This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Minnesota’s century-old Rapidan Dam captured the national spotlight last week when its partial failure destroyed a home and prompted county officials to demolish an adjacent store. Yet it’s just one of hundreds of dams across the Upper Midwest in … Read more
This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. US environmental law is a relatively young discipline. The Environmental Protection Agency is a little more than 50 years old, and the Clean Air and Clean Water acts—legislation we today see as bedrocks of public health and environmental safeguards—were passed in … Read more
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When a baseball-sized hailstone slams into a solar panel at more than 90 mph, the result is not pretty. We saw this in March, when a hailstorm decimated parts of the 350-MW Fighting Jays solar project in southeast Texas. … Read more
Agricultural yields for important commodities produced in those states (fruits, nuts, corn, sugar, veggies, wheat) are withering, thanks to punishing heat and soil-nutrition depletion. The supply chains through which these products usually travel are thrown off course at varying points, by storms that disrupt land and sea transportation. Preparation for these varying externalities requires supply-chain … Read more
This story originally appeared in Hakai Magazine and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A new video appears on the social media network Telegram: footage of the smoking area aboard a large vessel. The curtains are ripped, the lights are broken, and ash and glass litter the floor. “This is how they drink on … Read more
Since the World Meteorological Organization declared the start of the current El Niño on July 4, 2023, it’s been almost a year straight of record-breaking temperatures. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, there’s a 61 percent chance that this year could be even hotter than the last, spelling danger for areas prone to … Read more
How does race play a factor in how we all process those emotions? What I found in a survey that I conducted is that the most distressing emotions were reported by people of color, who in a statistically significant way, most identified feeling traumatized by the impact of climate change. They also reported feeling fear … Read more
The rules for Toronto’s ravines are based on the idea that a species will develop traits specific to a location as they grow over many generations. As a result, trees grown from seeds gathered in Toronto may be more likely to blossom when native pollinators are active than seeds from the same species grown at … Read more
CAPTION: Chelsea Wood kneels to search for shore crabs at a beach in Tacoma, Washington. She will later dissect the crabs to search for parasites. CREDIT: Jesse Nichols/Grist The parasites were a sign that the local shorebirds were doing great, Wood explained. As scientists have learned more about parasites, some have argued that many ecosystems … Read more
VanWalleghem said there is room to push costs down as the company gains experience from these first few plants. The storage systems have a projected lifespan of about 50 years, which is an important data point when comparing it to battery systems, which have much shorter lives, he said. Yiyi Zhou, an analyst for BloombergNEF, … Read more
