from Fast Company When Houston hit 109 degrees in late August—tying an all-time temperature record for the city—26 of the previous 27 days had been over 100 degrees. As the hot city gets even hotter because of climate change, it also keeps using more energy for air conditioning. But in the suburb of Conroe, one new building is pioneering a strategy to stay cooler: “self-cooling” concrete walls with a scalloped shape that helps repel heat. The deep grooves in the corrugated pattern give more surface area for heat to move away from the wall “In a way, the wall is […]
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Life and Death in America’s Hottest City
from The New Yorker The record-setting heat wave in Phoenix this summer, thirty-one consecutive days of temperatures exceeding a hundred and ten degrees, finally broke on Monday, July 31st. But, by the following Friday, August 4th, the thermometer was creeping up toward a hundred and fifteen degrees. Residents liked to joke that anything below the “teens” was comfortable. Jessica Lindstrom, who was thirty-four, was no longer a resident. She and her husband, Daniel, had bought a house in Central Point, Oregon, in 2015. But she had grown up in greater Phoenix and, that week, had brought her expanding family to […]
Continue readingNew Zealand Faces a Future of Flood and Fire
from Wired NEW ZEALAND IS grappling with two consecutive extreme weather events—massive flooding followed by a cyclone—that have claimed at least 12 lives and left hundreds of thousands of people without power. The high winds and waters of Cyclone Gabrielle have washed away coastal roads on the north island and left bridges splintered and broken. Landslides have covered tarmac with slick mud, and houses and streets across have been left under feet of water, only weeks after heavy rain also caused widespread floods. The country has declared a national state of emergency for just the third time in its history. New Zealand’s […]
Continue readingThe Global Carbon Surveillance State Is Coming
from NYTs For decades, those of us wondering why so little action had been taken to reduce carbon emissions, and why the public felt so little urgency about that failure, would sometimes lament that carbon dioxide was invisible. Unlike the pollution that smogged up cities, set rivers on fire and inspired the Clean Air and Water Acts here and similar legislation abroad, the stuff that was damaging the climate was being put into the atmosphere without anyone really seeing it. That’s why one of the most fascinating developments from this year’s major climate conference, COP27, which kicked off Nov. 6 […]
Continue readingThe Coldhearted Carbon Math
from NYTs Last November in Glasgow, the annual United Nations climate conference ended with its president, Alok Sharma, declaring that the global goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius had been just barely kept alive. “Its pulse is weak,” he said. This week in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, delegates reconvened for COP27, this year’s conference, amid a flurry of confident assertions that the same goal — which has energized and mobilized a global generation of activists and provides the conventional standard for judging progress on emissions — was now dead. “Say goodbye to 1.5° C,” The Economist intoned on […]
Continue readingDrought Conditions Drop the Mississippi River to Historic Lows
from The Atlantic Months of dry conditions in the Ohio River Valley and along the upper Mississippi basin have dropped the lower Mississippi River to levels that are approaching record lows. The narrowed channels and shallow water have affected barge traffic, making some docks inaccessible, slowing travel, and driving up the cost of freight. In some places, long-lost relics have been discovered, such as an old shipwreck on a riverbank in Louisiana, while in other places people have been able to explore features that are usually surrounded by water. More here.
Continue readingWyoming Will Soon Be Home To The World’s Largest Carbon Removal Facility
from Fast Company In rural Wyoming, a sprawling field will soon be filled with dozens of shipping container-sized boxes that can pull CO2 from the atmosphere to help combat climate change. The captured CO2, compressed into a liquid, will travel through pipelines into nearby wells that are drilled thousands of feet underground, storing it permanently. Everything will run on clean energy. The first units in the system, called Project Bison, will be running by the end of next year. By 2030, as it scales up, the project plans to capture five million metric tons of CO2 a year, or roughly […]
Continue readingCities Aren’t Adapting To Climate Change Fast Enough
from Fast Company Just 25 of the world’s cities account for 52% of total urban greenhouse gas emissions. This means that focusing on these cities can make a huge difference to the arc of long-term warming. More here.
Continue readingThe Grid Isn’t Ready for the Renewable Revolution
from Wired YOU CAN ALMOST hear the electrical grid creaking and groaning under the weight of the future, as two forces converge to push it—often literally—to its breaking point. One force is climate change, which can exacerbate disasters that take down parts of the grid, as Hurricane Ida did this summer, knocking New Orleans offline just as a heat wave settled in. Or extreme weather can suddenly spike the demand for energy just when the grid is least able to provide it, like during last winter’s Texas freeze and subsequent power system failure. The other force, ironically enough, is the massive […]
Continue readingThe Carbon Removal Industry Needs To Grow To Be The Size Of The Oil And Gas Industry
from Fast Company Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have spewed an extra 2.4 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, pushing the average global temperature up more than 1.2 degrees Celsius. The world adds another 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year. We’re already seeing what that means, from catastrophic flooding to heat waves that scientists thought were statistically impossible. As emissions shrink, the world will also need a way to pull the CO2 we’ve already emitted out of the air, both to cover the continued emissions of industries that are hard to decarbonize and […]
Continue readingBuilding Infrastructure To Stop Sea Level Rise Can Have An Unfortunate Consequence
from Fast Company As the world heats up and sea levels rise, communities in the U.S. could spend more than $400 billion on seawalls to try to hold the ocean back over the next couple of decades. But there’s a catch: Building a seawall in one area can often mean that flooding gets even worse in another neighborhood or city nearby. “Basically, the water has to flow somewhere,” says Anne Guerry, chief strategy officer and lead scientist at Stanford University’s Natural Capital Project. Guerry is also coauthor of a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of […]
Continue readingHow Climate Change Could Impact Your Home Value
from US News IN 2018, THE FEDERAL Emergency Management Agency announced that it would be updating New York City’s flood maps as a result of rising sea levels and shifting climate change forecasts. After all, in New York City, it’s been estimated that approximately 80 percent of the property owners who have experienced flood damage since the maps were last updated in 1983 didn’t have flood insurance. If you live in an area that has been plagued by floods, fires or beach erosion, or if you are concerned because 2014 to 2018 were the warmest years on record, you may […]
Continue readingAntarctic Glaciers Are Growing Unstable Above and Below Water
from Wired For several years, scientists have been worried about the retreat and eventual collapse of Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized plug that holds back the West Antarctic ice sheet from the Southern Ocean. If Thwaites goes kaput, the resulting catastrophe could raise global sea levels by more than two feet on its own, or by eight feet in combination with melting from nearby glaciers, according to NASA estimates. That fear has driven a big push by international teams of researchers to understand what’s going on at Thwaites and nearby Pine Island Glacier. A group of researchers from the United States […]
Continue readingIs Anybody Listening?
from Forbes How much longer will we continue to ignore the impact of our continued refusal to do anything to mitigate the planet’s long-standing climate emergency? California and Oregon are in flames, forcing half a million people to abandon their homes, and exceeding in a matter of weeks the area burned last year: yet we still refuse to accept that this is a direct result of the increase in global temperature caused by human activity that has turned our forests into tinder. The orange skies lending an apocalyptic, science-fiction air to San Francisco illustrate the terrible magnitude of the catastrophe […]
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