Hurricane Idalia’s Explosive Power Comes from Abnormally Hot Oceans – the New Yorker

Sunset at South Jetty after Hurricane Idalia (by Rudy Wilms CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

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…

How Plastics Are Poisoning Us – the New Yorker

"Don't waste water" (by Kumar Jhuremalani CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

They both release and attract toxic chemicals, and appear everywhere from human placentas to chasms thirty-six thousand feet beneath the sea…How worried should we be about what’s become known as “the plastic pollution crisis”? And what can be done about it? These questions lie at the heart of several recent books that take up what one author calls “the plastic trap…”

From Climate Exhortation to Climate Execution – the New Yorker

Installing panels (by Oregon Dept of Transportation CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

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…

Where Walruses Go When Sea Ice Is Gone – the New Yorker

Walrus at Poolepynten, Svalbard, Arctic (by Gary Bembridge CC BY 2.0 via Flickr)

The short documentary “Haulout” follows a scientist on a remote Arctic beach who witnesses the chaotic effects of climate change on Pacific walruses – film by Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev…

In 2018, in the Siberian Arctic, the filmmakers Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev, who are sister and brother, arrived on a strange beach. “The sand was of dark colour, full of bones, and smelled terrible…”