Amid the gathering storms, there is growing criticism that mainstream TV news organizations and storytellers in Hollywood haven’t done enough to raise public awareness of the need for action.
Thwaites Glacier has long been the subject of dark speculation. If this mysterious glacier were to break down into icebergs and eventually collapse into the ocean—it might be more than a scientific curiosity. It might be the kind of event that changes the course of civilization.
As the climate warms, heat waves are growing longer, hotter, and more frequent. Since the 1960s, the average number of annual heat waves in 50 major American cities has tripled. They are also becoming more deadly. Humans have never lived on a planet this hot, and we’re totally unprepared for what’s to come.
After the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, aid agencies promised to rebuild Indonesia “better.” Fifteen years later, their failures are all too obvious. The disaster hit Aceh the hardest. The evacuation buildings are unmistakably the shiniest features of the city’s newly built landscape.
Singapore is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world – with maximum daily temperatures predicted to reach 35-37 degrees Celsius by year 2100. This video explores how, beyond climate change, the urban heat island effect spells trouble for future Singapore.
Many of our coastal cities are imperiled, but none have plotted an escape quite as audacious as Jakarta’s. President Joko Widodo plans to pick up and move the capital, along with 7 million people.
The climate crises will spell our doom, a disaster that’s not merely on its way—it’s already here. Rosecrans Baldwin embeds with the government agents and the doomsday experts preparing now for the plagues, and the panics, and the fast-approaching day when life on our warming planet finally falls apart.
Britain has gone a week without using coal to generate electricity for the first time since 1882. The landmark follows a government pledge to phase out coal-fired electricity by 2025.
A look inside Milan’s Bosco Verticale, a pair of residential high-rises designed by Stefano Boeri with greenery designed to suck pollution out of the air.
Photographer Sushavan Nandy experienced the devastating effects of flooding first hand, as a child living in Jalpaiguri in North Bengal, India. This project shows the disruptive effects of climate change and flooding on individual lives.
A handful of supermarkets in Vietnam are attempting to move away from plastic. One of the most-pernicious, least-recycled/recyclable forms is the plastic film that food is often wrapped in. So supermarket chains including Lotte Mart, Saigon Co.op and Big C have started wrapping produce in banana leaves rather than plastic.
Fast fashion’s core business model is fueled by low prices, rapid consumption and fast-changing trends — all of which are in direct tension with its sustainability mission. The global fashion industry generates a huge amount of waste – one full garbage truck of clothes is burned or sent to a landfill every second.
The shopping mall would have been inconceivable without air conditioning, as would the deep-plan and glass-walled office block, as would computer servers. The expansion of tract housing in postwar suburban America relied on affordable domestic air conditioning units.
While road types can vary greatly depending on their use, location and construction method, the majority are formed from crushed rock, sand and asphalt in a process that releases volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere. In order to curb the environmental impact of road construction, a number of new innovations are now being trialed.
Broken temperature records, unnatural disasters, and homes lost would show just how catastrophically humans had transformed the planet. It’s been a decade of adapting to a new normal while clumsily figuring out how to safeguard the future from a climate crisis that’s only going to get worse.
Subjecting themselves to a cohort of skeptical students was an opportunity for oil and gas executives to boost their credibility in an era when many young activists will only engage with them with picket signs. Young activists say they’re seeing more of this “youth-washing” as the global youth climate movement gains momentum.
A conveyor belt of ocean water that loops the planet and regulates global temperatures could be heading for a tipping point. Arctic sea ice this summer was the second-lowest on record, and ocean changes in the Arctic could dramatically change the climate for much of the rest of the planet.
We’ve been behind where we need to be for decades now, and the fact that we’ll be living in a hotter, less hospitable world is an inevitability. The only uncertainty left is how quickly we respond and how much damage we’re going to be able to prevent.
Air conditioning systems can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour. Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a developing fix for climate change—also depend on moving large volumes of air. So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?
Ninety percent of the large fish that were here in the 1950s are now gone. One metric ton of plastic enters the ocean every four seconds. But the biggest problem, thanks largely to our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels, is that the ocean is heating up fast.
As National Geographic showed us, sea levels would rise by 216 feet if all the land ice on the planet were to melt. This would dramatically reshape the continents and drown many of the world’s major cities.
As the country suffers through one of its worst droughts on record, and heat waves shatter temperature records not once but twice within the same summer week, some are asking whether Australians can afford to keep returning to the same parched, scorched landscapes.
UNStudio has developed a paint dubbed The Coolest White Paint. By limiting the amount of light and therefore heat a building absorbs, the paint reduces the need for air-conditioning and the impact of urban heat islands.
For the last 150 years, Pacific Gas & Electric has been playing political hardball to maintain its monopoly over California’s electricity. Last year, a PG&E power line ignited the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people, making it the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history.
Some want a clear conscience. Others want to see if they are up to the challenge. But none of them want to wait until 2050 to cut their carbon emissions down to near-zero. Across the UK, environmentalists of all ages – from seven to 75 – are taking action now to lead low-carbon lives.
Once we trade dirty fossil fuels for clean energy, there’s no reason we can’t keep expanding the economy forever. This narrative may seem reasonable enough at first glance, but there are good reasons to think twice about it. One of them has to do with clean energy itself.
Rahawa Haile grew up surrounded by the beauty and kitsch of South Florida. Now she returns and wonders what happens when the places we love start to disappear.
Two fledgling projects led by animal-welfare groups hope to offer a lifeline to struggling farmers by helping them trade animal agriculture for alternative proteins. The groups say the shift benefits animals and the environment, while boosting farmers’ economic outlook.
“Any time you can avoid getting on a plane, getting in a car or eating animal products, that’s a substantial climate savings.” Many people trying to avoid the coronavirus are already two-thirds of the way there.
Coastal erosion is occurring along 17 per cent of the UK coastline. The worst affected is the town of Happisburgh in Norfolk, predicted to lose the most land over the next 20 years.
As psychiatrists and philosophers begin to define a pervasive mental health crisis triggered by climate change, they ask who is really sick: the individual or society?
Yuri Kozyrev and Kadir van Lohuizen travelled through 15,000km of the Arctic Circle, investigating the startling effects of climate change on the land and its indigenous communities. If temperatures continue to rise, scientists expect that the North Pole will be ice-free in summer by 2040.
Any building playing host to hundreds of people is going to have a huge climate footprint, but the glass is particularly problematic. The sunlight has unlimited access into the building, but no way to get out. That’s great for tomatoes, but for people it just means more air conditioning.
Institute’s collections are helping to provide an understanding of how global warming affects specific locations. Paintings of Venice show rising sea levels and tracking France’s vanishing Mer de Glace in paintings and daguerreotypes.
Warmer temperatures lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer temperatures. The problem posed by air conditioning resembles, in miniature, the problem we face in tackling the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach for most easily only bind us closer to the original problem.
All too frequently, activists, politicians, and scientists reduce the all-consuming crisis of global warming to a question of greenhouse gas emissions: what drives them up, and how best to bring them down. The natural world and its nonhuman inhabitants are reduced to a series of models and equations.
As businesses and governments grapple with how to approach climate change, the field of architecture faces a monumental opportunity—and some might argue an immense responsibility—to make an impact.
Called the “ZER0”, it’s an electric plane designed for efficiency rather than speed. The vehicle is only a concept, but it’s a compelling case study in how we might reconsider air travel to help the environment, developed by designer Joe Doucet.
Filmmaker Raphael Rogers stood on the ice dunes of the glaciers of Alaska in the midst of a snowy winter. The silence and majesty of the mountains surrounding us, the bluest ice we had ever seen and the steady rush of ice turned to water.
The consensus among informed observers is that the sea will rise in Miami Beach somewhere between 13 and 34 inches by 2050. Sunset Harbour is expected to fare slightly worse, and to do so more quickly. Thus, I felt the Sunset Harbour area was a good place to start pretending to buy a home here.
