California storm damage could top $1 billion – the New York Times

Kitchen manager Josh Whitby inspects the wreckage of Zelda's on the Beach Thursday afternoon in Capitola Village after the restaurant sustained major damage from the storm © 2023 Shmuel Thaler - Santa Cruz Sentinel

Major weather disasters have been striking the United States much more often in recent years as the global climate changes.

The damage from weeks of storms and flooding in California could exceed a billion dollars, according to the state’s emergency agency and private weather forecasters. That toll comes on the heels of 2022, one of the worst on record for large-scale weather and climate disasters around the United States..

Soaked and Battered by Repeating Rainstorms, California Girds for More – the New York Times

Powerful waves continue to batter the Capitola Wharf Thursday morning after the storm destroyed a section of the structure © 2023 Shmuel Thaler - Santa Cruz Sentinel

Extreme weather has plagued many parts of the country this fall and winter. But few places have been as ravaged by the changing climate these last weeks as California.

An unrelenting series of pounding storms over at least 11 days has left no part of California untouched — flooding towns from north to south, loading inland mountains with snow and transforming the often dry Los Angeles River into a raging channel…

An Alaskan Town Is Losing Ground—and a Way of Life – the New York Times

Kivalina, a village facing coastal erosion (by ShoreZone CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

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

Cover Art: THE COQUÍES STILL SING: A Story of Home, Hope, and Rebuilding, illustration by Krystal Quiles (courtesy of macmilllan books).

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…

The Red Sea’s Coral Reefs Defy the Climate-Change Odds – New York Times

Temple, Red Sea (Andrew K CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr).

…(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…