‘The Deluge’ is a climate nightmare — and it’s based on reality – Grist
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…
Video: How climate change is intensifying the winter storms slamming California – Phys.Org
As another atmospheric river impacts California on January 4 and 5—with more rain forecast after that—Michael Wehner, a senior scientist in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, discusses how climate change is increasing the rainfall from these drenching storms and how people can better prepare…
On the Edge of Retreat (multimedia feature) – the Washington Post
A century ago, about 250 people lived on Hog Island, a seven-mile expanse off the Virginia coast. They raised livestock and gathered oysters. They lived in a town called Broadwater, worked at the lighthouse and Coast Guard station, and danced at night in a social hall called the Red Onion.
But that was back when there was still soil beneath their feet…
Clamshells Face the Acid Test – Hakai Magazine
As acidification threatens shellfish along North America’s Pacific Coast, Indigenous sea gardens offer solutions.
It’s low tide in Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, California, and Hannah Hensel is squishing through thick mud, on the hunt for clams. The hinged mollusks are everywhere, burrowed into the sediment, filtering seawater to feed on plankton. But Hensel isn’t looking for living bivalves—she’s searching the mudflat for the shells of dead clams…
From Climate Exhortation to Climate Execution – the New Yorker
The Inflation Reduction Act finally offers a chance for widespread change…
So far, the climate debate has gone on mostly in people’s heads and hearts. It took thirty years to get elected leaders to take it seriously: first, to just get them to say that the planet was warming, and then to allow that humans were causing it. But this year Congress finally passed serious legislation—the Inflation Reduction Act—that allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to the task of transforming the nation so that it burns far less fossil fuel. So now the battle moves from hearts and heads to houses…
An Alaskan Town Is Losing Ground—and a Way of Life – the New York Times
For years, Kivalina has been cited—like the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, or the island nation of Tuvalu, in the Pacific—as an example of the existential threat posed to low-lying islands by climate change…
On a visit to the state in 2015, President Barack Obama flew over Kivalina and posted a photograph of the island on social media from the air. “There aren’t many other places in America that have to deal with questions of relocation right now,” Obama wrote, “but there will be.” He described what was happening in the village as “America’s wake-up call.”
Seven years later, Kivalina’s move is still mostly in the future, even though the island continues to lose ground…
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…
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?
How to move a country: Fiji’s radical plan to escape rising sea levels – the Guardian
For the past four years, a special government taskforce in Fiji has been trying to work out how to move the country. The plan it has come up with runs to 130 pages of dense text, interspersed with intricate spider graphs and detailed timelines. The document has an uninspiring title – Standard Operating Procedures for Planned Relocations – but it is the most thorough plan ever devised to tackle one of the most urgent consequences of the climate crisis…