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Category: Climate Change

The fervent debate over the best way to confront climate change

The fervent debate over the best way to confront climate change

By Madeline Ostrander, August 12, 2022 In the late 1950s, Ian Burton, then a geographer at the University of Chicago, learned about a troubling conundrum with levees. These expensive and engineering-intensive strategies — which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers favored for reining in floods along big river floodplains — worked well for holding back intermediate amounts of water. But they gave people a false sense of safety. After a levee went up, sometimes more people actually built and moved…

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Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

The Daily Mail reports: Germany’s most-important river is running dry as Europe suffers through a drought that is on course to become its worst in 500 years, with terrifying wildfires burning once again in France. Water levels in the Rhine – which carries 80 per cent of all goods transported by water in Germany, from its industrial heartlands to Dutch ports – are now so low that it could become impassable to barges later this week, threatening vital supplies of…

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Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Naomi Oreskes writes: At last year’s Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we don’t yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry’s optimism comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may…

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Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

William MacAskill writes: Humanity, today, is in its adolescence. Most of a teenager’s life is still ahead of them, and their decisions can have lifelong effects. Similarly, most of humanity’s life lies ahead – an estimated 118 billion people have already lived, but vastly more people, perhaps thousands or even millions of times that number, are yet to be born. And some of the decisions we make this century will impact the entire course of humanity’s future. Contemporary society does…

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Experts: Senate-passed bill will yield myriad climate benefits

Experts: Senate-passed bill will yield myriad climate benefits

Yale Climate Connections reports: The U.S. Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act by a single vote on Sunday, August 7. The bill, headed to the House of Representatives within days, includes by far the largest and most consequential measures to reduce domestic climate pollution in the nation’s history, with a $386 billion clean energy investment, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Based on analyses by several energy modeling groups, it would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by close to one-billion…

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History’s greatest obstacle to climate progress has finally fallen

History’s greatest obstacle to climate progress has finally fallen

Robinson Meyer writes: Climate change was born as a modern political issue in the United States Senate. On a hot June day in 1988, a senior NASA scientist warned a Senate committee that global warming, which was previously mooted only as a hypothesis, was not only real but was already underway. “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here,” James Hansen said. An auspicious start, and…

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How climate breakdown is supercharging toll of extreme weather

How climate breakdown is supercharging toll of extreme weather

The Guardian reports: The devastating intensification of extreme weather is laid bare today in a Guardian analysis that shows how people across the world are losing their lives and livelihoods due to more deadly and more frequent heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts brought by the climate crisis. The analysis of hundreds of scientific studies – the most comprehensive compilation to date – demonstrates beyond any doubt how humanity’s vast carbon emissions are forcing the climate to disastrous new extremes. At…

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How Republicans are ‘weaponizing’ public office against climate action

How Republicans are ‘weaponizing’ public office against climate action

The New York Times reports: Nearly two dozen Republican state treasurers around the country are working to thwart climate action on state and federal levels, fighting regulations that would make clear the economic risks posed by a warming world, lobbying against climate-minded nominees to key federal posts and using the tax dollars they control to punish companies that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Over the past year, treasurers in nearly half the United States have been coordinating tactics and…

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Surprise climate bill will meet ambitious goal of 40% cut in U.S. emissions, energy models predict

Surprise climate bill will meet ambitious goal of 40% cut in U.S. emissions, energy models predict

Science reports: For climate advocates in the United States, the past month felt like a roller coaster. In early July, negotiations in Congress on clean energy legislation of historic proportions collapsed, and the effort seemed doomed. But backroom talks continued and last week key senators suddenly announced an agreement on a $369 billion bill that would provide the most climate funding ever seen in the United States. “It was the best kept secret, potentially, in Washington history,” says Leah Stokes,…

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Geothermal heating and cooling: Renewable energy’s hidden gem

Geothermal heating and cooling: Renewable energy’s hidden gem

Yale Climate Connections reports: Often described as a giant tower of Jenga blocks, Boston University’s Center for Computing and Data Sciences shows no outward signs of leading the race to sustainable energy design. No rooftop wind turbines grace its heights; no solar panels are mounted on the multiple roof decks jutting out from the building’s core. What makes this building unique lies deep underground, where water circulating through 31 geothermal boreholes will supply 90 percent of its heating and cooling…

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Scientists say it’s ‘fatally foolish’ to not study catastrophic climate outcomes

Scientists say it’s ‘fatally foolish’ to not study catastrophic climate outcomes

Inside Climate News reports: As global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, some climate scientists say it’s time to start paying more attention to the most extreme, worst-case outcomes, including the potential for widespread extinctions, mass climate migration and the disintegration of social and political systems. “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” an international team of researchers wrote this week in a Perspective…

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Climate change: Are we already passed the point of no return?

Climate change: Are we already passed the point of no return?

The Observer reports: The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort. And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in…

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Climate deniers attack weather forecasters during UK heatwave

Climate deniers attack weather forecasters during UK heatwave

BBC News reports: Weather forecasters faced unprecedented levels of trolling during this month’s extreme heat in the UK, according to leading figures in the industry. The BBC’s team received hundreds of abusive tweets or emails questioning their reports and telling them to “get a grip”, as temperatures hit 40C. BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor said he had never experienced anything like it in nearly 25 years working in weather. The Royal Meteorological Society condemned the trolling. Most of the abuse seems…

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U.S. power companies secretly spending millions to protect profits and fight clean energy

U.S. power companies secretly spending millions to protect profits and fight clean energy

The Guardian reports: The CEO of the biggest power company in the US had a problem. A Democratic state senator was proposing a law that could cut into Florida Power & Light’s (FPL) profits. Landlords would be able to sell cheap rooftop solar power directly to their tenants – bypassing FPL and its monopoly on electricity. “I want you to make his life a living hell … seriously,” FPL’s CEO Eric Silagy wrote in a 2019 email to two of…

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What’s in the ‘total game changer’ climate bill nobody saw coming

What’s in the ‘total game changer’ climate bill nobody saw coming

Vox reports: Democrats may be on the verge of passing historic climate legislation after all. The $369 billion of climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced on Wednesday includes funding for clean energy and electric vehicle tax breaks, domestic manufacturing of batteries and solar panels, and pollution reduction. If the bill’s policies work as intended, it would push American consumers and industry away from reliance on fossil fuels, penalize fossil fuel companies for excess…

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Inside the UK’s Silicon Valley for nuclear fusion, where unlimited energy is becoming a reality

Inside the UK’s Silicon Valley for nuclear fusion, where unlimited energy is becoming a reality

BBC Science Focus reports: Flick through any collection of popular science magazines from the last 50 years and the chances are that you will encounter a feature about nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the process of joining lightweight atoms together to release energy; it is the reason the Sun and the rest of the stars shine, and recreating that process on Earth promises an abundant form of low-carbon energy. As you look through the archival material, keep an eye open…

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