Most recent 20 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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From Climate Exhortation to Climate Execution - New Yorker  (Dec 27, 2022) |
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Dec 27, 2022 · There are about a hundred and forty million homes in the United States. Two-thirds, or about eighty-five million, of them are detached single-family houses; the rest are apartment units or trailer homes. That’s what American prosperity looks like: since the end of the Second World War, our extraordinary wealth has been devoted, above all, to the project of building bigger houses farther apart from one another. The great majority of them are heated with natural gas or oil, and parked in their garages and driveways or on nearby streets are some two hundred and ninety million vehicles, an estimated ninety-nine per cent of which, as of August, run on gasoline. It took centuries to build ... | By Bill McKibben Read more ... |
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The Mail - New Yorker  (Dec 26, 2022) |
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The Mail - New Yorker  (Dec 26, 2022) |
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Dec 26, 2022 · Elizabeth Kolbert, in her sweeping survey of climate change (“A Vast Experiment,” November 28th), makes a stimulating contribution to the national conversation about this challenge. I especially appreciated her discussion of the role of narratives in spurring (or stalling) action. As Kolbert points out, pessimistic narratives can be limiting. But, in the U.S., examples of making radical change to curb or adapt to the climate crisis are hard to come by. If we incorporated instances of progress into our story of the crisis, perhaps our culture would be more deeply engaged with transitioning to sustainable energy. One generative source of alternative narratives is Europe, where ... | By Ed Caesar Read more ... |
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Tragicomic Creatures Great and Small - New Yorker  (Dec 26, 2022) |
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Dec 26, 2022 · Imperilled fantastical beasts drawn by a great. For several years, until the pandemic and declining health dictated otherwise, Edward Koren, who turned eighty-seven this month, made a point of trading life in northern New England for a few weeks in Paris, where he set up shop at Idem, the still thrumming nineteenth-century printing studio in Montparnasse. A contributor to The New Yorker for sixty years - more than a thousand cartoons and thirty-one covers, and counting - Ed has always been an eclectic cottage industrialist, bringing forth sui-generis art and artifacts (drawings, lithographs, books, utilitarian ceramics, wood sculptures, repurposed household objects), each of ... | By Ed Caesar Read more ... |
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The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer - New Yorker  (Dec 19, 2022) |
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Dec 19, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. On the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California, between the orchards and the ocean, sits an inconspicuous warehouse, its windows tinted brown and its exterior painted a dull gray. The facility has almost no signage, and its name doesn’t appear on Google Maps. A small label on the door reads “Google AI Quantum.” Inside, the computer is being reinvented from scratch. In September, Hartmut Neven, the founder of the lab, gave me a tour. Neven, originally from Germany, is a bald fifty-seven-year-old who belongs to the modern cast of hybridized executive-mystics. He talked of our quantum future with a blend of ... | By Janet Malcolm Read more ... |
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The fusion breakthrough suggests that maybe someday we'll have a second sun - New Yorker  (Dec 12, 2022) |
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Dec 12, 2022 · On Tuesday, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in fusion energy: according to early reports, scientists at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, have succeeded for the first time in making their complex and expensive machinery produce more power than it uses, if only for an instant. It’s a breakthrough of great significance - in essence, the researchers are learning to build a second sun. And it was greeted with the requisite hosannas - the Washington Post described it as a “holy grail,” a “major milestone in the decades-long, multibillion-dollar quest to develop a technology that provides unlimited, cheap, clean power.” | By Bill McKibben Read more ... |
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An Alaskan Town Is Losing Ground - and a Way of Life - New Yorker  (Nov 28, 2022) |
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Nov 28, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Typhoon Merbok began forming in the central Pacific Ocean during the second week of September. Fuelled by unusually warm waters, the storm system moved north and east toward Alaska, and by the time it crossed the Aleutian Islands weather buoys were recording forty-foot waves and winds of seventy-five miles an hour. On September 17th, Merbok, which had been downgraded to an extratropical storm, reached the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and the Bering Sea inlet of Norton Sound, one of the strongest storms to hit the area in fifty years. In the barrier village of Shaktoolik, Merbok wiped out a protective berm. In Golovin, ... | By Emily Witt Read more ... |
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Climate Change from A to Z - New Yorker  (Nov 28, 2022) |
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Nov 28, 2022 · The stories we tell ourselves about the future. Svante Arrhenius was, by nature, an optimist. He believed that science should - and could - be accessible to all. In 1891, he got his first teaching job, at an experimental university in Stockholm called the Högskola. That same year, he founded the Stockholm Physics Society, which met every other Saturday evening. For a fee of one Swedish crown, anyone could join. Among the society’s earliest members was a Högskola student named Sofia Rudbeck, who was described by a contemporary as both “an excellent chemist” and “a ravishing beauty.” Arrhenius began writing her poetry, and soon the two wed. Physics Society meetings ... | By Elizabeth Kolbert Read more ... |
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Journey to the Doomsday Glacier - New Yorker  (Nov 28, 2022) |
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Nov 28, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. I first saw our icebreaker, the RV Araon, when we were due to leave for Antarctica. The largest icebreakers are more than five hundred feet long, but the Araon was only the length of a football field; I wondered how it would handle the waves of the Southern Ocean, and how it would fare against the thick sea ice that guards the last wilderness on Earth. Its hull was painted a cheerful persimmon color, and its bow was conspicuously higher than the rest of the ship, with a curved shape suggesting that icebreakers don’t so much carve through ice as climb and crush, climb and crush. It was January 3rd, summer in New ... | By David W. Brown Read more ... |
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What Going Off the Grid Really Looks Like - New Yorker  (Nov 28, 2022) |
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Nov 28, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. “In the United States,” Gertrude Stein once observed, “there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” That was true in 1936, when she wrote “The Geographical History of America,” and it remains so today. The numbers are startling, and not only if you live someplace like the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with your hundred thousand neighbors per square mile. Add up all the developed areas in the fifty states - the cities and suburbs and exurbs and towns, the highways and railways and back roads, the orchards and vineyards and family farms, the concentrated animal feedlots, the cornfields and wheat ... | By Jia Tolentino Read more ... |
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After the Caldor Wildfire - New Yorker  (Sep 19, 2022) |
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Sep 19, 2022 · Last year, the Caldor wildfire burned through a wide swath of California’s Eldorado National Forest, an area in the central Sierra Nevada that I hike every summer. I returned in August, exactly one year after the fire started, and found a Pompeiian landscape: charred stumps, sooty ponds, thick drifts of ash. A firefighter told me that clifftops a thousand feet high had glowed red from the light of the flames. In a meadow, I gathered pieces of burned willow to use as charcoal for drawing. A clear creek cut through fresh growth. From behind the branches of a thicket, a deer stared at me, unmoving. Birds sang from blackened trees; the wind scattered seeds. The sky was as blue as ever. | By David Garczynski Read more ... |
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