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Climate

How Can I Lower Climate Risks When Buying a House?

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 24, 2025 - 05:00
The danger from extreme weather is growing, and so are insurance costs. Here’s what to know.
Categories: Climate

Greenpeace Is Going to Trial in $300 Million Suit That Poses Bankruptcy Risk

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 24, 2025 - 03:00
In a closely watched case, the owner of the Dakota Access Pipeline is claiming the environmental group masterminded protests that hurt the company’s business.
Categories: Climate

Britain’s net zero economy is booming, CBI says

The Guardian Climate Change - February 24, 2025 - 01:00

Green sector growing at triple the rate of the UK economy, providing high-wage jobs and increasing energy security

The net zero sector is growing three times faster than the overall UK economy, analysis has found, providing high-wage jobs across the country while cutting climate-heating emissions and increasing energy security.

The net zero economy grew by 10% in 2024 and generated £83bn in gross value added (GVA), a measure of how much value companies add through the goods and services they produce.

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Categories: Climate

‘An ode to Altadena’: LA arts community bands together to support fire-ravaged neighborhood

The Guardian Climate Change - February 23, 2025 - 12:00

The eclectic neighborhood was devastated by the wildfire last month; galleries and artists are now working to protect its legacy

A charred baby Slinky, a handful of book ash, blackened cowrie shells from a necklace made in Ghana. These are some of the remnants of precious things the artist Kenturah Davis has salvaged from what is left of her Altadena home.

Nearby, there is virtually nothing left of her parents’ home of 40 years. Gone are her mother’s intricately stitched quilts and a trove of paintings and sketches Davis’s father made of Hollywood backlots during his decades of working on television and movie sets.

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Categories: Climate

Scotland ‘likely to miss net zero climate target by up to 20m tonnes’

The Guardian Climate Change - February 23, 2025 - 11:44

Exclusive: Top officials and climate policy experts believe delays in cutting emissions make it improbable 2045 target will be met

Scotland is likely to miss its legally binding climate target by up to 20m tonnes, according to official data seen by the Guardian.

The Scottish government set itself the world-leading target of reaching net zero – the point where any excess carbon emissions are soaked up by trees, peat or carbon capture – by 2045.

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Categories: Climate

Waves are getting bigger. Is the world ready?

The Guardian Climate Change - February 22, 2025 - 14:00

Southern Ocean waves are growing larger and faster, threatening coastlines. But some scientists think they could help turn the tide in the climate crisis

In his remarkable memoir of his life chasing breaks in far-flung corners of the globe, Barbarian Days, the writer William Finnegan describes the “spooky duality” of waves, the way that, “when you are absorbed in surfing they seem alive. They each have personalities, distinct and intricate, and quickly changing moods, to which you must react in the most intuitive, almost intimate way – too many people have likened riding waves to making love. And yet waves are of course not alive, not sentient, and the lover you reach to embrace may turn murderous without warning.”

This idea of duality is difficult to avoid when thinking about waves. In them we see energy and matter collapse into each other, find fluidity with structure and form, and the eternal in the transient, apprehend both beauty and symmetry and violence and terror. Likewise, the physics of waves are simultaneously very simple and impossibly complex, the non-linear nature of fluid dynamics meaning they can remain relatively regular or combine without warning into rogue waves capable of sweeping people off rocks and sinking ships.

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Categories: Climate

Coffee Prices Are Soaring, but Growers Aren’t Celebrating

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 22, 2025 - 00:00
Climate change is behind the windfall gains, and growers are worried about whether they can adapt.
Categories: Climate

Trump Administration Unfreezes Funding for Some EPA Programs

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 14:07
The funding, approved by Congress and overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, had been blocked since January, when President Trump ordered a pause and review of climate and clean energy programs.
Categories: Climate

Labor hasn’t delivered on more effective nature laws. It’s not just embarrassing, it’s calamitous | Tim Winton

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 09:00

As Ningaloo reef bleaches and an election looms, we must hold to account those who stand in the way of our safety – the small cohort profiting from fossil fuels, and the politicians who protect them

Late last spring, I was part of an expedition to Scott Reef, a magnificent coral atoll nearly 300 kilometres off the Kimberley coast. And while it was a privilege to be in such a remote and wonderful place, watching rare and endemic sea life drifting past, the moment I tipped from the boat in my mask and fins, I knew something was wrong.

The water was too hot. Not tropical warm, but uncomfortably hot.

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Categories: Climate

Profits, Not D.E.I., Are Why Companies Exist

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 08:40
An awkward truth has become evident in the first days of the Trump administration, as many firms mute their commitments to diversity and sustainability.
Categories: Climate

Outcry as Trump withdraws support for research that mentions ‘climate’

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 07:00

US government stripping funds from domestic and overseas research amid warnings for health and public safety

The Trump administration is stripping away support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contains a word it finds particularly inconvenient: “climate.”

The US government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development.

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Categories: Climate

As the UK prepares its next carbon budget, what needs to be included?

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 06:02

Expert recommendations will influence plans for energy, housing, transport industry and farming for decades

Labour will next week be confronted with stark policy choices that threaten to expose the fault lines between the Treasury and the government’s green ambitions, as advice for the UK’s next carbon budget is published.

Plans for the energy sector, housing, transport, industry and farming will all be called into question in a sweeping set of recommendations for how the UK can meet the legally binding target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

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Categories: Climate

Hurricane-proof skyscrapers vulnerable to less powerful windstorms, study finds

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 06:00

Tall buildings fare poorly in derechos, say experts, raising questions over their resilience as climate crisis worsens

Skyscrapers built to withstand major hurricanes fare much more poorly in less powerful windstorms known as derechos, researchers have found, raising questions for cities worldwide over the resilience of tall buildings as the climate emergency worsens.

A team from Florida International University’s (FIU) civil and environmental engineering department studied the unexpectedly severe damage caused to buildings in Houston, a city with 50 skyscrapers of 492ft (150 metres) or more, during the 16 May 2024 derecho.

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Categories: Climate

Rolling back on climate actions may spell rise in preventable illness – study

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 04:40

Net zero policies would result in fewer deaths saving UK billions, say researchers

Countries that weaken or stop their net zero and climate actions may be consigning their populations to decades of preventable illness.

Gains from net zero are often presented as global benefits and mainly for future generations. But less fossil fuel use also means less air pollution which results in local health gains right away.

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Categories: Climate

El gobierno de Trump planea recortes en la oficina que financia la recuperación tras catástrofes

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 01:01
El personal de la oficina, una rama del Departamento de Vivienda de EE. UU. y que el Congreso utiliza para hacer frente a las peores catástrofes, se reduciría en un 84 por ciento.
Categories: Climate

‘To say there’s no future is counterproductive’: metal megastars Architects on grief, climate and hope for humanity

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 00:00

Consumed by anger and still mourning a brother and bandmate, the British quartet have written their masterpiece. They explain how they’re fighting self-loathing and trying to age responsibly

In a world of low royalties and short attention spans, not many bands make it to 11 albums, much less have their 11th be their masterpiece. But over the course of 20 years, the metal quartet Architects have inched towards this milestone. The Sky, the Earth & All Between sets out its scale in its title, where gigantic pop choruses soar over hellish chasms of churning noise, resulting in the most consistently sublime British rock album of this decade. The band are now at their arena-filling, Metallica-supporting peak, adored by millions.

“But it means nothing,” says frontman, Sam Carter. “Because you don’t believe it. If you can’t access that part of you that lets it in, then it’s pointless.” Drummer and lyricist, Dan Searle, is equally downcast. “I punish myself, I loathe myself,” he says evenly, blinking behind his glasses. “I feel like I’m shit at everything.” Across two decades, the band have been buffeted by poor mental health, creative differences and an instance of particularly traumatic grief. While the pair are quick to joke during our long conversation in a London photo studio, and are clearly ravenously ambitious, I have never met a rock band as candid about their frailties.

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Categories: Climate

Melbourne activist can’t rely on evidence from climate experts to defend protest charges, court finds

The Guardian Climate Change - February 20, 2025 - 22:26

Brad Homewood is charged with four offences after a 2021 Extinction Rebellion protest at the Exxon/Mobil depot in Spotswood

A climate activist cannot rely on evidence from experts in global heating and civil disobedience to beat charges after a protest outside a Melbourne fuel depot, a magistrate has found.

Brad Homewood, 52, was charged with four offences relating to a 2021 Extinction Rebellion protest at an Exxon/Mobil depot in Spotswood.

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Categories: Climate

The $20 Billion Controversy Over E.P.A. Climate Funds, Explained

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 20, 2025 - 14:06
An attempt by the agency to claw back billions in climate funds has led to confusion and the resignation of a top prosecutor.
Categories: Climate

Trump Team Plans Cuts at HUD Office That Funds Disaster Recovery

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 20, 2025 - 09:45
Staff at the office, a branch of the U.S. housing department that Congress uses to address the worst catastrophes, would be reduced by 84 percent.
Categories: Climate

‘If not fire, we’ll be killed by hunger’: villagers continue to feel fallout from Bolivia’s worst wildfires

The Guardian Climate Change - February 20, 2025 - 06:00

Residents battle food shortages and health issues after vast areas of forest and farmland burned last year

As she walks away from the house where she raised her family, Isabel Surubí pauses to point at the bed of a stream, now covered with dry leaves, that once supplied her entire community. “The water used to come from here,” she says.

In 2024, wildfires in Bolivia burned more than 10m hectares (about 39,000 sq miles) of forest, farmland and savannah – an area greater than the size of Portugal. After the fires, and the drought that preceded them, the spring feeding Surubí’s village of Los Ángeles in Bolivia’s tropical dry forest ran dry.

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Categories: Climate