As Hurricane Milton made landfall on Florida’s west coast the evening of October 9, a deluge of rain ruptured the city of St. Petersburg’s water main lines. The damage meant that some hospitals in the area—including one with a large neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)—were temporarily cut off from public …
Read More »Is AI More Sustainable if You Generate It Underwater?
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 »California Can Slake the Thirst of Its Farms by Storing Water Underground
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A new UC Riverside study on California agriculture and climate proposes a plan for new water capture, storage, and distribution systems throughout California that will sustain agriculture and keep up with climate trajectories. Available …
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 »The Outrageous Scheme to Capture and Sell Greenland’s Meltwater
Fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce in many countries, but not in Greenland. Its ice sheet contains around 6.5 percent of the world’s fresh water, and over 350 trillion liters are estimated to run into the ocean annually. And with climate change accelerating Arctic melting, more and more of Greenland’s …
Read More »Everything You Need to Know About the WIRED & Octopus Energy Tech Summit 2024
Returning for its second edition this October in Berlin, the WIRED & Octopus Energy Tech Summit is bringing together Europe’s leading experts and visionaries in the green energy sector to explore how to accelerate the creation of a fully carbon-free energy system. Last year’s summit focused on the urgent need …
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 »AI Has Helped Shein Become Fast Fashion’s Biggest Polluter
This story originally appeared in Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2023, the fast-fashion giant Shein was everywhere. Crisscrossing the globe, airplanes ferried small packages of its ultra-cheap clothing from thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencers’ “#sheinhaul” videos …
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 …
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