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Nature
Earth is hurtling towards its average temperature rising by 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. One climate model suggests that the likelihood of reaching that threshold in 2023 is now 55%.
The 1.5 °C figure was a preferred maximum warming limit set by the United Nations in the landmark 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. Climate scientists use different models to make predictions. Breaching the Paris limit requires a long-term trend of warming of 1.5 °C or more, but some research groups tracking average annual temperatures in isolation are already predicting 1.5 °C of warming this year. In May, a World Meteorological Organization report said that there was a 66% chance that the average annual temperature would breach 1.5 °C of warming between 2023 and 2027.
In its August 2023 monthly update, Berkeley Earth — a non-profit climate-monitoring organization — has put the chance of 2023 being on average 1.5 °C warmer at 55%. This is up from a chance of less than 1% predicted by the team before the start of the year, and the 20% chance estimated using July’s figures. “So this year has played out in a very unusual fashion,” says Robert Rohde, Berkeley Earth’s lead scientist in Zurich, Switzerland.
Think this summer was bad? It might be the best one you and I will ever see
Salon
This year we saw the hottest July ever recorded, and the same was true again in August. In fact, 2023 is on track to be the hottest year so far recorded, breaking the record set by 2020 and 2016. Over the past few months, more than 6,500 daily heat records have been broken in the U.S. alone, and in some places the roads became so hot that people suffered serious burns from falling on them. Terrible floods have ripped through China, Spain, Greece and elsewhere. Wildfires raged in Canada, the Canary Islands, Maui and parts of Europe. A tropical storm hit Los Angeles, the first in living memory. Wind speeds of Hurricane Lee, in the Atlantic Ocean, increased from 80 mph to 165 mph in roughly 24 hours.
The climate catastrophe is already here. We've been watching it unfold in real time on the news and over social media. Some have witnessed it first-hand, losing their homes, being forced to evacuate under emergency conditions and even losing their lives or the lives of friends and family. For those sensitive to human suffering and the grave injustices driving the climate crisis, this summer has been difficult to deal with. It's been one extreme weather event, one shattered record, one shocking tragedy after another — and though the summer is now officially over, there's more to come.
Much more to come. The disturbing fact that puts everything in perspective is that this summer will likely be among the mildest summers that you and I will experience for the rest of our lives.
Winter just ended in South America. It’s 110 degrees.
Grist
As the Northern Hemisphere emerges from the hottest summer on record, South America has, for now anyway, taken up the planet’s extreme-heat mantle. Winter just ended there, but a large swath of the continent is sweltering under an unprecedented heat dome that’s pushing temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of Brazil. […]
The worst of the heat has been in Brazil, where searing highs between 107 and 111 degrees F made the country one of the hottest places in the world, according to the weather organization MetSul Meteorologia. It had predicted conditions in the nation’s south-central and southeastern regions would rival “the deserts of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.” The hottest temperature ever recorded in Brazil is 112.6 degrees F, set during the late spring of 2020.
As odd as it may seem for winter in South America’s largest nation to feel like summer in the Middle East, the blistering conditions should come as no surprise: Scientists have long warned that climate change is making heat waves worse, and the ongoing El Niño is only amplifying the effect. In July, the Earth was as hot as it has been in 120,000 years.
Antarctic winter sea ice hits record low, sparking climate worries from scientists
ABC News (Australia)
Sea ice that packs the ocean around Antarctica hit record-low levels this winter, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), adding to scientists' fears the impact of climate change at the southern pole is ramping up.
Researchers warn the shift can have dire consequences for animals such as penguins which breed and rear their young on the sea ice, while also hastening global warming by reducing how much sunlight is reflected by white ice back into space.
Antarctic sea ice extent peaked this year on September 10, when it covered 16.96 million square kilometres, the lowest winter maximum since satellite records began in 1979, the NSIDC said on Monday.
Flowers are starting to spread in Antarctica and experts say that's not good news
Unilad
The freezing continent is home to just two species of flowering plants: Antarctic hair grass and Antarctic pearlwort.
As it's mostly covered in ice and snow, there previously hasn't been much space left for plants to grow… However, as global temperatures continue to rise and ice in Antarctica continues to melt, researchers have found that plants on the continent are growing more quickly. […]
Comparing the results with surveys from the previous 50 years, they found that the sites had not only become more densely populated by the plants, but that they had also grown faster each year as the climate got warmer.
The results were staggering, with the Antarctic hair grass growing as much in 2009-2019 as it had in the entire 50 years from 1960 from 2009.
Swiss glaciers lose 10% of their volume in two years
The Guardian
Swiss glaciers have lost 10% of their volume in just two years, a report has found.
Scientists have said climate breakdown caused by the burning of fossil fuels is the cause of unusually hot summers and winters with very low snow volume, which have caused the accelerating melts. The volume lost during the hot summers of 2022 and 2023 is the same as that lost between 1960 and 1990.
Heat extremes in the soil are underestimated
EurekAlert! AAAS
For the study, the research team coordinated by UFZ remote sensing scientist Dr Almudena García-García collected data from a wide range of sources: data from meteorological measuring stations, remote sensing satellites, the ERA5-Land data reanalysis set, and simulations of Earth system models. The researchers fed these data into the TX7d index, which is defined as the average of the daily maximum temperature in the hottest week of the year. It reflects the intensity of heat extremes (i.e. how high extreme temperatures can be). The researchers thus calculated the index for the 10-cm-thick upper soil layer and for the near-surface air at a height of up to 2 m for the years 1996 to 2021. At two thirds of the 118 meteorological measuring stations evaluated, the trend in heat extremes is stronger in the soil than in the air.
“This means that heat extremes develop much faster in the soil than in the air”, García-García, lead author of the study. Based on the data available, this is especially true in Germany, Italy, and southern France. In terms of figures, according to station data, the intensity of heat extremes in Central Europe is increasing 0.7°C/decade faster in the soil than in the air. […]
The fact that extreme temperatures can develop quickly in the soil and differ considerably from those in the air layer near the soil has important consequences. If the temperature of the soil is higher than that of the air, additional heat is released into the lower atmosphere, thereby causing atmospheric temperatures to rise. “Soil temperature acts as a factor in the feedback between soil moisture and temperature and can thus intensify heat periods in certain regions”, explains Dr Jian Peng, co-author and head of the UFZ Remote Sensing Department.
New Study Definitively Confirms Gulf Stream Weakening
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The Gulf Stream transport of water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with 99% certainty that this weakening is more than expected from random chance, according to a new study.
The Gulf Stream – which is a major ocean current off the U.S. East Coast and a part of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation – plays an important role in weather and climate, and a weakening could have significant implications.
“We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past,” states the journal article, “Robust weakening of the Gulf Stream during the past four decades observed in the Florida Straits,” published in Geophysical Research Letters. The Florida Straits, located between the Florida Keys, Cuba, and The Bahamas, has been the site of many ocean observation campaigns dating to the 1980s and earlier. “This significant trend has emerged from the dataset only over the past ten years, the first unequivocal evidence for a recent multidecadal decline in this climate-relevant component of ocean circulation.”
Road Hazard: Evidence Mounts on Toxic Pollution from Tires
Yale Environment 360
For two decades, researchers worked to solve a mystery in West Coast streams. Why, when it rained, were large numbers of spawning coho salmon dying? As part of an effort to find out, scientists placed fish in water that contained particles of new and old tires. The salmon died, and the researchers then began testing the hundreds of chemicals that had leached into the water.
A 2020 paper revealed the cause of mortality: a chemical called 6PPD that is added to tires to prevent their cracking and degradation. When 6PPD, which occurs in tire dust, is exposed to ground-level ozone, it’s transformed into multiple other chemicals, including 6PPD-quinone, or 6PPD-q. The compound is acutely toxic to four of 11 tested fish species, including coho salmon.
Mystery solved, but not the problem, for the chemical continues to be used by all major tire manufacturers and is found on roads and in waterways around the world. Though no one has studied the impact of 6PPD-q on human health, it’s also been detected in the urine of children, adults, and pregnant women in South China. The pathways and significance of that contamination are, so far, unknown.
“Ubiquitous” – Scientists Discover That the Oceans Release Microplastics Into the Atmosphere
Sci Tech Daily
Microplastic particles can be found in the marine atmosphere, even in the world’s most isolated regions. These minuscule particles originate from land but are also released back into the atmosphere from the ocean, according to a study led by Dr. Barbara Scholz-Böttcher of the University of Oldenburg, with collaboration from German and Norwegian researchers. The team studied air samples from several locations on the Norwegian coast extending to the Arctic. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature Communications.
“With our study, we present data on the mass load of different types of plastic in the marine atmosphere for the first time,” said Isabel Goßmann, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oldenburg’s Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM) and first author of the paper. The research team collected the samples during an expedition with the Research Vessel Heincke in 2021. […]
The analysis revealed the omnipresence of polyester particles. Polyethylene terephthalate particles, which presumably entered the atmosphere in the form of textile fibers, were detected in all samples…
Tire wear particles, the tiny debris abraded from tires during driving and especially braking, were identified as another major source of microplastics.
Houston Chronicle
The Dallas metro area releases the third-most greenhouse gas emissions out of all cities worldwide, with annual carbon dioxide tonnage far outpacing Houston and mega-cities like Guangzhou, China.
According to a new tool released at the climate change conference COP27 in November, the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas are the world's No. 1 and 2 transportation-related greenhouse gas cities. The Dallas metro area, a large swath of North Texas including parts of Dallas, Tarrant, Denton, and several other counties, produced nearly 24 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2021. The Houston area released about 20.4 million tons over the same period.
Electric Vehicles Are Not the Solution. Sustainable Transit Is.
Chicago Policy Review
[…] Unlike investments in EVs, investments in sustainable transit solutions like light rail and bus rapid transit (BRT) can reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by minimizing car-centrism and improving public transit access.
EV production is unsustainable. EV batteries are composed of several rare earth minerals, including cobalt and lithium. Mining companies expose nearby communities to high levels of toxins that are especially harmful to children. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they violate human rights via unsafe working conditions. There is also a lack of regulation over the large volume of water necessary to mine lithium, causing water shortages for local farmers and causing harm to the surrounding ecology. Moreover, cars require large amounts of steel, lead, plastics, and other chemicals whose production contributes to high greenhouse gas emissions.
Although EVs do not directly emit fossil fuels, the energy generated to charge an EV predominately comes from fossil fuel power plants. Power plants account for two billion metric tons of CO2 per year, a value that could exponentially grow with greater use of EVs.
Canada’s unprecedented fire season burns into fall
The Washington Post
An unprecedented fire season in Canada that began in May is set to roll into October still going strong. About 44 million acres (18 million hectares) have burned this year as 2023 continues its journey deep off the charts when it comes to areas scorched across the nation.
Large fires in the west engulfed hundreds of thousands of acres of forest over recent days as a strong area of low pressure offshore helped crank up winds in the drought-afflicted region. Mixed fire weather signals ahead include wind and some rain for British Columbia and Alberta, a building heat dome in the country’s center and a descent into the coming cold season.
In a typical year, the fire season would be ending or finished by this point. But it may take winter snows to finally smother the longest-lived blazes. […]
Large fires continue to burn in eight of Canada’s provinces, nearly from coast-to-coast.
Canadian wildfires could keep burning through winter, minister says
Reuters
Warm, dry conditions in Canada could ignite new wildfires in September and it is possible that some of the blazes could remain active through the winter season, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said on Thursday.
Canada is enduring its worst wildfire season on record, with over 166,000 square kilometers (64,000 miles), or an area equivalent to four Switzerlands, of land already burnt. As of Thursday, more than 1,000 fires were active across the country, including some 650 deemed out of control. […]
While forest fires are not uncommon in Canada, Wilkinson said climate change was amplifying their frequency and intensity.
"The science is clear: The root cause of this is climate change," Wilkinson told a briefing.
‘Treated like machines’: wildfire fighters describe a mental health crisis on the frontlines
The Narwhal
In June, as the winds howled through the largest wildfire in British Columbia’s history, 50-foot-tall spruce trees, burnt and blackened from the flames, came crashing down within metres of Rose Velisek.
Velisek, a third-year wildland firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, was told by a superior to “keep her head up … but keep working, keep hosing down the fire,” so she swallowed her fear and did as she was instructed.
“There’s this sense of pressure and anxiety towards getting the job done,” Velisek says. “It doesn’t matter if your safety is going to be compromised, you still gotta be out there doing it.”
The day left her uneasy — a feeling that would grow over the next two months, as her crew worked 16-hour days on back-to-back deployments on three major wildfires in northern B.C.
Wildfires turn Canada’s vast forests from carbon sink into super-emitter
The Guardian
The vast swaths of pine, spruce and larch forest that blanket much of Canada have been prized for generations. Not only do they provide a home to hundreds of species – including some of the most threatened in the country – but they also absorb more greenhouse gases than they emit, acting as a huge carbon sink.
This summer, however, as flames devoured one of the largest contiguous stretches of woodland on the planet, 2bn tonnes (2.2bn tons) of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere.
Emissions from Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season are probably triple the country’s annual carbon footprint, experts warn, as climate systems reach a “tipping point”. The trajectory of the country’s wildfires has raised questions about how Canada can better tackle the blazes – and whether the issue is a global problem as nations race to reduce the volume of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
New Study on How Governments Can Fund Radical Ecological and Social Policies without GDP Growth
Freie Universität Berlin
[…] “Halting global climate collapse requires massive increases in public spending. Only through public investment can we achieve a timely transition away from fossil fuels,” says Christopher Olk, a doctoral researcher at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin and lead author of the study “How to Pay for Saving the World: Modern Monetary Theory for a Degrowth Transition.” It is widely believed that governments can only increase spending if they first grow GDP to increase tax revenue, otherwise they risk inflation or “unsustainable” levels of public debt. This presents a problem, because GDP growth works against ecological objectives. Indeed, a majority of climate scientists is now calling for “degrowth” – a democratically planned, equitable reduction of less necessary forms of production – in high-income countries in order to enable faster decarbonization. Key degrowth measures include the expansion of universal public services and a job guarantee in sustainable sectors.
Degrowth presents governments with the question of how to finance the necessary ecological and social measures during this process of transformation – a question that Olk and his fellow research team members want to answer. They argue that public investment can be increased without GDP growth and that the process of degrowth simultaneously dismantles destructive, less necessary industries and prevents inflation.
The article, published in the journal Ecological Economics, draws on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to explain why states with monetary sovereignty are not subject to financial constraints
How America’s War Devastated Afghanistan’s Environment
New Lines Magazine
Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land.
Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war.
Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have carried down from the mountains. A gritty wind stings their chapped cheeks as they load the heavy trucks beside them. In these parts of Achin, nothing else moves in the bleached landscape. For years, locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination.
In April 2017, the U.S. military dropped the most powerful conventional bomb ever used in combat here — the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known unofficially as the “mother of all bombs,” or MOAB.
SkyNews
The UK's largest untapped oil and gas field has been given the green light by the regulator, despite warnings about the climate damage of new fossil fuel projects. […]
Green Party MP Caroline Lucas called the decision "morally obscene".
She said energy security and cheaper bills would be better achieved by "upscaling abundant and affordable renewables, and properly insulating the nation - ensuring clean air and water, thriving nature and wildlife, and high-quality skilled and stable jobs in the process". […]
The leading global climate science authority the IPCC, and the world's foremost energy agency, the IEA, say no new oil and gas projects can go ahead if the world is to limit warming to internationally agreed safer limits.
Carbon Credits: How This Popular Climate “Solution” Could Tank Our Progress
The New Republic
What could be worth giving up a tenth of your country? The Liberian government reportedly plans to do exactly that and sell control of its intact rainforests to the scion of one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers.
A draft memorandum of understanding, leaked last month, between Liberia’s Ministry of Finance and Blue Carbon LLC—one of many companies started by a 38-year-old member of Dubai’s royal family, Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum—would commit the small African nation to hand over exclusive rights to one million hectares of forest lands. In exchange, Blue Carbon will transform that land into “environmental assets,” including carbon credits: essentially, sellable units of promised emissions reductions. Such credits are, in general, intended to offset actual pollution by businesses, individuals, or governments. They can be bought either as a voluntary means of reducing carbon footprints or as a way to comply with government climate goals and regulations.
For oil-rich countries like the United Arab Emirates—the host of this year’s U.N. climate talks, COP28—“carbon offset” schemes like the one described above hold incredible promise; the UAE is banking heavily on offsets to meet its own climate goals and has emphasized their importance in the lead-up to COP28. It’s a compelling pitch: Any emissions polluters can’t curb themselves can be outsourced to someone else. […]
The only problem is that carbon offsets of all kinds are increasingly being outed as total bullshit.
Techno-fixes to climate change aren’t living up to the hype /
The Verge
An updated road map for combating climate change pours cold water on the idea that unproven technologies can play a major role in averting disaster.
Today, the International Energy Agency (IEA) updated its road map for the energy sector to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It doubles down on the need to swiftly switch to renewable energy while minimizing the use of technologies that are still largely in demonstration and prototype phase today, including carbon capture and hydrogen fuels. […]
High-tech fixes to climate change… , which include hydrogen fuel cells for heavy vehicles and devices that filter CO2 emissions from smokestacks or ambient air, now account for 35 percent of emissions reductions rather than nearly 50 percent.
Why? They just haven’t lived up to the hype, the report says pretty plainly.
“I think that some realism has kicked in from this, and I wonder how that realism from this report will kind of perforate through those industries,” says Dave Jones, global insights lead at energy think tank Ember. [...]
“Removing carbon from the atmosphere is very costly. We must do everything possible to stop putting it there in the first place,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a press release.
‘Climate villain’: scientists say Rupert Murdoch wielded his media empire to sow confusion and doubt
The Guardian
Scientists have described the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch as a “climate villain” who has used his television and newspaper empire to promote climate science denial and delay action. […]
Dr Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist at Australian National University, said: “It’s hard to think of another person who has single-handedly done more to muddy the public’s understanding of climate change.
“We have wasted decades debating the fundamental science in the media, when we really should have been focused on urgently implementing climate policies that will genuinely reduce emissions.”
PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ harming wildlife the world over: Study
Mongabay
In Hawaii and elsewhere in the North Pacific, few hatchlings are emerging from the nests of endangered hawksbill and green sea turtles. In Wisconsin, some tree swallows have failed to produce offspring. In California, infectious diseases are now more common in southern sea otters. In Michigan, bluegills are swimming slower. In the Arctic, some hooded seals and their pups have thyroid problems. And in North Carolina’s Cape Fear River, American alligators have been found with lesions and unhealed, infected wounds.
What each of these disparate places, animals and maladies have in common is high exposure to long-lived, human-made chemicals: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS.
While it’s now well known that human exposure to PFAS can cause cancer, reduce immunity, impair fertility, cause liver damage and trigger myriad other health problems, scientists are becoming increasingly aware that wildlife is also at risk.
A new study published September 26th in The Science of the Total Environment documents how exposure affects animals in the wild and includes an updated map pinpointing wildlife exposure to PFAS on every continent, with hotspots in the U.S., Europe, China and Australia. But the study’s lead author, David Andrews, notes that pretty much anywhere you look for these long-lived “forever chemicals,” you’ll find them.
The Colorado Sun
Many plants, animals and insects are moving to higher elevations to escape the effects of a warming climate, but a strategy that is useful today may threaten their long-term future.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Denver and Georgia Institute of Technology say flying species including bees and moths are having a hard time moving to higher ground, which makes them even more vulnerable and puts them at higher risk for extinction, and that could create serious implications for humans in the future.
“When we think about where species will be able to live under climate change in the coming decades, we need to remember that animals are sensitive to more than just how hot or cold (environments) are,” said Michael Moore, assistant professor in the department of integrative biology at CU Denver, a lead researcher in a study published earlier this month that examined the dangers climate change poses to flying insects.
“Hot strike summer” was just the beginning of labor’s grappling with climate change
QZ
After the summer of 2023, the hottest in recorded history, it is not just laborers but labor itself that is in the hot seat. Workers who spend their days exposed to the elements may find respite as the seasons turn, but as more of the world starts responding to climate change, the question remains: Where will organized labor stand as the heating of the Earth continues?
The effects of a warming planet are evolving rapidly. This hot strike summer, featuring everyone from flight attendants to Starbucks baristas, offers some clues as to how the labor movement must evolve as well. […]
But demands for better labor practices in the face of climate change still risk being framed as clashing against the needs for urgent climate action: the “We must act more ambitiously, yesterday!” imperative. California’s firefighters, for example, faced pushback when they sought to improve wages for preventative fire management. Critics argued that the added expense might slow down brush-clearing drives before a brutal wildfire season. It’s a tricky balancing act for a state that “sources” much of its firefighting force from prisons, for pennies on the dollar. […]
It’s not just infrastructure and logistics workers who are caught in the crosshairs of climate change. American farmworkers, too, will become more critical as the heating of the planet continues.
U.S. Heat Deaths Will Soar as the Climate Crisis Worsens
Scientific American
As the climate crisis continues, the U.S. will see heat-related deaths multiply, according to research that scientists say is a sobering reminder of the importance of adapting to rising temperatures and reining in planet-warming pollution.
Across more than 100 U.S. cities, nearly 2,000 people died each year from exposure to extreme heat or cold between 1987 and 2000, the period over which data correlated to individual cities are available. By the 2010s the number of annual deaths was closer to 12,500. And when the global average temperature reaches three degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages—which scientists have said could occur around the end of the century, given current emissions reduction plans—the annual totals will be around 63,000 deaths related to extreme temperatures, according to research published last month in GeoHealth. Most of that growth comes from deaths in extreme heat.
The research is a direct response to a talking point by climate deniers that holds that because much of the U.S. has historically been more vulnerable to cold, a warming climate isn’t concerning, says study co-author Jangho Lee, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Their argument was that since there are more cold-related deaths, compared to heat-related deaths, global warming will actually benefit human health,” he says. “We did not think that was true.”
How climate change could make fungal diseases worse
Knowable Magazine
[…] For a long time, fungi have been a neglected group of pathogens. By the early 2000s, researchers were already warning that climate change would make bacterial, viral and parasite-caused infectious diseases like cholera, dengue and malaria more widespread. “But people were not focused at all on the fungi,” says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That’s because, until recently, fungi haven’t troubled humans much.
Our high body temperature helps explain why. Many fungi grow best at around 12 to 30 degrees Celsius (roughly 54 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit). So, while they find it easy to infect trees, crops, amphibians, fish, reptiles and insects — organisms that do not maintain consistently high internal body temperatures — fungi usually don’t thrive inside the warm bodies of mammals, Casadevall wrote in an overview of immunity to invasive fungal diseases in the 2022 Annual Review of Immunology. Among the few fungi that do infect humans, some dangerous ones, such as species of Cryptococcus, Penicillium and Aspergillus, have historically been reported more in tropical and subtropical regions than in cooler ones. This, too, suggests that climate may limit their reach.
Today, however, the planet’s warming climate may be helping some fungal pathogens spread to new areas.
How Climate Change is Making it Harder Than Ever to Own a Home
Architectural Digest
[…] Where should I move next? […]
As the United States faces increasingly catastrophic fires, extreme heat, droughts, and hurricanes, among other climate disasters, concerned residents are turning to Keenan to tell them which parts of the country might offer relief. In 2019, a piece in the New York Times centered on [Jesse] Keenan’s research proposed Duluth, Minnesota as a potential asylum for those looking to escape the most dangerous impacts of climate change. By 2023, thousands of people had moved to the small city in hopes of a future with fewer climate risks. “These things are real,” Keenan says of the way climate is impacting both the cities and the homes in which people choose to spend their lives. “It’s slow numbers right now, but [it] will grow.”
Many realtors who live and work in areas with higher climate risks see this trend too. However, the force behind these moves is not the disasters themselves, but the increasing costs to take care of and own a home in these locales. “I wouldn’t say that the wildfires themselves are driving people away,” Debra Miller, a Sacramento-based real estate agent with Century 21 Select Real Estate, tells AD. “It’s the cost of maintaining their properties and the cost of insurance.” […]
As climate change continues to worsen, Keenan believes there will be sorting at a hyper-local scale based on individual values and measures of risk. “We’ll begin to separate ourselves, even very locally (like on a block or lot) between different measures of the quality of the building, the architectural elements, and also physical risk attributes. So we’ll begin to see a world with lower quality housing and higher quality housing.”
FEMA document: $8B in disaster aid to be withheld due in event of government shutdown
The federal government is planning to withhold $8 billion in disaster funds from states due to temporary new spending restrictions outlined in a previously unreported document that shows how the budget turmoil in Congress could affect the nation.
The restrictions, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency imposed on itself, threaten to delay thousands of FEMA-funded projects in 27 states and territories aimed at repairing roads, buildings and other facilities damaged by disasters in recent years, the FEMA document shows.
Puerto Rico is projected to be hit the hardest, as it struggles to rebuild from Hurricane Maria in 2017, earthquakes in 2020 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022. The financially strained U.S. territory could have up to $2.6 billion withheld for projects such as rebuilding critical facilities like hospitals and the electrical grid, the FEMA document shows.
Food prices are rising as countries limit exports. Blame climate change, El Nino and Russia’s war
AP News
How do you cook a meal when a staple ingredient is unaffordable?
This question is playing out in households around the world as they face shortages of essential foods like rice, cooking oil and onions. That is because countries have imposed restrictions on the food they export to protect their own supplies from the combined effect of the war in Ukraine, El Nino’s threat to food production and increasing damage from climate change.
For Caroline Kyalo, a 28-year-old who works in a salon in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, it was a question of trying to figure out how to cook for her two children without onions. Restrictions on the export of the vegetable by neighboring Tanzania has led prices to triple. […]
But that cushion has shrunk in the past two years, and climate change means food supplies could very quickly run short of demand and spike prices, said [Joseph] Glauber, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“I think increased volatility is certainly the new normal,” he said.
‘Too hot’ for salmon: How climate change is contributing to the Yukon salmon collapse
Alaska Public Media
Scientists know one thing for sure about the collapse of Yukon River king and chum salmon: there’s more than one culprit.
“It’s really hard and probably unrealistic to just point your finger at one thing and say that’s what’s doing it,” said Jayde Ferguson, a fish pathologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Researchers have identified many threats facing Yukon king and chum salmon, and those threats pop up at each stage of the salmon life cycle — when salmon hatch in freshwater streams, as they swim down the Yukon to the ocean, where they spend most of their lives and on their arduous journey back upriver to spawn and die.
Scientists think many of these threats are connected to climate change. Ferguson studies one of them, a parasite named ichthyophonus, at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game lab in Anchorage.
Inside scientists' mission to save America’s wine industry from climate change
AP via Salem Statesman Journal
The U.S. West Coast produces over 90% of America's wine, but the region is also prone to wildfires — a combustible combination that spelled disaster for the industry in 2020 and one that scientists are scrambling to neutralize.
Sample a good wine and you might get notes of oak or red fruit. But sip on wine made from grapes that were penetrated by smoke, and it could taste like someone dumped the contents of an ashtray into your glass. […]
The risk to America's premier wine-making regions — where wildfires caused billions of dollars in losses in 2020 — is growing, with climate change deepening drought and overgrown forests becoming tinderboxes. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, grapes are the highest-value crop in the United States, with 1 million acres of grape-bearing land, 96% of it on the West Coast. […]
"What's at stake is the ability to continue to make wine in areas where smoke exposures might be more common,” said Tom Collins, a wine scientist at Washington State University.
Protecting Cultural Heritage in a Warming World
NPR
[…] Efforts to conserve historic landmarks have traditionally focused on keeping them close to what they looked like in the past. That's becoming an increasingly untenable notion, explained Marcy Rockman, a researcher and consultant in Washington DC who works at the intersection of climate change and cultural heritage. "Our whole mandate is we try to keep it unchanging. We try to preserve it exactly as it is," Rockman said. "That is really hard to do under climate change."
Rockman, who served as the National Park Service's climate change adaptation coordinator for cultural resources for seven years until 2018, said there are various ways to plan for the future of cultural heritage in the face of human-caused climate change, from moving a landmark out of harm's way to making a deliberate choice to do nothing about it. […]
Other experts question whether it's worth rebuilding anything in a wildfire or flood-prone zone at all.
"Why are we reconstructing things?," said the Sarasota, Fla.-based architect and historic preservationist, Marty Hylton. "Why aren't we focusing on relocating things, or at least documenting them before they're gone?"
The spruce trees like old people
Anchorage Daily News
On the Kobuk River— It’s been a rainy fall. Again today the clouds are low, mist fills the air and raindrops pelt the windows. Water drips off tree branches. Down the hill through the wet grasses and fireweed and roses is the gray shine of the huge flooded river, 550 yards bank to bank, too muddy to drink, and now not easy to even clamber ashore in the endless thickets of submerged willows. […]
Here on my home hill, on the west end of Paugnaktagruk bluff, this fall the birch and alder leaves are blighted, blotched with brown, and the spruce look worse — not green and shiny as usual, but now frosted with dead needles from the summer’s plague of spruce needle rust. Daily, Aakatchaq and I walk the game trail that leads up the ridge. In the lush forest, we marvel at mushrooms, everywhere, and beautiful lichens and glowing green moss. Around us the spruce trees look like old people. They remind me of friends I haven’t seen in 20 years, gray and disconcerting to see so aged, different, but still recognizable as old loyal friends.
I know these trails well, from a lifetime walking them, and now even the trails feel strange. The lack of animals is obvious; these ancient paths have hardly been used and are overgrown, not marked and marred with hoof prints, moose and caribou turds or splats of bear scat.
The river’s been at flood stage for so long it’s starting to feel like a new normal. […]
In the afternoon the sky is brightening as I put on the AM radio to listen to “All Things Considered.” Aakatchaq brings in a small bag of muktuk. We have a box of lovely garden vegetables, and I slice homegrown turnips and carrots into the whale oil and get out dried caribou from last spring. We listen to news, of President Biden at a meeting of world leaders, and later a story about the percentage of Americans who now believe in climate change. Apparently, an even smaller percentage are also having mental anguish over it. I listen, chew muktuk and mumble self-deprecating comments about my own mental instability caused by lack of caribou. I joke about whether the announcer calibrated her numbers against the percentage of Americans who believe in gravity, or know which planet food comes from.
“Unprecedented” youth climate trial demands action from 32 European governments
Ars Technica
The largest climate case ever raised before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) kicked off Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, Reuters reported. It's an "unprecedented" effort from six young Portuguese people—ages 11 to 24—who allege that 32 European governments have failed to honor the Paris Agreement to mitigate climate change impacts, causing significant harms and violating their human rights.
Filed in 2020 after a devastating 2017 Portuguese wildfire that killed 120, the complaint alleged that inadequate state measures to reverse climate change have resulted in more frequent heatwaves and wildfires, increasing the risks of heat-related morbidity and fatal illnesses. The plaintiffs also argued that their rights to life, privacy, and family life are being violated, as well as their rights to a life free of discrimination. And because states are unlikely to act fast enough, they've alleged that any current risks are "set to increase significantly over the course of their lifetimes and will also affect any children they may have."
A victory in the ECHR could lead to a ruling forcing European governments to act faster to meet ambitious climate goals—likely by phasing out fossil fuels, reducing emissions, restricting companies from contributing to emissions released overseas, and limiting imports of goods produced by releasing emissions.