The Red Sea Could be a Climate Refuge for Coral Reefs – Inside Climate News

A flat fan at Elphinstone Reef, Red Sea, Egypt (by Derek Keats CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

When Lina Challita dives along Egypt’s coast, she doesn’t just see a colorful array of corals and fish. She sees hope. Against the grim backdrop of climate models that project most coral reefs dying by the end of this century in overheating oceans, the northern end of the Red Sea may end up being one of the last places on Earth where those critical ocean ecosystems can survive, at least at least for a while, and perhaps longer if countries of the world manage to cap global warming and stabilize the climate…

Opinion: Facts Haven’t Spurred Us to Climate Action. Can Fiction? – Undark Magazine

Science-fiction art directed toward climate change, melting ice and re-emerging life forms (illustration by David S. Soriano, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia).

SCIENTISTS MUST BE wondering what it will take to scare us straight. Watching flood waters submerge 80 percent of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina didn’t do it. Nor did videos shot by Australians in 2019 as they fled walls of flame, a hellish orange haze in all directions. Will the deaths of more than 6 million people in the Covid-19 pandemic …jolt the world into action? I wouldn’t count on it.

No debate anymore: Climate change makes extreme weather worse, federal scientists say – WUSF Public Media

Atmospheric River event in January 2017 (animation by NOAA/ESRL/PSD, Public Domain)

Scientists at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) delivered a clear message: Climate change is — unequivocally — making extreme weather events worse.
South Florida has always been hot, rainy and vulnerable to hurricanes. So it’s understandable that some longtime residents remain skeptical that climate change is doing anything to make the region’s age-old problems any worse…

‘The Deluge’ is a climate nightmare — and it’s based on reality – Grist

Cover of the new novel "Deluge" by Stephen Markley (published January 10, 2023, courtesy Simon & Schuster).

Excerpt: Stephen Markley explains how he wrote a dystopia that feels a little too real.

It was the year 2028, and I was hiding with eco-terrorists in a cabin deep in the woods…Birds were dropping dead from the sky, and a dust storm raged around us, turning the sun crimson…I was relieved to wake up from this dream and shake my paranoia that the FBI was after me. That’s how immersive The Deluge is, an ambitious new novel by Stephen Markley…

Welcome to the era of weather whiplash – Vox

New Year's Eve Storm drenches Santa Cruz County, CA, creating flooding, slides, slip outs, downed trees and wire ©2023 Shmuel Thaler - Santa Cruz Sentinel.

California’s floods reveal a likely climate change symptom: Quick shifts between opposing weather conditions. In less than a week, the story about California’s weather shifted dramatically. Just before New Year’s Eve, the state was running out of water following two decades of severe drought. Then, it started to rain and rain..California was battered by a series of atmospheric rivers…

‘Rivers in the Sky’: How Atmospheric Rivers Control Nearly All of Earth’s Precipitation – Popular Mechanics

On Jan. 28, 2020, the GOES West satellite traced the path of an atmospheric river flowing across the northern Pacific Ocean (courtesy of NOAA, Public Domain, via Flickr).

“Atmospheric rivers are literally rivers in the sky, the rivers of water vapor that transport massive amounts of water in the atmosphere,” Marty Ralph, a hydrometeorologist, tells Popular Mechanics. Ralph is the founding director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, where he has pioneered research on how atmospheric rivers influence the West Coast…

When Climate Adaptation Backfires – Discover

The River Thames Flood Barrier (by Andrew Price CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via

In the scramble to combat climate change, so-called solutions can cause more harm. An IPCC 2022 report warns of these maladaptations.

Around the world, people are building levees, shoring up dams, digging canals and constructing infrastructure to confront the impacts of climate change. Most of these investments will likely save countless lives and protect property, but some will inadvertently add to the problems they are trying to address…