Tag: Climate Change

How do you cool 7.5 billion people on a warming planet?


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Adapting will be expensive. With every degree of warming that gets locked into the climate system, the more it will cost to maintain something resembling normal life, and the more people there will be who are unable to afford it. The particular problem posed by heat isn’t that it’s impossible to adapt to, it’s that it’s difficult to adapt to equitably and in a way that doesn’t make the problem worse. Like mitigating climate change overall, any cooling solution will require collective action, in the form of international agreements like the Kigali Amendment, efficiency regulations, subsidies, technological advances, new building designs, and civic programs.

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Josh Dzieza — The Verge

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It Gets Wetter


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Today’s needull looks at Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book New York 2140. The writer looks at how climate change will affect New York and how might the city look then.

It’s a novel scene—New York City, 123 years from now: half-drowned but not out. Still a capital of real estate, still a political powerhouse, still an unequal battleground between finance and housing movements, still a crucible where capitalism and climate politics are smashed, melted, and twisted together. The (true) physical premise is that upper Manhattan is fifty feet higher than lower Manhattan.

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Daniel Aldana Cohen — Dissent

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Longer heat waves, heavier smog go hand in hand with climate change


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Living in New Delhi and facing one of worst urban pollution, I should be bracing up for a long and hot summer.

In this analysis, they saw that extreme weather and pollution events clustered into multi-day episodes that tended to be spatially connected. This means that the episodes typically affected grid squares that were adjacent to each other or contiguous. The researchers saw that the weather tended to drive several types of extreme events at once, with problems often coinciding or happening adjacent to each other in either space or time.

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Roheeni Saxena — Ars Technica

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