Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: In many coastal states, flood-prone areas have seen the highest rates of home construction since 2010, a study found, suggesting that the risks of climate change have yet to fundamentally change people’s behavior. The study, by Climate Central, a New Jersey research group, looked at the 10-year flood risk zone — the area with a 10 percent chance of flooding in any given year — and estimated the zone’s size in 2050. Then the group…

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Bob Henson writes: Even a seemingly minor change in average temperature, such as the 1°C rise observed globally over the last century, makes the most extreme heat events much more probable—and the greater the extreme, the bigger the proportional change, as shown in the illustration embedded below. The good ol' small-increases-in-the-mean-lead-to-large-increases-in-extremes bit. Works everytime, everywhere. https://t.co/ZUgmI1TBzz pic.twitter.com/nhqUzPLVFJ — Gernot Wagner (@GernotWagner) July 25, 2019 There’s bitter irony in the fact that the birthplace of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on…

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The Guardian reports: Leading architects and engineers are calling for all-glass skyscrapers to be banned because they are too difficult and expensive to cool. “If you’re building a greenhouse in a climate emergency, it’s a pretty odd thing to do to say the least,” said Simon Sturgis, an adviser to the government and the Greater London Authority, as well as chairman of the Royal Institute of British Architects sustainability group. “If you’re using standard glass facades you need a lot…

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BBC News reports: Wildfires are ravaging the Arctic, with areas of northern Siberia, northern Scandinavia, Alaska and Greenland engulfed in flames. Lightning frequently triggers fires in the region but this year they have been worsened by summer temperatures that are higher than average because of climate change. Plumes of smoke from the fires can be seen from space. Mark Parrington, a wildfires expert at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (Cams), described them as “unprecedented”. There are hundreds of fires covering…

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The Washington Post reports: A historic heat wave has toppled numerous long-standing temperature records with astonishing ease. On Wednesday and Thursday, new national heat records were set in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and temperatures rose to record highs in major cities such as Paris, which soared to 109 degrees. This is the hottest Paris has been in recorded history. The heat wave, caused by a massive area of high pressure extending into the upper atmosphere, also known as a…

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Science News reports: A whopping new estimate of the power of planting trees could rearrange to-do lists for fighting climate change. Planting trees on 0.9 billion hectares of land could trap about two-thirds the amount of carbon released by human activities since the start of the Industrial Revolution, a new study finds. The planet has that much tree-friendly land available for use. Without knocking down cities or taking over farms or natural grasslands, reforested pieces could add up to new…

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Brian Kahn reports: We’ve reached the point in our wild planetary experiment where humans are memorializing the things we’re knowingly wiping out. Iceland has lost its first glacier to rising temperatures. Now, scientists from Rice University and Iceland are planning to install a plaque near the sad pile of ice and snow formerly known as Ok Glacier. The researchers say it’s the first memorial to a disappearing glacier, but climate change ensures it almost certainly will not be the last….

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Dawn Stover writes: Those wispy stripes left behind by airplanes have a surprisingly forceful, albeit short-lived, effect on the climate. After accounting for factors such as aircraft improvements that are expected to reduce soot emissions, climate researchers at the German Aerospace Center recently estimated that the heat-trapping effects of cirrus cloudiness caused by contrails will “increase significantly over time” because of the large projected increases in air traffic—which is growing so fast that efforts to make airplanes less polluting won’t…

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The Guardian reports: Taking a long-haul flight generates more carbon emissions than the average person in dozens of countries around the world produces in a whole year, a new Guardian analysis has found. The figures highlight the disproportionate carbon footprint of those who can afford to fly, with even a short-haul return flight from London to Edinburgh contributing more CO2 than the mean annual emissions of a person in Uganda or Somalia. 2019 is forecast to be another record-breaking year…

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