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Category: Climate Change

Hurricanes like Helene are deadly when they strike and keep killing for years to come

Hurricanes like Helene are deadly when they strike and keep killing for years to come

The Associated Press reports: Hurricanes in the United States end up hundreds of times deadlier than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all the nation’s wars, a new study said. The average storm hitting the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, which dwarfs the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts in a hurricane’s aftermath, the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature…

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Is the idea of a ‘climate haven’ under water?

Is the idea of a ‘climate haven’ under water?

Bob Henson writes: Asheville, North Carolina, seemed like a good place to escape the worst of a warming world. The city’s appealing four-season climate includes summers with a typical daily high around 84°F – unusually low for the Southeast U.S. – and winters that aren’t too frigid. There’s typically plenty of moisture throughout the year, but with a mountain rain shadow that keeps Asheville a bit less wet than most of its neighbors. And the city takes climate seriously: findings…

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Devastation in Western North Carolina shows nowhere is safe from climate change

Devastation in Western North Carolina shows nowhere is safe from climate change

Marina Koren writes: When Helene swept through western North Carolina late last week, the rain fell heavy and fast enough to start washing away mountainsides. Rivers overflowed, and a chunk of one of the state’s major highways collapsed, cutting off communities; floods slung mud and muck into buildings. Cars, trucks, dumpsters, entire homes and bridges—these and more were carried away in the floods as if they weighed nothing. Much of what managed to stay in place became submerged in brown…

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Burying wood in ‘vaults’ could help fight global warming

Burying wood in ‘vaults’ could help fight global warming

Science reports: The discovery of an eastern red cedar log, buried in eastern Canada for millennia and nearly perfectly preserved, illustrates the potential of a new kind of carbon storage scheme in the fight against climate change: wood “vaults.” The log shows how burying wood—rather than letting it decay on the surface—could keep billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere, advocates say. The unusual conditions that preserved the log, described today in a paper in…

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How Hurricane Helene could have widespread consequences for homeowners

How Hurricane Helene could have widespread consequences for homeowners

The Washington Post reports: When Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida on Thursday night, it made landfall in the state’s sparsely populated Big Bend, far from the glittering cities with expensive waterfront property to the south. But that didn’t stop Helene from becoming another multibillion-dollar superstorm. The hurricane’s massive size and record-breaking storm surge left an equally massive footprint of destruction across the Southeast, from Florida’s Tampa Bay region to Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas. The storm likely caused $15 billion…

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Why energy-hungry civilizations on this planet and elsewhere are destined to self-destruct

Why energy-hungry civilizations on this planet and elsewhere are destined to self-destruct

Universe Today reports: Earth’s average global temperatures have been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), Earth has been heating up at a rate of 0.06 °C (0.11 °F) per decade since 1850 – or about 1.11 °C (2 °F) in total. Since 1982, the average annual increase has been 0.20 °C (0.36 °F) per decade, more than three times as fast. What’s more, this trend is projected to increase by between 1.5 and 2 °C…

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Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows

Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows

The Guardian reports: Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems. “Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.” The report, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), builds on years of research…

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Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple vastly higher than reported

Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple vastly higher than reported

The Guardian reports: Big tech has made some big claims about greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. But as the rise of artificial intelligence creates ever bigger energy demands, it’s getting hard for the industry to hide the true costs of the data centers powering the tech revolution. According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported. Amazon is the largest emitter…

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Trump’s obsession with oil could destroy America’s auto industry

Trump’s obsession with oil could destroy America’s auto industry

Robinson Meyer writes: There is a curious cognitive dissonance in how a lot of us think about the last decade’s climate policies and this decade’s economic problems. During the final years of the 2010s, the Trump administration proudly tore up dozens of policies meant to lower American greenhouse gas emissions and build a competitive domestic clean energy industry. It prioritized oil, coal and natural gas businesses over wind, solar and batteries, and as president, Donald Trump often seemed to revel in picking…

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Americans misunderstand their contribution to the deteriorating environment

Americans misunderstand their contribution to the deteriorating environment

Inside Climate News reports: Roughly one in two Americans said they are not very or not at all exposed to environmental and climate change risks. Those perceptions contrast sharply with empirical evidence showing that climate change is having an impact in nearly every corner of the United States. A warming planet has intensified hurricanes battering coasts, droughts striking middle American farms and wildfires threatening homes and air quality across the country. And climate shocks are driving up prices of some…

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Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

The New York Times reports: With the help of a small rope tied around his ankles, Eugenio Sánchez, lithe at age 50, shimmied himself all the way up a towering tree like a human inchworm, his chest heaving from the exertion, just to pick a few leaves. The leaves, found only on the highest branches, would help the scientists waiting below identify the species. And that, along with the tree’s exact size (or at least as close as one can…

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Donald Trump gets everything wrong about the climate crisis

Donald Trump gets everything wrong about the climate crisis

Bill McKibben writes: Here is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: the Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90% chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-cliched run of disasters: open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars…

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In California’s Park Fire, an indigenous cultural fire practitioner sees beyond destruction

In California’s Park Fire, an indigenous cultural fire practitioner sees beyond destruction

Sarah Hopkins writes: Where others might see only catastrophe, Don Hankins scans fire-singed landscapes for signs of renewal. Hankins, a renowned Miwkoʔ (Plains Miwok) cultural fire practitioner and scholar, has kept an eye on the Park Fire’s footprint as it sweeps through more than 429,000 acres across four Northern California counties. It started late last month and became one of the largest fires in state history in a matter of days, fueled by dry grasslands. The fire has since risen…

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Megatsunami risk on the rise as glacial melt drives landslides

Megatsunami risk on the rise as glacial melt drives landslides

The Guardian reports: Just under a year ago, the east coast of Greenland was hit by a megatsunami. Triggered by a large landslide entering the uninhabited Dickson Fjord, the resulting tsunami was 200 metres high – equivalent to more than 40 double-decker buses. Luckily no one was hurt, though a military base was obliterated. Now analysis of the seismic data associated with the event has revealed that the tsunami was followed by a standing wave, which continued to slosh back…

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Project 2025: The right-wing conspiracy to torpedo global climate action

Project 2025: The right-wing conspiracy to torpedo global climate action

Michael E. Mann writes: Summer 2024 saw another round of devastating heat waves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and record-setting global temperatures. The window for averting a catastrophic 1.5 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the planet is rapidly closing. Can we meet this moment? I suppose it depends on whom you ask. For this is a tale of two worldviews. In one—based on facts and evidence—environmental policy is motivated by science and reason, with the intent of advancing the common good and the sustainability of…

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How methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe

How methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe

Rob Jackson reports: Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within…

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