This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Kitchen Arts & Letters, a legendary cookbook store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is tiny—just 750 square feet—but not an inch of space is wasted. With roughly 12,000 different cookbooks and a staff of former chefs …
Read More »Millions of EV Batteries Could Retire to Solar Farms
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a 20-acre parcel outside the tiny Southern California town of New Cuyama, a 1.5-megawatt solar farm uses the sun’s rays to slowly charge nearly 600 batteries in nearby cabinets. At night, when energy demand rises, …
Read More »California’s Giant Sequoias Are in Big Trouble
This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2015 a lightning strike started what became known as the Rough Fire, which eventually burned more than 150,000 acres of forest east of Fresno and just west of Kings Canyon National Park. The …
Read More »Scientists Have Been Freezing Corals for Decades. Now They're Learning How to Wake Them Up
This story originally appeared in Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, …
Read More »The Fight Against the Smallmouth Bass Invasion of the Grand Canyon
This story originally appeared in High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On July 1, 2022, a National Park Service biologist named Jeff Arnold was hauling nets through a slough off the Colorado River, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, when he captured three greenish …
Read More »Bird Flu Reaches the Antarctic for the First Time
This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Avian flu has reached the Antarctic, raising concerns for isolated populations of penguins and seals that have never been exposed to the deadly H5N1 virus before. The full impact of the virus’s arrival is not yet …
Read More »Why Have Climate Catastrophes Toppled Some Civilizations but Not Others?
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Roman Empire fell more than 1,500 years ago, but its grip on the popular imagination is still strong, as evidenced by a recent trend on TikTok. Women started filming the men in their lives to …
Read More »Abandoned Farms Are a Hidden Resource for Restoring Biodiversity
This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Gergana Daskalova was nine months old when she was taken in by her grandparents in their small village in Bulgaria. It was soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and her parents had …
Read More »In Defense of the Rat
This story originally appeared on Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There was a time when we human beings used to put animals on trial for their alleged crimes against us. The earliest of these prosecutions in the Western tradition of law appears to be a case …
Read More »Sweat Is Helping You Survive Climate Change
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Under the relentless sun in Africa, the birthplace of humanity, every living thing had to find a way to beat the heat. Lions rested in the shade, termites built giant ventilation mounds, and elephants evolved giant …
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