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Category: Climate Change

Otis teaches a terrifying lesson in rapid hurricane intensification

Otis teaches a terrifying lesson in rapid hurricane intensification

John Morales writes: This is a scary new paradigm in the tropics. And we all need to worry. Hurricane Otis struck very near Acapulco, Mexico, on Tuesday night as a monster 165 mile-per-hour category 5 cyclone. On Monday night, about 24-hours before landfall, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) was predicting it would do so as 70 mile-per-hour tropical storm. With the energy content (and destructive potential) of the wind increasing with the cube of the windspeed, that means that Otis…

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Biden administration approves biggest offshore wind farm yet

Biden administration approves biggest offshore wind farm yet

The New York Times reports: The Interior Department on Tuesday approved a plan to install up to 176 giant wind turbines off the coast of Virginia, clearing the way for what would be the nation’s largest offshore wind farm yet. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, to be built by Dominion Energy, is the fifth commercial-scale offshore wind project approved by the Biden administration. If completed, the 2.6-gigawatt wind farm would produce enough electricity to power more than 900,000 homes,…

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Climate crisis: Remaining carbon emissions budget is now tiny, scientists say

Climate crisis: Remaining carbon emissions budget is now tiny, scientists say

The Guardian reports: The carbon budget remaining to limit the climate crisis to 1.5C of global heating is now “tiny”, according to an analysis, sending a “dire” message about the adequacy of climate action. The carbon budget is the maximum amount of carbon emissions that can be released while restricting global temperature rise to the limits of the Paris agreement. The new figure is half the size of the budget estimated in 2020 and would be exhausted in six years…

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When idiot savants do climate economics

When idiot savants do climate economics

Christopher Ketcham writes: William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach…

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How climate change drives conflict and war crimes around the globe

How climate change drives conflict and war crimes around the globe

Inside Climate News reports: Drought, flooding and extreme weather are driving and amplifying violent conflict around the world. At the same time, warfare has devastated ecosystems, imperiled access to vital resources and left behind toxic legacies that sicken civilian populations. On Thursday, a coalition of human rights organizations and lawyers published an open letter urging the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Karim A. A. Khan, to begin assessing the links between climate change and crimes in the court’s remit. The letter…

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The great underappreciated driver of climate change: household food waste

The great underappreciated driver of climate change: household food waste

Alexandra Frost writes: Tens of millions of tons of food that leaves farms in the United States is wasted. Much of that waste happens at the industrial level, during harvesting, handling, storage, and processing, but a staggering amount of food gets wasted at home, scraped into the garbage can at the end of a meal or tossed after too long in the crisper drawer. According to a 2020 Penn State University study, almost a third of the food that American…

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A shadowy corner of international law is threatening climate action, UN expert warns

A shadowy corner of international law is threatening climate action, UN expert warns

Inside Climate News reports: Soon after Italy approved a ban on offshore oil drilling, in 2015, the country received some alarming news: A British oil company that had been planning to drill was suing the government, seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. The company, called Rockhopper, brought its claim not in Italian courts but through a system of international arbitration that allows foreign investors to sue governments. Last year, the company won the case along with an order…

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Why is Britain retreating from global leadership on climate action?

Why is Britain retreating from global leadership on climate action?

Fred Pearce writes: In 1988, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became the first world leader to take a stand on fighting climate change. Last month, exactly a quarter-century later, her successor Rishi Sunak tore up a cross-party consensus on the issue that had survived the intervening eight general elections and replaced it with a populist assault on what had been his own government’s environmental policies. Thatcher, who trained as a chemist before entering politics, took her stand at a packed…

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Lloyd’s of London warns extreme weather could incur $5tr of economic losses over five years

Lloyd’s of London warns extreme weather could incur $5tr of economic losses over five years

BusinessGreen reports: Extreme weather events could result in around $5tr of economic losses over five years as crops fail and water and food shortages escalate, insurer Lloyd’s of London has warned. A new data tool released by the insurance giant this week models the global economic impact of a “hypothetical but plausible increase” in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, leading to a series of food and water shocks over a five year period. The analysis predicts that…

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Exxon, Apple and other corporate giants will have to disclose all their emissions under California’s new climate laws – that will have a global impact

Exxon, Apple and other corporate giants will have to disclose all their emissions under California’s new climate laws – that will have a global impact

Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s Los Angeles refinery, California’s largest producer of gasoline. David McNew/Getty Images By Lily Hsueh, Arizona State University Many of the world’s largest public and private companies will soon be required to track and report almost all of their greenhouse gas emissions if they do business in California – including emissions from their supply chains, business travel, employees’ commutes and the way customers use their products. That means oil and gas companies like Chevron will likely have to…

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The oil industry has taken over the GOP but nature is intervening, says Al Gore

The oil industry has taken over the GOP but nature is intervening, says Al Gore

David Remnick interviews Al Gore: Gore: [I]t now seems obvious to almost everyone that the severity of the crisis has reached a new level of intensity. Climate-related extreme events have become so common and so dangerous that people who wanted to dismiss it are now waking up to the reality that we’re facing. And, of course, the underlying substance is shocking. We’re still using the sky as an open sewer for the heat-trapping, gaseous pollution that we spew into it…

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Pope Francis lambasts climate change skeptics and ‘irresponsible’ Western lifestyles

Pope Francis lambasts climate change skeptics and ‘irresponsible’ Western lifestyles

CNN reports: Pope Francis has made his strongest statement yet on the accelerating climate crisis, pinning blame on big industries and world leaders as well as “irresponsible” Western lifestyles, in a blistering statement on Wednesday. “Our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” the pontiff wrote in a 7,000 word encyclical called Laudate Deum (“Praise God”). “Some effects of the climate crisis are already irreversible, at…

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September shattered global heat record — and by a record margin

September shattered global heat record — and by a record margin

The Washington Post reports: Early analyses show global warmth surged far above previous records in September — even further than what scientists said seemed like astonishing increases in July and August. The planet’s average temperature shattered the previous September record by more than half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit), which is the largest monthly margin ever observed. Temperatures around the world last month were at levels closer to normal for July according to separate data analyses by European and…

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Climate change and habitat loss push amphibians closer to extinction

Climate change and habitat loss push amphibians closer to extinction

NPR reports: When JJ Apodaca was starting graduate school for biology in 2004, a first-of-its-kind study had just been released assessing the status of the world’s least understood vertebrates. The first Global Amphibian Assessment, which looked at more than 5,700 species of frogs, toads, salamanders, newts and other amphibians became “pretty much the guiding light of my career,” said Apodaca, who now heads the nonprofit group Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy. Nineteen years later, a second global assessment of the world’s…

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Energy consumption ‘to dramatically increase’ because of AI

Energy consumption ‘to dramatically increase’ because of AI

Yahoo Finance reports: Artificial intelligence is expected to have the most impact on practically everything since the advent of the internet. Wall Street sure thinks so. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 26% year to date thanks to the frenzy over AI-related stocks. But AI’s big breakout comes at a cost: much more energy. Take for example OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. Research done at the University of Washington shows that hundreds of millions of queries on ChatGPT can cost around 1 gigawatt-hour…

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A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations

A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations

Wired reports: Every year between September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It’s like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols that affect the climate. Clouds are the largest source of uncertainty in climate predictions. Depending on location, cloud cover can reflect sunlight away from land and ocean that would otherwise absorb its…

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