Group items tagged

The London Underground is the oldest subway system in the world, so it might seem an unlikely source of innovation for one of the thorniest problems facing humanity in the 21st century: climate change.

While public transit is usually more environmentally friendly than other methods of travel, the Underground is playing a more direct role in a groundbreaking experiment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.

The local council for the Borough of Islington in London has developed, planned and installed a way to provide heat and hot water for several hundred homes, a school and two recreation centers, all using otherwise-wasted thermal energy generated mostly by the electric motors and brakes of the Underground’s trains.

too few Americans think about heat waves, which claim more lives globally than any other weather-related hazard, as a problem for which systematic, long-term preparation is warranted. To protect human life as temperatures soar, we need to conceive of what we might call heat season as a phenomenon distinct from summer—a part of the year that people in much of the country have traditionally viewed with great fondness.

Historically, wildfire season in the United States has begun in May and ended in October; however, wildfires raged well into December last year.

The annual Atlantic hurricane season formally begins June 1 and ends November 30. The emergence of Tropical Storm Ana on May 22 made 2021 the seventh consecutive year that a storm strong enough to be named formed off-season.

But for many seniors, heat has become the new Covid. The searing temperatures have settled over the continent like another indiscriminate plague, reinforcing the isolation of many older people and the threats to their health, and pushing governments and social services to take extraordinary steps to try to protect them.

As temperatures rise, the threat to Europe’s elderly is now widespread, with southern European nations being joined by others as far north as Belgium in putting heat plans in place

For Italy, the extreme heat has forged a pincer with the country’s most pressing demographic trend — an aging population — to present an especially acute crisis. About 24 percent of Italians are over 65, making it the oldest country in Europe, and over 4 million of them live alone.

By 2050, hundreds of American cities could experience an entire month each year with US "heat index" temperatures above 100F (38C) if nothing is done to tackle emissions and the resultant climate crisis, scientists said. 

Few places would be unaffected by extreme heat conditions by 2050 and only a few mountainous regions would remain extreme heat refuges by the century’s end, the team from the Union of Concerned Scientists said.

They said this failure to reduce emissions could set the country on a path to soaring temperatures including conditions so far in excess of current climate trends they will surpass the heat index.

1. Floods and disease

As life becomes less tolerable for humans, animals and plants, things will get easier for disease-causing organisms. More than half of all known diseases have been made worse by the climate crisis

A warming world makes outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio more likely.

in a warm, sunny climate, a white roof almost certainly doesn’t hurt on an individual basis and may help reduce the need for air-conditioning (as inhabitants of sultry climes have known for a long time)

While a white roof in the southern states will reduce cooling loads and therefore save energy even some white roof manufacturers agree that the benefits of white roofs in the northern states an especialy in most of Canada are negligible at best and even an energy negative in many areas. In the north the only minor benefit may be a slight reductioin in heat island effect, but that only applies while the roof is clean and in urban areas

While programs such as LEED promote white roofs as a blanket policy people need to think the process through, if you have 10 heating degree days for every 1 cooling degree day what is more inportant. In the north most buildings have much higher insulation values negating many of the possibile benefits of the reflective roofing

Four hundred deaths in the Netherlands. More than 18,000 hospitalizations in Japan. An estimated 169 million people on alert in the United States

This isn’t the plot of a disaster movie. The numbers reflect the impact of extreme heat waves that smothered countries around the world in July and early August, a phenomenon that scientists warn will intensify as the Earth warms.

“This is not science fiction. It is the reality of climate change,” he said. “It is happening now, and it will worsen in the future without urgent climate action.”

The world's oceans are now heating at the same rate as if five Hiroshima atomic bombs were dropped into the water every second, scientists have said.

"The upward trend is relentless, and so we can say with confidence that most of the warming is man-made climate change," said Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"There are no reasonable alternatives aside from the human emissions of heat trapping gases to explain this heating," Cheng said, adding that to reach this temperature, the ocean would have taken in 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 -- or 228 sextillion -- joules of heat.

India has contributed little to climate change: Home to 18 percent of the world’s population, it has emitted just 3 percent of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

It is happening right now: Over the past three months, a heat wave has devastated North India and neighboring Pakistan. Temperatures surpassed 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It is so hot that overheated birds fell out of the sky in Gurgaon, India, and a historic bridge in northern Pakistan collapsed after melting snow and ice at a glacial lake released a torrent of water.

Indians have responded by staying indoors as much as possible, particularly during the afternoon hours. The government has encouraged this, pushing schools to close early and businesses to shift work schedules. The measures have kept down deaths — with fewer than 100 recorded so far, an improvement from heat waves years ago that killed thousands.

Global warming has heated the oceans by the equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years, according to analysis of new research. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the seas, with just a few per cent heating the air, land and ice caps respectively. The vast amount of energy being added to the oceans drives sea-level rise and enables hurricanes and typhoons to become more intense.

A Guardian calculation found the average heating across that 150-year period was equivalent to about 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. But the heating has accelerated over that time as carbon emissions have risen, and was now the equivalent of between three and six atomic bombs per second.

The total heat taken up by the oceans over the past 150 years was about 1,000 times the annual energy use of the entire global population.

The half-degree difference between 1.5 and two degrees may not seem like much, but, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, it could mean saving or losing thousands of lives each year in the United States alone.

Dr. Lo and her colleagues used the 1.5 degree Celsius temperature target from the Paris Agreement as their baseline, and under that level of warming estimated the heat deaths that would occur in 15 cities across the United States. They selected those cities — which included Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York — because there was reliable climate and health data available.

“The numbers are quite astonishing in terms of how many deaths we could afford by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees from three degrees,” Dr. Lo said. For example, she said, that would allow New York City to avoid 2,716 heat-related deaths during the most extreme temperature years

Key Findings Due to projected increases in temperature and water vapor in the atmosphere:

Global warming of more than 6°C (11°F) eliminates all labor capacity in the hottest months in many areas, including the lower Mississippi Valley, and exposes most of the US east of the Rockies to heat stress beyond anything experienced in the world today.

In this scenario, heat stress in NYC exceeds present day Bahrain, and Bahrain heat stress would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.

Electric vehicles produce less carbon dioxide than petrol cars across the vast majority of the globe – contrary to the claims of some detractors, who have alleged that the CO2 emitted in the production of electricity and their manufacture outweighs the benefits.

Across the world, passenger road vehicles and household heating generate about a quarter of all emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. That makes electric vehicles essential to reducing overall emissions, but how clean an electric vehicle is also depends on how the electricity is generated, the efficiency of the supply and the efficiency of the vehicle.

Scientists from the universities of Exeter, Nijmegen and Cambridge conducted lifecycle assessments that showed that even where electricity generation still involves substantial amounts of fossil fuel, there was a CO2 saving over conventional cars and fossil fuel heating.

Temperatures were forecast to hit 107 on Wednesday in the San Joaquin Valley in the center of California, according to the National Weather Service. While temperatures in Fresno were 16 to 18 degrees above normal for this time of year, they fell short of breaking records.

In Redding, in Northern California, temperatures reached 107 on Tuesday, a day after peaking at 109 and breaking the previous record of 103 set in 2016, meteorologists said.

In Nevada, Las Vegas saw its first 100-degree day of the year on Monday, followed by another triple-digit day — 103 — on Tuesday. It’s forecast to hit 105 on Wednesday and 106 on Thursday.

Heat waves in Europe are increasing in frequency and intensity at a faster rate than almost any other part of the planet, according to scientists, who say that global warming and other factors like the circulation of the atmosphere and the ocean all play a role.

In Germany, more than 100 firefighters battled flames that engulfed parts of Grunewald, a forest in the west of Berlin, after munitions and fireworks exploded at the city’s bomb disposal site on Thursday morning.

The drought has been particularly devastating for European agriculture, which was already suffering from an abnormally dry spring season, parching crops, making it harder to feed livestock and raising worries about reduced harvests.

Painting black tar roofs with a white, solar-reflective coating is a low cost, quick and tangible way to reduce the risk of power grid ‘brown-outs’, save millions of dollars in energy costs, and curb climate change. The statistics are as simple as they are staggering: A roof covered with solar-reflective white paint reflects up to 90% of sunlight as opposed to the 20% reflected by a traditional black roof. On a 90°F day, a black roof can be up to 180°F. That heat has a major impact on interior building temperature, potentially heating your room to between 115 – 125°F. A white roof stays a cool 100°F. Plus the inside of the building stays cooler than the air outdoors, around 80°F in this example, reducing cooling costs.

White roofs also reduce the “urban heat island” effect in which temperatures rise in dense urban areas because of the proliferation of heat-radiating, black tar surfaces. For example, the Urban Heat Island effect causes New York City to be about 5 degrees warmer than surrounding suburbs and accounts for 5 to 10 percent of summer electricity use.

Volunteers saw that all it takes is a paint roller, some solar-reflective white coating and a little hard work to start curbing climate change.

the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

More than a third of heat-related deaths in many parts of the world can be attributed to the extra warming associated with climate change, according to a new study that makes a case for taking strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to protect public health.

The sweeping new research, published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, was conducted by 70 researchers using data from major projects in the fields of epidemiology and climate modeling in 43 countries. It found that heat-related deaths in warm seasons were boosted by climate change by an average of 37 percent, in a range of a 20 percent increase to 76 percent.

My guests are author David Wallace-Wells, who wrote the book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” and Genevieve Guenther, climate communication activist and founder of the organization, End Climate Silence.

genevieve guentherAll right, well, let me talk about this point that you shouldn’t have kids or you should have one fewer kid to lower your carbon footprint because it’s misanthropic and it’s just wrong. So there was one study that came up with the top personal carbon footprint actions, and one of them was have one fewer kid. But if you dig down into that study you see that they assume that the consumption of parenthood would remain the same with each subsequent kid. People in the global south generally have large families. And it hasn’t increased their carbon emissions at all. It’s not the kids, it’s the consumption.

genevieve guenther

As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.”

Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster.