magic City is at the center of environmental news that’s impossible to ignore.

For more than a year, Gwendolyn West’s canal-front home in North Miami has been, in the words of her attorney, “literally under attack” by gushing rivers of raw sewage.

Mention the cooling canals at Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station around a local environmentalist, and you’ll likely get to watch that activist’s face turn all shades of red and purple. Florida Power & Light owns the plant in South Miami-Dade, and evidence strongly suggests FPL has known for decades that the plant’s canals were leaking saltwater into the Biscayne Aquifer, Miami’s largest source of drinking water.

If you’ve been delaying your visit to Miami’s Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, the Ernest Hemingway house in Key West, or the 18th-century Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, now is the time to make arrangements. The same goes for scientists: If you’re planning, say, a study of the indigenous civilizations that lived in the Everglades thousands of years before Europeans arrived, start digging tomorrow.

Nearly three months ago, Hurricane Irma destroyed thousands of boats in marinas as it spun through the Sunshine State. Workers have spent weeks towing the vessels to shore and clearing out the debris, but hundreds of boats remain smashed and sunken in coastal waterways. And now marine scientists warn that the decaying wreckage could harm delicate local ecosystems.

When disaster strikes, health care is often one of the first things to slip through the cracks as unexpected expenses pile up. That’s especially true for sexual and reproductive health care.

Hunting invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades is no easy task: Trackers have to spot the world’s largest snake species amid the sawgrass and swamps of the protected land, but they’re often no match for the highly camouflaged constrictor. But one team of snake hunters has a new tool for finding pythons: high-tech thermal drones.

Every time Miami Beach’s Animal Recovery Mission (ARM), the undercover animal-abuse investigative group led by former military contractor Richard Couto, releases a video, it gets that much harder to eat meat or drink milk from South Florida cows. This month has been a doozy for Couto. First, ARM last week released film of animal handlers at one Okeechobee farm kicking cows.

Miami is known for getting slammed by hurricanes, which tend to blow down power lines. So after Irma knocked out electricity for roughly 90 percent of Florida Power & Light’s customers in September, many residents asked why most of FPL’s lines are still above ground. The company is now reportedly “considering” burying more of its lines, but one Miami-Dade County commissioner thinks there’s a faster route to harden Florida against storms. She wants the state to force FPL to put lines underground.

Recently, the Trump administration denied environmental protection to the Florida Keys mole skink, whose habitat is projected to disappear in the next 40 years due to sea-level rise. Now the Center for Biological Diversity is threatening a lawsuit to fight the administration’s blatant disregard for climate science and the species affected by it.

Instead of shouldering the cost of fixing its leaking cooling canals at Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Homestead, FPL is asking state regulators for permission to pass that bill — a reported $200 million — onto consumers.

Melanie Lustig walked out of her job at Monkey Jungle in mid-September. The last straw, she says, was scooping up piles of rotten fruit and feces inside an enclosure where the park’s orangutan, Mei, had been kept for days. The New Jersey native had been dismayed for months by the…

Monkey Jungle got its start in the ’30s when Joseph DuMond released a troop of monkeys into a dense patch of South Dade wilderness and then opened it as a one-of-a-kind attraction “where humans are caged and monkeys run wild.” More than seven decades later, the 30-acre roadside park — which allows some monkeys to roam freely while visitors gaze at them from an enclosed path — still makes that promise.

For more than a month, Miami-Dade County has been sending garbage trucks full of hurricane debris and trash to Poinciana Industrial Park, a county-owned lot directly in front of Northpark, a residential neighborhood filled with families, children, and senior citizens. Furious, residents have begun protesting what they call a clear case of environmental racism.

As sea levels continue to rise, Florida has taken a licking for its bad habit of climate-ignorant development. But despite warnings from the state’s most brilliant and respected scientists, Gov. Rick Scott has more or less disregarded the issue, infamously banning the Department of Environmental Protection from using the term “climate change” in 2015. And though national publications such as Scientific American have taken developers to task for their reluctance to stop building along the coast, state law does little to discourage the practice.

After getting a call from someone about trash piling up in a Miami canal, environmentalist Dave Doebler turned to Google Maps to get the GPS coordinates. What showed up on the screen shocked him: The massive clump of trash could be seen in satellite images.

Miami hasn’t just been extra hot this year — at this point, it sometimes feels as if we’re living in a totally different climate. Not only was July of this year the hottest single month in city history, Dade County has also surpassed yet another heat record already this year…