From Jane to the Octonauts, Children’s TV is Taking on the Climate Crisis – Grist Magazine

Screenshot from trailer for the children's show JANE, streaming on AppleTV via Youtube

Olivia Dreizen Howell wasn’t seeking out a climate lesson when she and her kids, aged 7 and 9, tuned into Molly of Denali, a popular children’s show on PBS. But there it was: Molly, a 10-year-old Alaska Native and vlogger from the fictional village of Qyah, goes with her friends to visit an old clubhouse. Upon arriving, they find it has begun to sink into the ground. The episode, “Not So Permafrost,” follows Molly as she uncovers why her refuge is sinking in the first place. It served as an unexpected opening for Dreizen Howell and her family to discuss the climate crisis…

Can video games change people’s minds about the climate crisis? – the Guardian

Terra Nil video game screen capture from Netflix game trailer via Youtube.

A new wave of game makers are attempting to influence a generation of environmentally conscious players. Will it work, and is it enough?….Terra Nil, the video game that Alfred has been developing since 2019, is a response to these terrifying events. Dubbed a “city-builder in reverse”, it foregoes the consumption and expansion of genre classics such as Civilisation and SimCity to paint a picture of environmental restoration. Starting with arid desert, it’s up to the player to rewild a landscape using various technologies – a toxin scrubber, for example, or a beehive…

One way to save coral reefs? Deep freeze them for the future – NPR

Corals of Fagatele Bay in National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa. (by: Greg McFall courtesy of NOAA Office of Marine Sanctuaries CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

Ocean temperatures have been extremely hot this summer, wreaking havoc on some of the world’s highly vulnerable coral reefs. With marine heat waves only expected to get worse as the climate changes, scientists are increasingly focusing on an emergency plan: collecting coral specimens and safeguarding them onshore….

Hip hop has been a climate voice for 50 years. Why haven’t more people noticed? – Grist Magazine

Hip Hop Graffiti (CC BY-SA 4.0 via Pxfuel).

“People have spent time bobbing their heads to our stories of this despair and not seeing it as a call to action…”
Hip hop’s relationship to the environment, both in terms of lyrics and political activism, goes back to its very beginning, when smoke from apartment fires blackened the skies of the 1970s South Bronx. And yet its role in advocating for climate solutions has largely gone unnoticed…

Sorry, Honey, It’s Too Hot for Camp (Podcast) – Atlantic Radio

Hot Walk (by Moodycamera Photography CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr).

Summer is getting too hot and dangerous, killing the childhood of our imaginations.

A heat dome in Texas. Wildfire smoke polluting the air in the East and Midwest. The signs are everywhere that our children’s summers will look nothing like our own. In this episode, we talk with the climate writer Emma Pattee about how hot is too hot to go outside. The research is thin and the misconceptions are many—but experts are quickly looking into nuances of how and why children suffer in the heat, so we can prepare for a future that’s already here…

Slipping away: Erosion forces Olympic National Park to take a hard look at Kalaloch Lodge – the Seattle Times

Kalaloch Lodge, on the west coast of Washington's Olympic Peninsula (by Ron Sipherd CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

Kalaloch is the third-most-visited of Olympic National Park’s nine districts…Kalaloch Lodge, run on a concessionaire’s contract by the global entertainment/hospitality company Delaware North…has grown into a beachfront hotel with a restaurant overlooking the ocean, a small grocery store, a campground and nearly 50 cabins sitting on the same bluffs where the Beckers built their rustic resort 95 years ago. Except there’s less bluff. And less of it every year….

NOAA and partners race to rescue remaining Florida corals from historic ocean heat wave – NOAA Climate.gov

Animated satellite-based map showing the build-up of ocean heat stress in the waters around Florida between June 25 and July 23, 2023. Coral reefs in the southern portion of the Florida Keys have been experiencing extreme heat stress for weeks. In areas where the Degree Heating Week (DHW), which is directly related to the timing and intensity of coral bleaching, reached 4 °C-weeks, significant coral bleaching is expected; in areas where the DHW reached 8 °C-weeks, severe coral bleaching and significant mortality are expected (courtesy of NOAA Climate.gov, based on NOAA Coral Reef Watch data, Public Domain).

In mid-July 2023, heat-stressed corals in the southern Florida Keys began bleaching—expelling their food-producing algal partners—amid the hottest water temperatures ever documented in the region during the satellite record (dating back to 1985). As weeks of heat stress have continued to accumulate, bleaching and death have become more widespread, raising fears of a mass mortality event on the region’s already fragile reefs…