Most recent 10 articles: New Yorker
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Why Is the Sea So Hot? - New Yorker (Mar 15) |
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Mar 15 · Find anything you save across the site in your account
In early 2023, climate scientists - and anyone else paying attention to the data - started to notice something strange. At the beginning of March, sea-surface temperatures began to rise. By April, they’d set a new record: the average temperature at the surface of the world’s oceans, excluding those at the poles, was just a shade under seventy degrees. Typically, the highest sea-surface temperatures of the year are observed in March, toward the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. Last year, temperatures remained abnormally high through the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn and beyond, breaking the monthly records for May, ... | By Elizabeth Kolbert Read more ...
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A smoking gun for Biden's big climate decision? - New Yorker (Oct 31) |
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Oct 31 · The Biden Administration faces one of its most profound climate choices this autumn: Should it continue to allow the expansion of liquefied-natural-gas exports, or should it halt the rapid buildout of this industry at least until it can come up with new guidelines? The stakes are enormous - the buildout of L.N.G. infrastructure in the United States is by far the largest example of fossil-fuel expansion currently proposed anywhere in the world. But there’s some new data that may make the Administration’s choice easier - or certainly starker.
The data are from an analysis by Robert Warren Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell who is one of the ... | By Ariella Elovic Read more ...
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Climate-change myths - New Yorker (Sep 04, 2023) |
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Sep 04, 2023 · Myth: There is nothing you can personally do to stop climate change.
Fact: There is something you can personally do, but you didn’t do it.
Myth: Our children will wander tornado-swept wastes strewn with the shards of a great civilization.
Fact: Typhoon-swept wastes will be more common.
Myth: Earth’s climate has changed naturally in the past, so modern climate change must also be a natural process.
Fact: Modern climate change is caused by human activity. For evidence, look at all that footage of smokestacks spewing methane, which then cuts to a time-lapse of a big traffic jam and over to a lush tree in a field rapidly desiccating as a lonesome elk walks ... | By David Grann Read more ...
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Heat waves and the sweep of history - New Yorker (Jul 26, 2023) |
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Jul 26, 2023 · I’ve been travelling by train across Central Europe this hot summer and, as often happens with Americans, I’ve been reminded of the sheer density of human history in older corners of the world. On Sunday morning, for instance, I spent a few hours at Hrad Devín, or Devín Castle, a stone ruin a dozen kilometres upriver from the center of the (low-key and utterly charming) Slovakian city of Bratislava, on the Austrian border, at the spot where the bluish-green Danube meets the olive Morava, flowing in from the mountains of the Czech-Polish border. It’s such a clearly strategic spot that it’s no wonder people have been settling here for millennia. There are excavations of an old Celtic ... | By Ben Taub Read more ...
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How a Disaster Expert Prepares for the Worst - New Yorker (May 22, 2023) |
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May 22, 2023 · In another time, or another place, Lucy Easthope says, she would have been a fortune-teller - a woman of opaque origin and beliefs, who travelled from campfire to town square, speaking of calamities that had come to pass and those which hung in the stars. Easthope, who is forty-four, is one of Britain’s most experienced disaster advisers. She has worked on almost every major emergency involving the deaths of British citizens since the September 11th attacks, a catalogue of destruction and surprise that includes storms, suicide bombings, air crashes, and chemical attacks. Depending on the assignment, Easthope might find herself immersed at a scene for days, months, or years. “I am ... | By Sam Knight Read more ...
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Briefly Noted Book Reviews - New Yorker (Mar 20, 2023) |
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Mar 20, 2023 · The Great Displacement, by Jake Bittle (Simon & Schuster). Roving across the United States, this survey explores the precarious environments in which many Americans now live, places irreversibly altered by floods, fires, hurricanes, and drought. “Managed retreat” is a popular term in climate discourse, but whole communities, from Arizona ranchers to Indigenous tribes in Louisiana, face disaster without any sort of plan. Victims of megafires in California find themselves at the mercy of the state’s housing crunch. Bittle argues that the approaches of both government and the insurance industry are totally inadequate for today’s dilemmas: Where should we build? What should we protect? ... | By Cal Newport Read more ...
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Why SUVs are still a huge environmental problem - New Yorker (Mar 03, 2023) |
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Mar 03, 2023 · Last year, the world’s S.U.V.s collectively released almost a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. If all the vehicles got together and formed their own country, it would be the world’s sixth-largest emitter, just after Japan. This is a disturbing figure, but, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, it gets worse. Globally, S.U.V. sales continue to grow, even though, last year, total passenger-vehicle sales fell. And the trend has now spread to electric vehicles: in 2022, for the first time, the sale of electric S.U.V.s edged out the sale of other electric cars.
The move toward bigger and heavier vehicles, it seems pretty obvious, is incompatible with ... | By Elizabeth Kolbert Read more ...
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“Weather Conditions,” by Clarence Major - New Yorker (Jan 16, 2023) |
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Jan 16, 2023 · Meteorologist says, “For your local weather,
here is a quick peek out your window.”
You look: you see houses leaning against one another for support -
as if the whole world is falling apart.
On a front porch, a woman is breastfeeding a newborn and
you know a pointless war rages on, on the other side of the river.
You see that poor beggar family with a little boy
walking along the winter beach. You see the retired general
going to the bar for his morning coffee.
Using your binoculars, you see through the window
of the watering hole a shivering couple huddled together
at a table in the corner. Two tables away, the ... | By Anjali Chandrashekar Read more ...
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Off the Grid in the Big City - New Yorker (Jan 16, 2023) |
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Jan 16, 2023 · Kudos to you! You’ve decided to do your part in saving the planet by going off the grid. Not keen on relocating to Maine or Montana? Manhattan works just fine. Josh Spodek went off the grid in May in his studio apartment in the West Village. He just disconnected the circuit breaker, and now his carbon footprint is about that of three average-sized house cats. Good news! Spodek has invited you over to show you the ropes. He’s the lean guy with the spiky brown hair and brown hiking shirt. Hungry? There’s some leftovers from yesterday’s solar-powered no-packaging vegan stew, which has been sitting out overnight, and which Spodek has sniffed, declaring, “I don’t think you’ll ... | By Elizabeth Kolbert Read more ...
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A Hawaiian Volcano vs. the Keeling Curve - New Yorker (Jan 02, 2023) |
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Jan 02, 2023 · Mauna Loa, the world’s biggest active volcano, on Hawaii’s Big Island, erupted last month, after almost four quiet decades. As lava oozed down the mountainside, residents packed go bags and amateur volcanologists flew in. Some Hawaiians came to make offerings to the goddess Pele; the mayor warned spectators not to throw marshmallows. Amid the hoopla, the lava shut down some scientific instruments. “We didn’t want to set a new record for the biggest hole in the curve,” Tim Lueker, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said recently. He meant the Keeling Curve - an authoritative illustration that the planet is warming - which had been tracking carbon dioxide almost ... | By Amanda Petrusich Read more ...
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