Christopher Flavelle reported from Iowa and spoke with more than 40 insurance experts, officials and homeowners in a dozen states. Mira Rojanasakul analyzed insurance market data for carriers across the country. Photography by Jamie Kelter Davis.
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“At first glance, Dave Langston’s predicament seems similar to headaches facing homeowners in coastal states vulnerable to catastrophic hurricanes: As disasters have become more frequent and severe, his insurance company has been losing money. Then, it canceled his coverage and left the state.
But Mr. Langston lives in Iowa.
Relatively consistent weather once made Iowa a good bet for insurance companies. But now, as a warming planet makes events like hail and wind storms worse, insurers are fleeing.
Mr. Langston spent months trying to find another company to insure the townhouses, on a quiet cul-de-sac at the edge of Cedar Rapids, that belong to members of his homeowners association. Without coverage, “if we were to have damage that hit all 17 units, we’re looking at bankruptcy for all of us,” he said.” . . . . .
“For the past two years, world leaders, economists and activists have called for sweeping overhauls to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that would make the two lending institutions more adept at combating climate change.
Discussions about how to reform lumbering multilateral bureaucracies can get tedious quickly. But ultimately the debates are all about money. How to make more money available for developing nations that are being battered by extreme weather? And how to make sure poor countries don’t spend too much money servicing their debt?
Experts estimate that at least $1 trillion a year is needed to help developing countries adapt to hotter temperatures and rising seas, build out clean energy projects and cope with climate disasters.” This year, poor countries will owe $400 billion in debt repayments.
“The world’s coral reefs are in the throes of a global bleaching event caused by extraordinary ocean temperatures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and international partners announced Monday.
It is the fourth such global event on record and is expected to affect more reefs than any other. Bleaching occurs when corals become so stressed that they lose the symbiotic algae they need to survive. Bleached corals can recover, but if the water surrounding them is too hot for too long, they die.
Coral reefs are vital ecosystems: limestone cradles of marine life that nurture an estimated quarter of ocean species at some point during their life cycles, support fish that provide protein for millions of people and protect coasts from storms. The economic value of the world’s coral reefs has been estimated at $2.7 trillion annually.” . . . . .
“The extreme weather. The melting glaciers. The weirdly warm oceans. They’re all the product of global warming, which is being driven by the release of the three most important heat-trapping gases: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
Global average carbon dioxide concentrations jumped last year, “extending the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases” in NOAA’s 65 years of record-keeping. Methane and nitrous oxide levels also rose sharply last year. All this despite a wave of global policy measures and economic incentives designed to wean the world off fossil fuels.” . . . .
Christopher Flavelle reported from a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Alameda, Calif. He spoke with scientists, environmentalists and government officials.
A little before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, an engineer named Matthew Gallelli crouched on the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, pulled on a pair of ear protectors, and flipped a switch.
A few seconds later, a device resembling a snow maker began to rumble, then produced a great and deafening hiss. A fine mist of tiny aerosol particles shot from its mouth, traveling hundreds of feet through the air.
It was the first outdoor test in the United States of technology designed to brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, a way of temporarily cooling a planet that is now dangerously overheating. The scientists wanted to see whether the machine that took years to create could consistently spray the right size salt aerosols through the open air, outside of a lab.
If it works, the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth’s oceans.
As humans continue to burn fossil fuels and pump increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the goal of holding global warming to a relatively safe level, 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial times, is slipping away. That has pushed the idea of deliberately intervening in climate systems closer to reality.” . . . .
David Lindsay: Clearly, we need to pollute less. Preserve our ecosystems. Less Green House Gas emissions would also be helpful.
Solar radiation management should be studied because sometime over the next 10 years and beyond some country or countries will get desperate enough to try it and we need to better understand the quite substantial risks. For example if we were to mask the heating for a number of years and then some disaster caused the program to stop those years worth of heating would arrive in a few weeks causing an extinction level event called termination shock. And that’s just one of many potential risks.
We have a problem with long wave energy (infrared) from the Sun warmed Earth being trapped on its way out to space. And we want to solve this by messing with incoming short wave radiation. What could go wrong?
The use of albedo increasing aerosols that reflect solar energy to prevent it being absorbed by the Earth is like taking an antidote to poison so you can keep eating the poison. Once you do that you cannot stop taking the antidote. When the inevitable interruption happens there will be a rapid and abrupt temperature increase that will cause global disasters.
Catrin Einhorn reported from the grasslands north of Flagstaff, Ariz. Photos and video by Nina Riggio.
First in a series on how the energy transition affects wildlife.
“For pronghorn, those antelope-like creatures of the American West, this grassland north of Flagstaff is prime habitat. It gives the animals the food and conditions they need to survive fall and winter.
But for a nation racing to adopt renewable energy, the land is prime for something else: solar panels. The sun shines strong, the terrain is flat and high-voltage transmission lines are already in place from a decommissioned coal plant. Energy collected here could speed to major metropolitan regions across the West, part of a colossal wave of clean power needed to stave off the worst effects of global warming.
Animals need humans to solve climate change. But they also need places to live. Loss of habitat is the top driver of a staggering global decline in biodiversity, the variety of life on earth. The boom in solar, set to be the fastest-growing energy source in the United States, is predicted to fence off millions of acres across the nation, blanketing them in rows of glassy squares.
The good news for wildlife is that there are ways for solar developers to make installations less harmful and even beneficial for many species, like fences that let some animals pass, wildlife corridors, native plants that nurture pollinators, and more.
But at this pivotal moment, as solar farms sprout across the country, those measures often go unused. Among the reasons: a patchwork of local and state regulations governing large-scale solar, not enough research on how animals interact with it, and an absence of federal guidelines on siting or design.
“We’re faced with two truths: We have a climate change crisis, but we also have a biodiversity crisis,” said Meaghan Gade, a program manager at the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies. “We have to be mindful that there’s wildlife that are dependent on these habitats, and we have to be smart and thoughtful about how we’re doing this deployment so that we can hold both of those crises at the same time.”
Eighty percent of states rely on voluntary approaches to minimize impacts to species and habitat, according to the association. As developers race ahead, the decisions they make today will reverberate for decades.
On the grassland north of Flagstaff, a ranching family, solar developers and state wildlife biologists have come together to try out solutions on the fly. One sunny day last fall, a helicopter descended over a herd of pronghorn streaking across shrubby grasslands near the site of a planned solar farm.” . . . . .
David Lindsay: Great article, thank you Catrin Einhorn. Many excellent comments, such as the top one:
For starters the tops of big box stores, warehouses, even data centers, which can also catch and convert the heat they generate into reusable energy, government buildings, parking lots, which make our planet warmer be reemitting heat into our atmosphere, can jujitsu and be an environmental savior instead of a demon, can all provide a great amount of area without harming a single animal. That is just for solar, and then you have wind farms which you can put off shore as well as in urban landscapes like towers, The possibilities are nearly endless for utilizing non-nature areas. Let’s start there.
Rooftop solar takes no land. But many Americans expect “the government”, or energy utilities to make the move to solar. This means that consumers will forever be customers, instead of owning their own energy production. This is over reliance on others, and a failure to be the change. A study in California concluded that there are enough south facing roofs to provide all of the state’s electricity. Put solar on your roof! Stop paying “the man” for electricity, and help prevent large habitat destroying solar farms.
We need nuclear power, NOT solar power. The basic math on energy that can be collected by a square meter of solar will highlight that we would have to plaster the earth with solar panels to satisfy the needs of households, schools, hospitals, factories, electric cars, etc. According to the US Dept of Energy, a single nuclear power plant can replace 3 MILLION solar panels and 430 wind turbines. A nuclear plant can be located on a site the size of a city block, works at night, on days without wind, and does not kill millions of migrating birds. In addition, since a nuclear plant produces energy at a single location, not as much unsightly overhead power cabling is required to bring the energy to market.
From the article: “as solar farms sprout across the country, those measures often go unused.” Over hunting and fishing, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and now climate change. None of these things happen in a vacuum, but there are synergies among them which make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts. Several previous mass extinctions have been linked to natural global warming events caused by an increase in atmospheric CO2, the worst, the end-Permian, likely from coal seams ignited by magma, turned Earth into basically a lifeless rock for millions of years. If we wanted to create a mass extinction, paleoclimate evidence indicates that rapidly increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is hard to beat.
“The exceptional warmth that first enveloped the planet last summer is continuing strong into 2024: Last month clocked in as the hottest January ever measured, the European Union climate monitor announced on Thursday.
It was the hottest January on record for the oceans, too, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Sea surface temperatures were just slightly lower than in August 2023, the oceans’ warmest month on the books. And sea temperatures kept on climbing in the first few days of February, surpassing the daily records set last August.
The oceans absorb the great majority of the extra heat that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap near Earth’s surface, making them a reliable gauge of how much and how quickly we are warming the planet. Warmer oceans provide more fuel for hurricanes and atmospheric river storms and can disrupt marine life.
January makes eight months in a row that average air temperatures, across both the continents and the seas, have topped all prior records for the time of year. All in all, 2023 was Earth’s hottest year in over a century and a half.
The principal driver of all this warmth is no mystery to scientists: The burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities have driven the mercury steadily upward for more than a century. The current El Niño weather cycle is also allowing more ocean heat to be released into the atmosphere.
Yet precisely why Earth has been this hot, for this long, in recent months remains a matter of some debate among researchers, who are waiting for more data to come in to see whether other, less predictable and perhaps less understood factors might also be at work around the margins.
“Rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are the only way to stop global temperatures increasing,” Samantha Burgess, Copernicus’s deputy director, said in a statement.
According to Copernicus’s data, temperatures in January were well above average in eastern Canada, northwestern Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, though much of the inland United States was colder than usual. Parts of South America were warmer than normal and dry, contributing to the recent forest fires that devastated central Chile.
The intensity of recent underwater heat waves prompted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in December to add three new levels to its system of ocean heat alerts for indicating where corals might be bleaching or dying.
An El Niño pattern like the one currently observed in the Pacific is associated with warmer years for the planet, as well as a swath of effects on rainfall and temperatures in specific regions.
But as humans heat up the planet, the effects that forecasters could once confidently expect El Niño to have on local temperatures are no longer so predictable, said Michelle L’Heureux, a NOAA scientist who studies El Niño and its opposite phase, La Niña.
“For regions that previously tended to have below-average temperatures during El Niño, you almost never see that anymore,” Ms. L’Heureux said. “You see something that’s more near-average, or even still tilting above average.” ” -30-
“Since the dawn of the industrial age, our species has warmed the planet by considerably more than today’s most widely accepted estimates imply, according to a team of scientists who have gleaned detailed new information about Earth’s past climate from an unusual source: centuries-old sponges living in the Caribbean Sea.
Networks of satellites and sensors have measured the rising temperatures of recent decades with great precision. But to assess the full arc of global warming, scientists typically combine this data with 19th-century thermometer readings that were often spotty and inexact.
This is where the sponges come in. By examining the chemical composition of their skeletons, which the creatures built up steadily over centuries, the researchers have pieced together a new history of those earliest decades of warming. And it points to a startling conclusion: Humans have raised global temperatures by a total of about 1.7 degrees Celsius, or 3.1 Fahrenheit, not 1.2 degrees Celsius, the most commonly used value.
“It’s a bit of a wake-up call,” said Malcolm T. McCulloch, a geochemist at the University of Western Australia and one of the scientists who worked on the new research.” . . . .
“. . . . . What’s your message to business leaders today?
One million species are in danger of extinction. So what I say to the business community is: Just think logically. This planet has finite natural resources. And in some places, we’ve used them up faster than Mother Nature can replenish them. How can it make sense if we carry on in the way we are now, with business as usual, to have unlimited economic development on a planet with finite natural resources, and a growing population?
But consumers, at least if they’re not living in poverty, have an enormous role to play, too. If you don’t like the way the business does its business, don’t buy their products. This is beginning to create change. People should think about the consequences of the little choices they make each day. What do you buy? Where did it come from? Where was it made? Did it harm the environment? Did it lead to cruelty to animals? Was it cheap because of child slave labor? And it may cost you a little bit more to buy organic food, but if you pay a little bit more, you waste less. We waste so much. And eat less meat. Or no meat. Because the impact on the environment of heavy meat eating is horrible, not to mention the cruelty.” -30-
“It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.
Average temperatures were 1.48 degrees Celsius, or 2.66 Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels, according to an announcement this morning by Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitor. The previous record was in 2016.
Temperature records started being shattered in June. From then on, every month has been the warmest on record.
Climate scientists aren’t surprised that unabated emissions of greenhouse gases caused global warming to reach new highs, my colleagues Raymond Zhong and Keith Collins reported. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you shouldn’t be surprised, either.
But they are still trying to understand whether 2023 foretells many more years in which heat records are not merely broken, but smashed. In other words, they are asking whether the numbers are a sign that the planet’s warming is accelerating.” . . . .
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