AI data centers are so hot right now. Each time generative AI services churn through their large language models to make a chatbot answer one of your questions, it takes a great deal of processing power to sift through all that data. Doing so can use massive amounts of energy, …
Read More »In Praise of Climate Virtue Signaling
What separates a good leader from the merely adequate? The question stalks the business section of bookshops and motivates no end of teeth-grindingly-awful podcasts. In the latest addition to this canon, Tony Blair’s new book draws some lessons on leadership from his decade as prime minister of the UK. His …
Read More »The Multiple Ways Climate Change Threatens to Make Migraines Worse
Migraines have long had an intimate relationship with the elements. Alongside stress and hormones, fluctuations in meteorological conditions are one of the most commonly cited triggers for an attack. “Patients will often say that they can predict the weather,” says Vincent Martin, director of the Headache and Facial Pain Center …
Read More »Project 2025 Would Drastically Cut Support for Carbon Removal
Over the past few years, the United States has become the go-to location for companies seeking to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. There are a handful of demonstration-scale direct air capture (DAC) plants dotted across the globe, but the facilities planned in Louisiana and Texas are of a …
Read More »Lo-Fi Weather Channel Videos Are Soothing Climate Fears on YouTube
The Vaporwave album Conditions at Hickory begins with static, as if you’re tuning in to a 1940s radio broadcast. First and second tracks “Foothills” and “Daily Commute” start out humdrum and benign enough. Then, the mood shifts. Sounds come like warnings, cautions of something sinister to come. Beeping sounds and …
Read More »Burning Man Is Over, but You Can Keep the Party Going Year-Round
By all accounts, Burning Man was particularly good this year. The weather in Black Rock City was perfect, except for a couple of white-out dust storms that added to the sense of adventure. There wasn’t an exodus traffic jam, and the art was top notch. God knows the burners that …
Read More »South Sudan May See the First Permanent Mass Displacement Due to Climate Change
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Enormous floods have once again engulfed much of South Sudan, as record water levels in Lake Victoria flow downstream through the Nile. More than 700,000 people have been affected. Hundreds of thousands of people there were already forced …
Read More »Breadfruit Is Here to Save the World
Warming temperatures are making farming much more difficult in the tropics. Food systems across island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific are particularly vulnerable, being hit hard by a combination of heat waves, droughts, and unseasonal rain. And the impact of climate change in these areas is likely to increase …
Read More »The Mosquito-Borne Disease ‘Triple E’ Is Spreading in the US as Temperatures Rise
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A 41-year-old man in New Hampshire died last week after contracting a rare mosquito-borne illness called eastern equine encephalitis virus, also known as EEE or “triple E.” It was New Hampshire’s first human case of the …
Read More »Why Super Typhoons Like Yagi Are More Common Than You’d Think
The year’s first super typhoon erupted over the steamy waters of the western Pacific Ocean on Thursday as Yagi churned toward an eventual landfall in southern China. Having formed as a tropical cyclone in the Philippine Sea on Sunday, the powerful storm peaked on Thursday afternoon local time with maximum …
Read More »