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Date is date posted here in Internet Salmagundi, not date originally published.
Climate
The Carbon Footprint of Artificial Intelligence (4/18/2024) Tagged: Artificial Intelligence, Environmental Impacts of Computing | Looking for ways to cut the release of greenhouse gases attributable to AI use, at a time that usage is very likely to grow.
The Catholic cartographer who wants to help the church fight climate change (3/7/2024) Tagged: Climate, Mapping (Cartography), Geographic Information System (GIS) Mapping, Machine Learning | The Catholic Church is one of the world’s largest landowners. Using public data and GIS, Molly Burhans is trying to make it a better steward.
The Trillion-Dollar Auction to Save the World (12/10/2023) Tagged: Carbon Credits | Ocean creatures soak up huge amounts of humanity’s carbon mess. Should we value them like financial assets?
Let Us Not Put All Our Eggs in One Basket (9/30/2023) Tagged: Climate Change, Limitless Growth: Is it a Good Idea? | But what about the overall environmental impacts of this growing infrastructure and the huge number of short-lived devices connected to it, or the indirect impacts on other sectors?
Mapping California’s ‘Zombie’ Forests (8/10/2023) Tagged: Forest Health | In California’s ‘zombie’ forests, conifers have become mismatched to a warming climate.
Our House Is On Fire: The Climate Emergency and Computing’s Responsibility (6/28/2023) Tagged: Environmental Impacts of Computing, Climate Change & Computing’s Responsibility | We will most likely never do better than a best guess at computing's carbon footprint, but given uncertainties it would be safer and more responsible to act on the assumption that higher estimates could be closer to the truth—especially since the pace of warming has exceeded our expectations at every point. But in big-picture terms, the difference between 1.8% and 3.9% does not fundamentally change our mission: computing's emissions must be reduced urgently and drastically. How are we going to achieve this?
Extreme Heat Is a Disease for Cities. Treat It That Way (6/21/2023) Tagged: Urban Heat Island | The “urban heat island effect” creates extra-hot temperatures that kill. But cities can prescribe powerful treatments, like green spaces and reflective roofs.
Hidden beneath the surface (6/20/2023) Tagged: Climate Research, Climate Record | Digging deep into a humble lake in Canada, scientists found a spot on Earth like no other — and a record that could redefine our history of the planet
Hurricane Ian Is a Warning From the Future (12/16/2022) Tagged: Urban Development, Hurricanes / Tropical Cyclones | Tropical storms are increasingly likely to batter the US as oceans warm—and will continue to wreak havoc so long as climate change remains unaddressed.
The Desert’s Fragile Skin Can’t Take Much More Heat (12/9/2022) Tagged: Cryptobiotic Soil (Biocrust) | Climate change and human activity are destroying the layers of fungi, lichen, and bacteria that protect deserts from erosion.
If You Don’t Already Live in a Sponge City, You Will Soon (12/9/2022) Tagged: Urban Technology, Water, Urban Ecology | Less pavement and more green spaces help absorb water instead of funneling it all away—a win-win for people and urban ecosystems.
California’s Heat Wave Is a Big Moment for Batteries (9/12/2022) Tagged: Record Heat, Battery Technology | Scorching temperatures in the Golden State are a test case for a more flexible energy grid.
The US agency in charge of developing fossil fuels has a new job: cleaning them up (9/12/2022) Tagged: Climate Research, Carbon Capture / Carbon Removal | The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management has a new name, new leaders, and a new mandate to meet Joe Biden’s climate goals.
A River Runs Through It (7/24/2022) Tagged: Water | Unearthing streams breathes life back into local communities.
Good, Better, Best: How Sustainable Should Computing Be? (7/10/2022) Tagged: Ethics, Decarbonize, Renewable / Sustainable Energy | As financial pressures on climate risk and reputation grow, computing industry executives have made new commitments to reduce carbon emissions and impact.
The architect making friends with flooding (5/28/2022) Tagged: Water, Flooding, Climate Policy | One Chinese landscape designer has pioneered a new approach—working with water instead of trying to bend it to our will.
The Quest to Trap Carbon in Stone—and Beat Climate Change (4/5/2022) Tagged: Carbon Capture / Carbon Removal | On a barren lava plateau in Iceland, a new facility is sucking in air and stashing the carbon dioxide in rock. The next step: Build 10,000 more.
UN climate report: Carbon removal is now “essential” (4/5/2022) Tagged: Carbon Capture / Carbon Removal | Removing the greenhouse gas from the air will likely be necessary, along with radical emissions cuts, to keep temperatures from rising 2˚C.
The Atlantic’s vital currents could collapse. Scientists are racing to understand the dangers. (4/3/2022) Tagged: Ocean Currents, Climate Research | So far, the efforts to observe the currents directly show they're weirder and more unpredictable than expected.
Underwater Permafrost Is a Big, Gassy Wild Card for the Climate (4/3/2022) Tagged: Permafrost, Methane, Carbon Dioxide | You’ve probably heard of permafrost, the frozen carbon-rich land. But it’s also thawing under the sea, burping up planet-warming gases.
Lessons from a genocide can prepare humanity for climate apocalypse (10/18/2021) Tagged: Historical Analogy, Climate Change, Environment & Technology | The bad news is that our slow-motion ecological catastrophe demands new ways of thinking. The good news? We’ve faced the end of the world before.
A powerful new model could make global warming estimates less vague (7/30/2021) Tagged: Machine Learning, High Performance Computing, Climate Modelling | One of the biggest sources of climate uncertainty is how clouds will behave. Caltech physicist Tapio Schneider is trying to give us some answers.
Suppressing fires has failed. Here’s what California needs to do instead. (7/4/2021) Tagged: Wildland Fires | It’s time to reverse a century of fire-management policy. That will require sweeping regulatory reforms, and tons of money.
Summer Heat 2020 (9/27/2020) Tagged: Weather Phenomena | It is now normal for each Summer to in one way or another be hotter than the one prior. As a result there will be remarkable occurrences a few of which I'm cataloguing here.
California Fires – Late August, 2020 (8/22/2020) Tagged: Weather Phenomena, History - WSO, Wildland Fires, Fire Related Weather, Fire Tornado, Fire Whirl, Record Heat | A large number of fires were started by lightning strikes in California over the weekend of August 15-16, 2020. They resulted from a storm system that moved along the coast of California and produced copious amounts of dry lightning through primarily northern California around the greater San Fransisco Bay area. I'm including a number of articles, imagery and videos to document the resulting series of fires and the impact the resulting smoke has had on the upper western United States.
A deadly derecho slammed Nashville with 70 mph winds Sunday, snapping trees and knocking out power (5/4/2020) Tagged: Weather Phenomena | Residents in the Tennessee Valley are cleaning up after a long-lived line of thunderstorms, known as a derecho, brought severe wind gusts on Sunday. The intense storms caused straight-line wind damage along a path that stretched for more than 600 miles.
A Forgotten Wilderness: Nature’s Hidden Relationships in West Central Idaho (3/15/2019) Tagged: Climate, Geography, Photographs | “Idaho author Matthew Deren discovered a hidden niche from the ground up in West Central Idaho as he researched a book about nature's hidden relationships in the temperate forests between McCall and Riggins.”
"‘I noticed a convergence zone in West Central Idaho that no one had really discovered before,’ Deren says. ‘It's a point where the south meets the north, the dry meets the wet, and where civilization meets the wild. It's the largest temperate block of wilderness in North America.’"