Can video games change people’s minds about the climate crisis? – the Guardian
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…
In the face of sea level rise, can we reimagine California’s vanishing coastline? – the Los Angeles Times
Excerpted from “California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline” (available Sept. 26, 2023) by Rosanna Xia. Reprinted in the Los Angeles Times with permission from Heyday Books, © 2023.
Hip hop has been a climate voice for 50 years. Why haven’t more people noticed? – Grist Magazine
“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…
Hurricane Idalia’s Explosive Power Comes from Abnormally Hot Oceans – the New Yorker
Of all the astonishing facts about our blithe remaking of the world’s climate system, the most astonishing might be this: if oceans didn’t cover seventy per cent of our planet, we would have increased the average temperature to about a hundred and twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit. That’s because those oceans have absorbed something like ninety-three per cent of the extra heat trapped by the greenhouse effect and our burning of fossil fuels…
Venice Isn’t Alone: 7 Sinking Cities Around the World – How Stuff Works
Many big cities sit near the ocean. They became cities in the first place because their ports facilitated trade and travel by sea.
Coastal cities all over the world are sinking — a geological process called subsidence — and it’s happening at a rate that makes scientists nervous. If these bits of land didn’t have important cities on them, it’s likely nobody would notice, or, in some cases, that they wouldn’t be sinking at all…
AP Photos In Sri Lanka, Fishers Suffer as Sea Erosion Destroys Homes and Beaches – AP
Ranjith Sunimal Fernando now has a shell of a home at the edge of Sri Lanka’s coast, lost to the sea. Waves lap past the broken walls into damaged, empty rooms.
“One night last month, my son went to the bathroom and I suddenly heard him screaming, ‘our house has gone into the sea!’,” said Fernando, a 58-year-old fisher born and raised in Iranawila, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of the capital, Colombo…
Up to 70% of California beaches could disappear by end of the century – the Guardian
A new study uses satellites to predict what California’s famous coastline could look like by 2100.
California is known for golden sands and endless waves, but much of the state’s famous shoreline could vanish in the future. That’s according to a new study, which found that between 25% and 70% of California beaches might be washed away by the end of the century, leaving only cliffs or coastal infrastructure in their wake…
Why the Climate Fight Will Fail without India – Scientific American
India is in the midst of the biggest climate experiment the world has ever known.
It’s a test that aims to transform a nation marked by deep economic inequality and heavily polluting coal power to one where families drive electric scooters and cool their homes with the sun’s energy. And it could determine whether global temperatures exceed limits beyond which climate impacts become increasingly disastrous…
Opinion: Facts Haven’t Spurred Us to Climate Action. Can Fiction? – Undark Magazine
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.