Teaching Children About Climate Change – the New York Times
Two new picture books and a novel for young readers place children at the center of climate calamity. Fittingly, they are stories of homes under threat; home, after all, is the thing climate change stalks, be it a house, a community or a livable planet. Each book offers its own lessons on how to cope with life under the monster we’ve created. The novel even shows how kids can help slay it…
Can Development Laws Elevate Us Out of Sea Level Rise?
Watch Hill is an old neighborhood, where houses with names like Windridge, Waveland and Sea Swept began to take their positions on the ridge more than 160 years ago…
But Watch Hill’s most implacable foe has always been Mother Nature. In 1938, the Great Hurricane wiped fifty houses off Napatree Point, a finger of land curling into the sound. Today, the village is under the increasingly frequent assault of water coaxed by tidal force or blown in by Nor’easters over streets and parking lots, cutting off access to Napatree and giving the old house names a sardonic twist…
Six Art Installations Making Sea Level Rise Visible – Metropolis
Around the globe, artists are reckoning with climate change and finding new ways to render the impacts of rising seas legible…
“Quite often on the news you’ll see these graphs showing sea level rise and flooding levels, and it can be quite hard to grasp the magnitude of it all,” says architect Andre Kong. “With something that devastating, how can you understand what it actually looks like and what it actually means?
New Research Shows People, Wildlife, and Marine Environment Benefit When Island-Ocean Connections are Restored – SCRIPPS
“By applying this knowledge to islands worldwide, we can understand the marine benefits of island restoration projects and maximize returns for our conservation management investments for people, wildlife, and the planet,” said Stuart A. Sandin, PhD, lead co-author of the perspective and a marine ecologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego…
‘Sand is like gold.’ The pricey race to restore Florida beaches before the next hurricane – KOAM News Now
For decades, Florida has been restoring its beaches by dredging or trucking in more sand. But the practice is becoming more challenging — and expensive, thanks to the rising cost of beach-quality sand. Offshore sand deposits, especially on Florida’s southeast coast, are dwindling after decades of repeated beach restoration projects. As local governments squabble over the right to use the remaining sand, its price is rising…
Florida beaches were already running low on sand. Then Ian and Nicole hit – the Washington Post
“I think we’re starting to discover that, despite our best efforts and wanting to throw as much money at this as possible, it has become very difficult to keep these beaches as wide as we would like to keep them,” Robert S. Young, a geology professor at Western Carolina University and director of the Program for Developed Shorelines… “We simply don’t have the capacity to hold all of these beaches in place.”
Shelter from the Storm – Science
A plan to wall off Houston and nearby industry from flooding caused by hurricanes will cost tens of billions of dollars. Will it be enough?
Plans for one of the world’s biggest and most expensive flood barriers were born in a second-floor apartment here in this city on the Gulf of Mexico, as water 4 meters deep filled the street below. In September 2008, Bill Merrell, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University, Galveston, was trapped with his wife, daughter, grandson, and “two annoying chihuahuas…”
Study finds widespread occurrence of microplastic in Monterey Bay – Santa Cruz Sentinel
In a study published in early November, UC Santa Cruz researchers examined how much microplastic is present in the Monterey Bay and some of its inhabitants, and found that the tiny pieces of plastic pollution are not only prevalent in the water, but also in the fish and seabirds they studied…
The Red Sea’s Coral Reefs Defy the Climate-Change Odds – New York Times
…(T)he wildly colorful coral reefs in the waters outside the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh, where the annual United Nations climate conference is taking place, are an anomaly: They can tolerate the heat, and perhaps even thrive in it, making them some of the only reefs in the world that have a chance of surviving climate change…