Attention to the Unseen

Live Science reports: Greenland’s enormous ice sheet has been struck by a “massive melting event,” with enough ice vanishing in a single day last week to cover the whole of Florida in two inches (5 centimeters) of water, Danish researchers have found. Since July 27, roughly 9.37 billion tons (8.5 billion metric tons) of ice has been lost per day from the surface of the enormous ice sheet — twice its normal average rate of loss during summer, Polar Portal,…

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Alexandria Herr, Shannon Osaka, and Maddie Stone report: In 2019 an international team of scientists published a commentary in the celebrated science journal Nature, sounding the alarm of a planet in crisis — and calling for transformative change. “We are in a state of planetary emergency,” they wrote, departing from the usual sterility of scientific writing. “The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril.” Yes, they were writing about climate change, but of a particular kind: climate tipping…

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Naomi Klein writes: Many people here think they are safe from climate change, the journalist from a German newspaper explained to me. They don’t see it as an immediate threat, like Covid-19. They see the Greens as scolds who want to take away their cheap holidays. “What do you have to say to them?” The question came via video call in late June, and I was, at that very moment, pickled in my non-air-conditioned home, gripped by a heatwave that…

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Slate reports: By all accounts, the climate crisis is already here. Deadly heat domes across the Pacific Northwest, a petroleum pipeline leak in the middle of the ocean that set the Gulf of Mexico on fire, and the deadly floods in Germany and Belgium in the past few weeks alone have proved that the world is changing in response to how we have changed it.* No one should be surprised by this. For decades, scientists have been ringing the alarm…

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Grist reports: Climate scientists have long warned that global warming would lead to extreme heat in many parts of the world. But the 120 degree Fahrenheit temperatures brought on by the heatwave in the Pacific Northwest in June were more in line with what researchers had imagined would occur later this century. “Astonished” is the word Michael Wehner, an extreme weather researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, used to describe his reaction to the heat in an interview with National…

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Inside Climate News reports: Scientists know that global warming is changing clouds, but they haven’t been sure whether those changes would heat or cool the planet overall. It’s an important question, because clouds have been the main source of uncertainty in projecting just how sensitive the climate is to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, and because clouds have a huge effect on the climate system. Just a 20 percent change in their extent or reflectivity would have more of an impact…

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The Washington Post reports: As viewed on a weather map of the globe, no fewer than five powerful heat domes are swelling over the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. These zones of high pressure in the atmosphere, intensified by climate change, are generating unforgiving blasts of heat in North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously. The heat domes, in a number of instances, are the source of record high temperatures and are contributing to swarms of wildfires in western North America…

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Chris McGreal reports: When Royal Dutch Shell published its annual environmental report in April, it boasted that it was investing heavily in renewable energy. The oil giant committed to installing hundreds of thousands of charging stations for electric vehicles around the world to help offset the harm caused by burning fossil fuels. On the same day, Shell issued a separate report revealing that its single largest donation to political lobby groups last year was made to the American Petroleum Institute,…

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The New York Times reports: Last September, a wildfire tore through one of Dario Sattui’s Napa Valley wineries, destroying millions of dollars in property and equipment, along with 9,000 cases of wine. November brought a second disaster: Mr. Sattui realized the precious crop of cabernet grapes that survived the fire had been ruined by the smoke. There would be no 2020 vintage. A freakishly dry winter led to a third calamity: By spring, the reservoir at another of Mr. Sattui’s…

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