WTF Climate Change News

[Beebo Brink]

Fatal heat waves are testing India’s ability to protect 140 crore people - The Hindu BusinessLine

In scorching heat on a busy Kolkata street last month, commuters sought refuge inside a glass-walled bus shelter where two air conditioners churned around stifling air. Those inside were visibly sweating, dabbing at their foreheads in sauna-like temperatures that were scarcely cooler than out in the open.

Local authorities initially had plans to install as many as 300 of the cooled cabins under efforts to improve protections from a heat season that typically runs from April until the monsoon hits in June. There are currently only a handful in operation, and some have been stripped of their AC units, leaving any users sweltering.

“It doesn’t work,” Firhad Hakim, mayor of West Bengal , said on a searing afternoon when temperatures topped 40C. “You feel suffocated.”

 

[detrius]

Fatal heat waves are testing India’s ability to protect 140 crore people - The Hindu BusinessLine

Had to look this up: apparently, India has its own numbering system. A crore is 10 million, so "140 crore people" means "1.4 billion people".



ETA: oops, made a typo

 

[Beebo Brink]

 

[Beebo Brink]

Phoenix, America’s Hottest City, Is Having a Surge of Deaths | Scientific American

Relentless heat led to 645 deaths last year in Maricopa County, the most ever documented in Arizona. The soaring number of heat mortalities — a 1,000 percent increase over 10 years — comes as temperatures reach new highs amid exploding eviction rates in the Phoenix area, leading to a collision of homelessness and record-setting heat waves.

The crisis has left local officials searching for answers in a region that regularly relies on churches more than the government to save people’s lives by offering them a cool place to hide from the desert air.

 

[Cindy Claveau]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

My eco-frens prolly all know this, but anyways: You should always be extremely, super, heavy-duty skeptical whenever a company claims to be "carbon-neutral" or even has the guts to call itself "carbon-negative". Look into it. Make sure you find out exactly what they mean by that.

Because for a lot of them, it doesn't mean they make a point of using renewable energy or particularly green technology or policies. Often, it means they just give some money to another company to plant X many trees...somewhere, where their favorite math says that over X many trees' lifetime they will absorb roughly the same or more carbon than the company's production and power needs causes to be splooged out into the world, and they believe or at least act like this math-lawyering frees them to use as much energy as they want from wherever.

Needless to say this is dumb, and a cop-out. It makes a whole lot of not really well-based assumptions. Like, for example, that the company they're paying is actually planting the number of trees it says it is. Or that all of those trees will actually survive through maturity and live for over a hundred years or however long it's supposed to take them to suck up X amount of carbon, and will never themselves be harvested and burned. Or that any amount of carbon being absorbed locally in, say, Argentina, actually negates the climatic effects of the same amount of carbon emitted in the northern hemisphere, like the atmosphere is just a bank account and carbon is a currency you can deposit in one place and instantly withdraw from somewhere else. Things like that.

 

[Cindy Claveau]

 

[Beebo Brink]

I'm almost afraid to ask. WhitePeopleTwitter?

 

[Free]

I'm almost afraid to ask. WhitePeopleTwitter?

It's a subreddit where they just post twitter shit (mostly politics), but yeah I don't get the white part of the name.

 

[Cindy Claveau]

I'm almost afraid to ask. WhitePeopleTwitter?

It consists of a great many people who haven't learned how to mask their opinions well.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Every time I think I've achieved emotional acceptance, something comes along to deliver a gut punch.

Howler monkeys drop dead from trees in Mexico during brutal heatwave - The Washington Post

 

[Beebo Brink]

Heat in India: North India boils as temperatures near 50C (bbc.com)

 

[Beebo Brink]

Something very strange is happening to tornadoes across the US. And scientists are baffled | BBC Science Focus Magazine

 

[Beebo Brink]

How ‘kitty cats’ are wrecking the home insurance industry | Grist

The rising cost of homeowner’s insurance is now one of the most prominent symptoms of climate change in the United States. Major carriers like State Farm and Allstate have pulled back from offering fire insurance in California, dropping thousands of homeowners from their books, and dozens of small insurance companies have collapsed or fled from Florida and Louisiana following recent large hurricanes.

The problem is fast becoming a crisis that stretches far beyond the nation’s coastal states. That’s owing to another, less-talked-about kind of disaster that has wreaked havoc on states in the Midwest and the Great Plains, causing billions of dollars in damage. In response, insurers have raised premiums higher than ever and dropped customers even in inland states such as Iowa.

These so-called “severe-convective storms” are large and powerful thunderstorms that form and disappear within a few hours or days, often spinning off hail storms and tornadoes as they shoot across the flat expanses of the central United States. The insurance industry refers to these storms as “secondary perils”—the other term of art is “kitty cats,” a reference to their being smaller than big natural catastrophes or “nat cats.”

 

[Beebo Brink]

Why more and more homeowners are dropping insurance - The Washington Post

Slammed by pricier policies and climate-driven natural disasters, more and more Americans are exposing themselves to risk.

One 2023 estimate, released by the industry group Insurance Information Institute, concluded that 12 percent of homeowners had no insurance in 2022, up from just 5 percent in 2019.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Now this, to me, seems like one of the most dangerous aspects of AI.

US slows plans to retire coal-fired plants as power demand from AI surges (ft.com)

The staggering electricity demand needed to power next-generation technology is forcing the US to rely on yesterday’s fuel source: coal.

Retirement dates for the country’s ageing fleet of coal-fired power plants are being pushed back as concerns over grid reliability and expectations of soaring electricity demand force operators to keep capacity online.

The shift in phasing out these facilities underscores a growing dilemma facing the Biden administration as the US race to lead in artificial intelligence and manufacturing drives an unprecedented growth in power demand that clashes with its decarbonisation targets. The International Energy Agency estimates the AI application ChatGPT uses nearly 10 times as much electricity as Google Search.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Now this, to me, seems like one of the most dangerous aspects of AI.

US slows plans to retire coal-fired plants as power demand from AI surges (ft.com)

It's got to be possible in principle to make electronics a lot more energy efficient like a human brain is. I would like to see research push in that direction since this is clearly spiraling out of control.

 

[Isabeau]

‘Game-changing’: Vermont becomes first state to require big oil to pay for climate damages

Under the legislation, Vermont officials will have until January 2026 to assess the total costs to the state from greenhouse gases emitted between 1995 and 2024, including the impacts on public health, biodiversity and economic development. They will then use federal data to determine how much to charge individual polluters for those harms.

Climate advocates celebrated the passage of the law, which won supermajority support in the state legislature from Democrats and some Republicans.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Severe Heat Killed More Than 70,000 in Europe Last Year, Scientists Estimate - Yale E360

 

[Beebo Brink]

Maps show how "Tornado Alley" has shifted in the U.S. - CBS News

There's growing evidence that "Tornado Alley," the area of the United States most susceptible to tornadoes, is shifting eastwards, according to a recent study looking at tornado formation patterns.