To effectively combat the climate crisis, we're going to need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. But what's the best way to do it? Two of the main solutions being considered are direct carbon capture technology and growing trees and each approach has its pros and cons.

Carbon removal is a catch-all term for anything that people do that pulls CO2 out of the air and stores it somewhere else. To meet the world's climate goals, we would need to do this on a massive scale — anywhere from 440 billion to 1.1 trillion metric tons before the end of the century. That's more carbon than the U.S. has emitted in its entire history.

So how do we remove all that carbon? There are two carbon removal ideas that have really captured the conversation. One is direct air capture, which involves big factories that suck in tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, chemically concentrate it, and store it deep in the ground. The other idea is to simply plant trees! After all, trees have naturally sequestered carbon for millions of years.

(via digg)

• climate crisis
• video

This is sobering: in an ad for the United Nations Global Compact, the words of Carl Sagan from nearly 40 years ago warn us of the necessity for urgent action on climate change, deforestation, and extinction.

Life is something rare and precious. There is something extraordinary about the planet that we are privileged to live on. The human species is destroying forests and we're doing it at a rate of one acre of forest every second. We're doing something immensely stupid.

(via colossal)

• advertising
• Carl Sagan
• climate crisis
• video

Eternal Spring is a short timelapse film by Christopher Dormoy featuring beautiful shots of melting snow and ice. Watching this, it is difficult not to think of the climate crisis, which is of course the whole point.

Ice is a beautiful element I love to work with in my video projects. I wanted to feature the ice melting aspect in timelapse process to illustrate the phenomenon of global warming. Melting ice is beautiful and symbolizes spring, but it can also symbolize a problematic aspect of our climate.

And wow, that shot of the Moon at the halfway point... (via colossal)

• Christopher Dormoy
• climate crisis
• time lapse
• video

In this video in their ongoing series on the climate crisis and how to fix it, Vox looks at the pros and cons of solar geoengineering (aka using artificial means to reflect sunlight in order to cool the Earth).

The climate change crisis has become so dire that we're being forced not only to think of ways to curb emissions and mitigate greenhouse gases, but of ways to adapt to our current situation to buy ourselves more time.

One of those technologies is called solar geoengineering. It happens in nature when huge volcanic eruptions cover the stratosphere with ash: That ash forms a layer that reflects sunlight and cools the planet underneath. Solar geoengineering takes advantage of that principle, using different scientific methods to make the planet more reflective overall. The problem is, deploying it would require messing with our very complicated climate on a massive scale, and many scientists don't think the risks are worth it.

• climate crisis
• science
• video

In 1976, the price per watt of energy generated by solar photovoltaic was over $100. In 2019, it was less than 50 cents per watt, a price decline of 99.6%. Even since 2009, solar has declined 90% in price. So what's behind that incredible drop? Industry played a part but the main driver was forward-thinking government policy and subsidy of solar by countries like the US, Japan, Germany, and China:

In the course of a single lifetime, solar energy has transformed from a niche technology to the cheapest way to bring clean, reliable power to billions of people around the world. But the markets that brought us these lower prices didn't just magically appear by some invisible hand. Political leaders in countries all over the world created these markets, then subsidized them for decades to the tune of billions of dollars. "By investing that money, you got the solar to come down in costs to the point where you don't need to subsidize it anymore."

One of the experts in the video, Gregory Nemet, is the author of a book called How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation if you'd like to read more on the development of solar.

• climate crisis
• energy
• video

The first few sentences of the abstract for this paper from the scientific journal Renewable Energy contain a twist in the middle that's worthy of M. Night Shyamalan:

The USA is confronted with three epic-size problems: (1) the need for production of energy on a scale that meets the current and future needs of the nation, (2) the need to confront the climate crisis head-on by only producing renewable, green energy, that is 100% emission-free, and (3) the need to forever forestall the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. This paper offers both a provable practical, novel solution, and a thought experiment, to simultaneously solve all of the above stated problems.

If you don't know about the supervolcano lurking under Yellowstone National Park, now's your chance to learn more. Here's Bill Bryson from his book A Short History of Nearly Everything:

Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across — roughly the same dimensions as the park — and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about 1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining. According to Professor Bill McGuire of University College London, "you wouldn't be able to get within a thousand kilometers of it" while it was erupting. The consequences that followed would be even worse.

Back to the paper. The authors are proposing to generate massive amounts of energy from the supervolcano — "well over 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy" per year:

Through a new copper-based engineering approach on an unprecedented scale, this paper proposes a safe means to draw up the mighty energy reserve of the Yellowstone Supervolcano from within the Earth, to superheat steam for spinning turbines at sufficient speed and on a sufficient scale, in order to power the entire USA. The proposed, single, multi-redundant facility utilizes the star topology in a grid array pattern to accomplish this. Over time, bleed-off of sufficient energy could potentially forestall this Supervolcano from ever erupting again.

I mean, this actually sounds like a great idea if it could be done safely, without ruining the park and, you know, accidentally blowing shit up. As of 2016, Iceland generated 65% of its energy from geothermal sources — the US could certainly stand to lean more on geothermal.

• climate crisis
• energy
• science
• Yellowstone National Park

Activist Greta Thunberg is coming out with a new book about the climate crisis called The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions (kindle).

In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts — geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders — to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?

The book is already out in Europe (I actually included the European cover above because, unsurprisingly, it's better than the US cover), but will be released in the US in February.

• books
• climate crisis
• Greta Thunberg
• The Climate Book

Gabrielle Schwarz at The Guardian has gathered 20 of the most iconic and meaningful photographs of the effects of the climate crisis. Metaphors abound. I think often of Kristi McCluer's photograph of the golfers casually playing a round in proximity to 2017 Eagle Creek fire in the Pacific Northwest. As David Simon said at the time, "In the pantheon of visual metaphors for America today, this is the money shot." (Iceberg photo by Magnus Kristensen and sled dog photo by Steffen Olsen.)

• climate crisis
• photography

Hoping to draw attention to the climate crisis, activist Wynn Bruce set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court on Earth Day. He later died from his injuries.

A Colorado man who set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court on Friday in an apparent Earth Day protest against climate change has died, police said.

The Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., said that Wynn Bruce, 50, of Boulder, Colo., had died on Saturday from his injuries after being airlifted to a hospital following the incident. Members of his family could not be reached immediately for comment.

Kritee Kanko, a climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund and a Zen Buddhist priest in Boulder, said that she is a friend of Mr. Bruce and that the self-immolation was a planned act of protest.

"This act is not suicide," Dr. Kritee wrote on Twitter early Sunday morning. "This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis."

It's shocking and sad but perhaps not surprising how little media attention this has gotten. Bruce, a Buddhist, seems to have planned this action for several weeks or even months, leaving clues in a repeatedly edited comment on Facebook. His action mirrors that of Thích Quảng Đức in 1963, who self-immolated in Saigon in 1963 to protest the persecution of Buddhists in South Vietnam. Rest in peace, Wynn Bruce.

• climate crisis
• death
• Wynn Bruce

If we're going to address the climate crisis, we need to fight despair and keep hope alive. Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece for The Guardian about 10 ways we can guard against our feelings of dread and fear.

2. Pay attention to what's already happening

Another oft-heard complaint is "nobody is doing anything about this". But this is said by people who are not looking at what so many others are doing so passionately and often effectively. The climate movement has grown in power, sophistication and inclusiveness, and has won many battles. I have been around long enough to remember when the movement against what was then called "global warming" was small and mild-mannered, preaching the gospel of Priuses and compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and mostly being ignored.

One of the victories of climate activism — and consequences of dire climate events — is that a lot more people are concerned about climate than they were even a few years years ago, from ordinary citizens to powerful politicians. The climate movement — which is really thousands of movements with thousands of campaigns around the world - has had enormous impact.

See also We Have the Tools to Fix the Climate. We Just Need to Use Them. (via life is so beautiful)

• climate crisis
• lists
• Rebecca Solnit

A new video from Kurzgesagt is designed to provide a little hope that humans can figure a way out of the climate crisis, without being overly pollyannish.

And so for many the future looks grim and hopeless. Young people feel particularly anxious and depressed. Instead of looking ahead to a lifetime of opportunity they wonder if they will even have a future or if they should bring kids into this world. It's an age of doom and hopelessness and giving up seems the only sensible thing to do.

But that's not true. You are not doomed. Humanity is not doomed.

There's been progress in the last decade, in terms of economics, technology, policy, and social mores. It's not happening fast enough to limit warming to 1.5°C, but if progress continues, gains accumulate, people keep pushing, and politicians start to figure out where the momentum is heading, we can get things under control before there's a global apocalypse.

• climate crisis
• Kurzgesagt
• science
• video

The winning entries in the Environmental Photographer of the Year for 2021 highlight the ways in which our planet's climate is changing and how humans are (and are not) adapting to those changes. From top to bottom, photos by Kevin Ochieng Onyango, Simone Tramonte, and Michele Lapini. (via dense discovery)

• best of
• best of 2021
• climate crisis
• photography

Temperature Textiles are knitted textiles like blankets, scarves, and socks with patterns drawn from climate crisis indicators like temperature, sea level rise, and CO2 emissions. See also Global Warming Blankets. (via colossal)

• climate crisis
• fashion

While indigenous communities, farmers, and those living close to the land have known for generations the role that beavers play in maintaining healthy ecosystems, more and more scientists have been experimenting and gathering data on just how essential these animals are. Through their actions, beaver (and humans mimicking their actions) can help restore river-based ecosystems, improve wildfire resilience, bring fish & other animals back to habitats, and fight drought.

Beaver should be our national climate action plan because connected floodplains store water, store carbon, improve water quality, improve the resilience to wildfire, and what beaver do play an enormous role in controlling the dynamics of those systems. So, yeah, it sounds really trite to give a national climate action plan to some rodents. But if we don't do that directly, we should at least be trying to mimic what they do.

The video above provides a great overview on what we're learning about how beavers restore ecosystems. Last month, I linked to this Sacramento Bee piece about how beavers were used to revitalize a dry California creek bed:

The creek bed, altered by decades of agricultural use, had looked like a wildfire risk. It came back to life far faster than anticipated after the beavers began building dams that retained water longer.

"It was insane, it was awesome," said Lynnette Batt, the conservation director of the Placer Land Trust, which owns and maintains the Doty Ravine Preserve.

"It went from dry grassland... to totally revegetated, trees popping up, willows, wetland plants of all types, different meandering stream channels across about 60 acres of floodplain," she said.

The Doty Ravine project cost about $58,000, money that went toward preparing the site for beavers to do their work.

In comparison, a traditional constructed restoration project using heavy equipment across that much land could cost $1 to $2 million, according to Batt.

See also The Beaver Manifesto and this long piece from Places Journal about beavers as environmental engineers.

Across North America and Europe, public agencies and private actors have reintroduced beavers through "re-wilding" initiatives. In California and Oregon, beavers are enhancing wetlands that are critical breeding habitat for salmonids, amphibians, and waterfowl. In Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, environmental groups have partnered with ranchers and farmers to encourage beaver activity on small streams. Watershed advocates in California are leading a campaign to have beavers removed from the state's non-native species list, so that they can be managed as a keystone species rather than a nuisance. And federal policy is shifting, too. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sees beavers as "partners in restoration," and the Forest Service has supported efforts like the Methow Beaver Project, which mitigates water shortages in North Central Washington. Since 2017, the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service has funded beaver initiatives through its Aquatic Restoration Program.

(via the kid should see this)

• beavers
• climate crisis
• science
• video

A group of researchers, scientists, and artists is building an Earth's Black Box in a remote area of Tasmania that will function like a flight data recorder for climate change, recording the potential crash of our civilization.

Earth's Black Box will record every step we take towards this catastrophe. Hundreds of data sets, measurements, and interactions relating to the health of our planet will be continuously collected and safely stored for future generations.

The purpose of the device is to provide an unbiased account of the events that lead to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for future generations, and inspire urgent action.

In a quote to the NY Times, one of the project's participants said, "I'm on the plane; I don't want it to crash."

• climate crisis

Artist Rogan Brown is highlighting what the climate crisis is doing to global coral populations with two recent delicate and intricate paper sculptures of bleached coral. Brown writes:

Here I try to capture the beauty, intricacy and fragility of the coral reef in layers of simple paper. The world's coral reefs have become symbols of the devastating effects of global warming and man-made pollution. Mass bleaching events occur each year with increasing regularity and if the situation continues then it is inevitable that we will witness the demise of these magnificent biodiverse habitats. My hope is that by reminding us of how astonishing these ecosystems are we may unite to save them.

You can check out the rest of Brown's intricate paper sculptures in his portfolio or on Instagram. (via colossal)

• art
• climate crisis
• Rogan Brown

Since 2003, photographer Olaf Otto Becker has been documenting the decline of the glaciers and ice sheet in Greenland.

Greenland's ice sheet is melting. Regularly, like the ticking of a clock, huge, new icebergs from the edges of the glacier plunge into the ocean each day with a thunderous boom and a roar. Our planet breathes. The accelerated melting of the ice is nothing more than one of our Earth's compensatory reactions. Everything is constantly in motion. Even landscapes are changing with breathtaking speed, if time is not measured on a human scale. For me, icebergs are swimming sculptures, witnesses to a global change that, drifting southward on the ocean, slowly dissolve into their mirror image.

I've included some of my favorite shots from his projects above — beautiful but signifiers of the deep trouble humanity is in. (via colossal)

• climate crisis
• Greenland
• Olaf Otto Becker
• photography

For the last ten years, artist Amy Balkin has been collecting artifacts related to the climate crisis. The collection is called A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting.

A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting is a collection of materials contributed by people living in places that may disappear because of the combined physical, political, and economic impacts of climate change, primarily sea level rise, erosion, desertification, and glacial melting.

From a piece about the archive in the New Yorker:

There is an incredible pathos to Balkin's collection of things. In the light of imagined future eyes, tinged by loss, all manner of things become relevant that would otherwise pass unnoticed. Even two beer-bottle caps, in this context, are mesmerizing. Both are from places that are threatened with a certain kind of disappearance, or, at the very least, radical change; through their corrosion and fading, they seemed to foretell this disappearance somehow. And yet, paradoxically, looking at them, I knew that these pieces of metal would likely outlast me. A future person might see them in a museum, displayed with a label that reads "Beer-bottle caps, common in this time." But what would that person's world be like? What would be lost, between now and then, even as these fragments are shored up against ruin?

You can contribute to the archive — instructions for sending in an artifact are here.

• Amy Balkin
• art
• climate crisis

Because of humans, most of the world's oyster reefs have disappeared over the last 200 years. Now, some groups around the world are trying to put some of them back. In addition to providing water filtration and habitats for other animals, offshore oyster reefs can help slow long-term erosion by acting as living breakwater structures that partially deflect waves during storm surges.

In the last century, 85% of the world's oyster reefs have vanished. And we're only recently beginning to understand what that's cost us: While they don't look incredibly appealing from the shore, oysters are vital to bays and waterways around the world. A single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water every day. And over time, oysters form incredible reef structures that double as habitats for various species of fish, crabs, and other animals. In their absence, our coastlines have suffered.

Now, several projects from New York to the Gulf of Mexico and Bangladesh are aiming to bring the oysters back. Because not only are oysters vital ecosystems; they can also protect us from the rising oceans by acting as breakwaters, deflecting waves before they hit the shore. It won't stop the seas from rising — but embracing living shorelines could help protect us from what's to come.

(via the kid should see this)

Update: Check out the Billion Oyster Project if you'd like to get involved in returned oysters to New York Harbor. (via @djacobs)

• climate crisis
• food
• NYC
• oysters
• video

One of the many effects of human-driven climate change is that, on average, the bodies of animals are getting smaller — birds, fish, deer, frogs, rodents, insects. And these changes could have large and unpredictable consequences.

"That's the problem with human-driven climate change. It's the rate of change that's just orders of magnitude faster than what the natural world has had to deal with in the past. Size is really important to survival, and you can't just change that indefinitely without consequence. For one thing, I don't think it's feasible that species are going to be able to continue to get smaller and maintain things like a migration from one hemisphere to another."

And since smaller bodies can hold fewer eggs, they result in fewer offspring, and a lower population size in the long run. For amphibians who need to keep their skin wet in order to breathe, shrinking can mean higher chances of drying out in a drought because their bodies absorb and hold smaller quantities of water.

But the more concerning consequences have to do with how this could destabilize relationships between species. Because shrinking plays out at different rates for different species, predators might have to eat more and more of shrinking prey, for example, throwing a finely-tuned ecosystem off balance.

• climate crisis
• science
• video

From XKCD's Randall Munroe, a chart of the global average temperature over his lifetime. If you're curious, you can check how much hotter your hometown is now than when you were born.

• climate crisis
• infoviz
• Randall Munroe

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released their summary report on the climate emergency, which warns that our climate is now changing rapidly almost everywhere and immediate & massive action is necessary. The press release starts:

Scientists are observing changes in the Earth's climate in every region and across the whole climate system, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released today. Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion — such as continued sea level rise — are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.

However, strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change. While benefits for air quality would come quickly, it could take 20-30 years to see global temperatures stabilize, according to the IPCC Working Group I report, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis, approved on Friday by 195 member governments of the IPCC, through a virtual approval session that was held over two weeks starting on July 26.

This is a huge deal — all 195 member governments had to approve the findings and language in this report and the report is not ambiguous. From Eric Holthaus:

The report's main takeaway, put in a single sentence directly quoted from the report's press release: "Unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach."

That means "immediate, rapid, large-scale" change is what we MUST demand — there's a vastly limited future for all of us if it doesn't happen right away.

The most striking part of the report to me is its of use the word "rapid" prominently, which to me is a major change from past reports.

The era of rapid climate change has begun. Both a rapid escalation of consequences, and a rapid escalation of solutions. Time has run out for anything but radical change.

To me, the report is equal parts depressing and galvanizing.

It will take several years, even in the best possible scenario, to see the positive effects of rapidly reductions in emissions. But that's not so different from every other worthwhile investment we make — from going to school, to going to therapy, to building bike lanes, to forming communities of mutual aid. Every worthwhile thing takes time. And, if we believe this report, the next 20-30 years is the most important time of our whole lives.

• climate crisis
• Eric Holthaus

In this video, Tomorrow's Build takes a look at the $7 billion flood defense system that was built to protect Venice, Italy from increased flooding due to climate change. They detail how the system was built, how well it works, how it compares with other defense systems, the challenges associated with keeping it working, and how well this sort of defense system might work for other coastal cities (NYC, SF, Sydney).

• climate crisis
• Venice
• video

In what will be an increasingly common occurrence in the years to come, smoke from fires in the western United States and Canada covered a large part of the US over the past few days. The smoke drifted thousands of miles to the eastern seaboard and turned the skies hazy, the Sun orange, and the air dangerous for some people to breathe. But there's good news: your Covid mask works for air pollution too!

Dr. Commane said people should avoid going outdoors in high-pollution conditions, and especially avoid strenuous exercise. She also suggested that wearing filtered masks can provide protection for those who can't avoid the outdoors.

"A lot of the masks people have been wearing for Covid are designed to capture PM2.5," she said, referring to N95-style masks. "That's the right size to be very useful for air quality."

It's always nice when your apocalyptic dystopias match up so nicely.

• climate crisis
• Covid-19

Sarah Miller, author of this 2019 article on Miami real estate & rising oceans, recently wrote this resonant piece, All The Right Words On Climate Have Already Been Said.

I told her I didn't have anything to say about climate change anymore, other than that I was not doing well, that I was miserable. "I am so unhappy right now." I said those words. So unhappy. Fire season was not only already here, I said, but it was going to go on for at least four more months, and I didn't know what I was going to do with myself. I didn't know how I would stand the anxiety. I told her I felt like all I did every day was try to act normal while watching the world end, watching the lake recede from the shore, and the river film over, under the sun, an enormous and steady weight.

There's only one thing I have to say about climate change, I said, and that's that I want it to rain, a lot, but it's not going to rain a lot, and since that's the only thing I have to say and it's not going to happen, I don't have anything to say.

Miller continued:

Also, for what? Let's give the article (the one she was starting to maybe think about asking me to write that I was wondering if I could write) the absolute biggest benefit of the doubt and imagine that people read it and said, "Wow, this is exactly how I feel, thanks for putting it into words."

What then? What would happen then? Would people be "more aware" about climate change? It's 109 degrees in Portland right now. It's been over 130 degrees in Baghdad several times. What kind of awareness quotient are we looking for? What more about climate change does anyone need to know? What else is there to say?

This is where I am on the climate emergency most days now (and nearly there on the pandemic). Really, what the fuck else is there to say?

• climate crisis
• journalism
• Sarah Miller

From Electric Vehicles Won't Save Us by Coby Lefkowitz:

This isn't a story about Elon Musk, or Tesla, or a contrarian take about how "oil is good, actually." I unconditionally support electric vehicles in their quest to take over the primacy of gasoline-powered vehicles in the market. But I don't save that enthusiasm for their prospects on society broadly. From the perspective of the built environment, there is nothing functionally different between an electric vehicle and a gasoline propelled one. The relationship is the same, and it's unequivocally destructive. Cars, however they're powered, are environmentally cataclysmic, break the tethers of community, and force an infrastructure of dependency that is as financially ruinous to our country as it is dangerous to us as people. In order to build a more sustainable future and a better world for humanity, we need to address the root problems that have brought us to where we so perilously lie today.

• cars
• cities
• climate crisis
• Coby Lefkowitz
• USA

For this video, the NY Times talked to several people from around the world (Britain, Zimbabwe, Norway, India, etc.) about what they think about how the United States is approaching climate change and other environmental challenges. Spoiler alert: there is a lot of incredulity about how shitty America is doing in this area. And that matters because what happens here affects everyone around the world.

See also What Does U.S. Health Care Look Like Abroad? and What Do U.S. Elections Look Like Abroad?

• climate crisis
• USA
• video

Writing in the New Yorker and citing a report by Carbon Tracker Initiative, Bill McKibben provides some hope that we can address the climate crisis.

Titled "The Sky's the Limit," it begins by declaring that "solar and wind potential is far higher than that of fossil fuels and can meet global energy demand many times over." Taken by itself, that's not a very bold claim: scientists have long noted that the sun directs more energy to the Earth in an hour than humans use in a year. But, until very recently, it was too expensive to capture that power. That's what has shifted — and so quickly and so dramatically that most of the world's politicians are now living on a different planet than the one we actually inhabit. On the actual Earth, circa 2021, the report reads, "with current technology and in a subset of available locations we can capture at least 6,700 PWh p.a. [petawatt-hours per year] from solar and wind, which is more than 100 times global energy demand." And this will not require covering the globe with solar arrays: "The land required for solar panels alone to provide all global energy is 450,000 km2, 0.3% of the global land area of 149 million km2. That is less than the land required for fossil fuels today, which in the US alone is 126,000 km2, 1.3% of the country." These are the kinds of numbers that reshape your understanding of the future.

But world governments will need to invest in renewable energy sooner rather than later and fossil fuel companies will fight tooth and nail to slow the transition to renewables. If they win in slow-walking the response to the climate crisis, as McKibben puts it, "no one will have an ice cap in the Arctic, either, and everyone who lives near a coast will be figuring out where on earth to go".

• Bill McKibben
• climate crisis
• energy

In his latest impeccably produced video, Neil Halloran looks at the science of climate change and uncertainty both in science and in the public's trust of science.

Degrees of Uncertainty is an animated documentary about climate science, uncertainty, and knowing when to trust the experts. Using cinematic visualizations, the film travels through 20,000 years of natural temperature changes before highlighting the rapid warming of the last half century.

The vast majority of climate scientists seem pretty sure that human use of fossil fuels has warmed the Earth and that warming is increasingly having an impact on both nature and society. But how do we, as members of the public with a relatively poor understanding of science, evaluate how certain we should be?

FYI: This video includes some interactive elements that only work if you watch it on Halloran's website.

• climate crisis
• infoviz
• Neil Halloran
• science
• video

Every 10 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) updates its definition of what it defines as "normal" weather.

As soon as the 2021 New Year's celebrations were over, the calls and questions started coming in from weather watchers: When will NOAA release the new U.S. Climate Normals? The Normals are 30-year averages of key climate observations made at weather stations and corrected for bad or missing values and station changes over time. From the daily weather report to seasonal forecasts, the Normals are the basis for judging how temperature, rainfall, and other climate conditions compare to what's normal for a given location in today's climate.

They're set to release the updated 1991-2020 Normals in early May and, crucially, these new normal climate conditions are not adjusted for climate change.

The last update of the Normals took place in 2011, when the baseline shifted from 1971-2000 to 1981-2010. Among the highlights of the rollout was the creation of a map showing how climate-related planting zones across the contiguous United States had shifted northward in latitude and upward in elevation. It was a clear signal that normal overnight low temperatures across the country were warmer than they used to be.

The planting zone maps emphasized a key point about the Normals and climate change: the once-per-decade update means these products gradually come to reflect the "new normal" of climate change caused by global warming. What's normal today is often very different than what was normal 50 or 100 years ago. This gradual adjustment is the point: the purpose of the Normals is to provide context on what climate is like today, not how it's changing over time.

This is literally shifting baselines in action.

So what are shifting baselines? Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience.

And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.

Over time, the fish goes extinct — an enormous, tragic loss — but no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action. By the time the fish go extinct, the fishers barely notice, because they no longer valued the fish anyway.

I've been thinking a lot about shifting baselines recently — specifically in terms of how quickly people in the US got used to thousands of people dying from Covid every day and became unwilling to take precautions or change behaviors that were deemed essential just months earlier when many fewer people were dying. See also mass shootings.

• climate crisis
• infoviz
• NOAA
• weather