Climate crisis

Subterms

    More stories

    • 213 Shares98 Views

      in US Politics

      On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom’. Its moderators say it’s not for everyone

      by

      The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours.For many, the only sane solution is to stop reading the news altogether – advice often shared by therapists, self-help books and even newspaper articles.But to bury your head in the sand until the day the apocalypse arrives at your doorstep is not necessarily the most tranquil, nor moral, of postures. In the sprawling Reddit community r/collapse, people instead try to stare unblinkingly at the unravelling of civilization. For the roughly half a million members here, many of whom joined in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic and two Donald Trump inaugurations, the arc of history feels more like a freefall.This June, r/collapse was busy discussing the developing conflict between Iran and Israel, as well as “wet bulbs” (a far more humid and deadly type of heatwave), the millions of air conditioners being bought in India as temperatures rise and Trump’s plan to end Fema.But one of the top posts tackled a more specialist topic: declining levels of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic. “As if the North Atlantic fisheries wasn’t in bad enough shape from overfishing of cod, now the base of the entire food chain has observed to be getting smaller each year for the past 60 years,” the poster wrote. A commenter added: “Ocean acidification/die off is terrifying. Even if we solve all the other collapse problems (and we almost certainly can’t) the oceans dying means the atmosphere becomes depleted of oxygen and poisonous. If humans survive those scenarios, life on Earth would more resemble that of a moon colony.” Much informed panicking ensued.There are lots of places on the internet, and especially on Reddit, that collate news stories around a theme: r/UpliftingNews, r/LateStageCapitalism and r/nottheonion (which posts news so ridiculous it seems like satire) to name a few. But r/collapse is much more than a collation of links for people to feel outraged and nihilistic or warm and fuzzy about. What’s striking is the clear-eyed, unemotional tone in which posts are written: neither pessimistic nor hopeful, just peering through the window at a relentless decline.“We are not an activist subreddit,” one moderator, a retired history teacher, told me. “We filter out people who want to organize and protest. We are also not inclined towards accelerationism, we’re not seeking doom. We accept that perhaps it’s going to happen, but it’s not a conspiratorial subreddit. It’s basically logic, rational and scientific.”View image in fullscreenThat is thanks in part to r/collapse’s 30 fairly active moderators – among them neuroscientists, environmental scientists, chemical engineers, government auditors and history teachers – who intensively maintain the subreddit as relatively objective a resource as possible. They even have a separate page, called r/collapse_wilds, for posts removed by the moderation team, usually because they did not provide high quality enough evidence. When a new moderator applies, the existing group screens them for mental health issues and ability to handle consistently distressing content, as well as overt political bias.It might sound like a lot of red tape to help run a subreddit, but when you realize what it takes to drench yourself in fatalistic topics day in, day out, you start to understand that a collapse moderator is a special kind of person.I spoke with 10 such moderators on a video chat, just as the national guard and marines were sent to quell Ice protests in Los Angeles. All are men based in North America, polite and turn-taking, though most insisted on remaining anonymous so their online roles wouldn’t interfere with their real world positions. In their roles, they take the existential questions of civilization collapse seriously: What exactly constitutes collapse? Are we already experiencing it? Why aren’t people reacting more strongly to its likelihood, and does either humanity or technology have the ability to prevent it? Practical questions, too: where is the best place to live, the most helpful job to have, as collapse happens?They wrestle with whether too much Trump news is distracting, and painstakingly debate posts about the morality of having children and population growth, which they say is the most controversial topic among the community. Each post from a user must come with an accompanying statement explaining why it’s related to collapse that the moderators assess; sometimes it seems more like they’re overseeing a grant application process rather than an online forum.The work is often philosophical in nature. “People say that this is one of the least religious times in human history, but I think that’s completely false,” said Etienne, a moderator who is based in Ontario with a background in cognitive science and neuroscience. “Most of us have strong, strong faith in the myth of technological progress. Most people associate thinking about collapse with pessimism because you’re questioning the orthodoxy of our modern religion, which is faith in progress. And I think once you’ve made peace with the myth that we all grew up with being scientifically false, then you go through the stages of grief, then you build some psychological resilience to live in the world.”The group says that when the media or academia write about collapse issues, they often try to end on an optimistic note, so as not to depress the reader.“It’s really hard to find a mainstream publication that doesn’t end an article about, say, renewable energy, with a section that says: ‘things are difficult but let’s have hope’ and ‘it’s just a matter of building more solar panels,’” Etienne said. He cited reports, including an impactful study by Simon Michaux commissioned by the Finnish government, that say it’s simply impossible to replace energy with renewable sources at scale. “But we find there’s much less coverage of that – of using less energy and degrowth.”View image in fullscreenThe moderators also say that people who are concerned about societal collapse tend to think it’ll come suddenly with a nuclear bomb or terrible pandemic. The subreddit is of a different mind. One moderator, an engineer who preferred to remain anonymous, explained the tenets of r/collapse like this: “In the long term, it’s going to be very difficult for us to maintain this very complex industrial society. We’re looking at a type of simplification of industrial civilization. I think most of our members think this is what collapse is, which is why almost half of the members, when asked when they think collapse is going to happen, said that it’s already happening.“This is the idea of catabolic collapse: that what we’re living through is a series of crises, sometimes followed by momentary resolution, but the long-term trend is downturn. It’s not going to be a sudden event that’s everything in a single day, which I think people like preppers are more accustomed to thinking.”Every week, r/collapse puts out a special newsletter called Last Week in Collapse, a one-stop shop for everything that has gone wrong in the world. Its author is an international affairs researcher, who requested anonymity because their background might “color the reader’s interpretation of the events”. They’re not part of the moderation group, but began writing the roundup in 2021, inspired by what they had seen on the subreddit.“It was part of a process of making sense of the storm of news around us – almost a form of writing therapy,” they told me over email. “It is so easy to get lost or distracted by the next thing that we forget the big picture. So I decided to start organizing and summarizing other stories because I believed it would help other collapsologists and observers zoom out and take it all in.”It makes for a pretty brutal read. This week’s newsletter, for example, began with a newly published study of tree rings that suggested “irreversible large-scale forest loss” in the Amazon; featured a study saying climate change could reduce crop yields across the US and Europe 40% by 2100, which one scientist likened to “everyone on the planet giving up breakfast”; touched on counterintuitive research showing that some glass bottles contain up to 50 times more microplastics than plastic bottles or metal cans; and reported that this is “the sixth consecutive year that global peacefulness has deteriorated” per the Global Peace Index. These were just a few of around a hundred links.“Collapse is hard to deny when it’s all laid out for you every week,” says the author. Readers are now able to spend just five or 10 minutes reading one email “and be kept abreast on all the latest doom”.I ask what differentiates just bad news from a news story that is actually about collapse. “I have found that it helps to imagine likely realities for humanity, position your perspective in the future, and then look backwards for the telltale signs and milestones of future collapse,” the author says. “What factors and events will seem obvious to someone living 50 or 100 years from now? We can look back at the 1930s today and the road to WWII seems much clearer. Scientists are publishing under-appreciated studies every day, and their relevance is fairly obvious. Yet our attention lies elsewhere entirely.”A weekly roundup does seem like a useful alternative to completely ignoring society’s downfall. But if things are as bad as r/collapse believes them to be, does it do us any good to inundate ourselves with news of the end of everything? Aren’t we just increasing our personal suffering without making anything better?“Yes, I sometimes wonder about the overall mental impact of Last Week in Collapse,” says its author. “I know some people find it to be valuable, informative and even soothing. Others can’t bring themselves to read it. It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. To paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in collapse, but collapse is interested in you.”View image in fullscreenTo that end, the subreddit provides online mental health resources as well as a separate community, r/CollapseSupport, where people talk about their struggles. “Can’t stop thinking about the children”, “feeling completely hopeless” and “scared to death for everyone” are three recent post titles.Most of the moderators say that the thing they’ve found most helpful in dealing with the onslaught of information is moderating itself, and connecting with people who have similar concerns across the world: debating but also sharing cat photos and having meaningful discussion about how to lead a meaningful life in the end times. But they’re aware they’re not always the most fun people at a party.“I don’t want to be right about this sort of situation,” said one of the moderators, an electrical engineer from the midwest. “But if you’re open-minded and you’re considerate of sources, and you’re approaching it from a very methodical fashion, there is much cause for concern. Working through that grief was trying. I think there’s a lot of people that come to this community that maybe had my same perspective, and if I can at least help a few of those folks work through that, or come to their own peace, that adds some small iota of value to the internet space at large.”And that would be a vaguely uplifting note to end this article on, but as I’m hearing, that’s the coward’s way out. The truth is not all the people behind r/collapse feel like they’re necessarily helping.As the author of Last Week in Collapse put it to me, there’s probably no way out of the collapse: “I do not believe we will ultimately innovate or vote ourselves out of our situation. I predict humanity is in for a polluted future of climate emergencies, famines, wars and scarcity before the end of this century. And heatwaves, civil conflicts, breakdown of ocean currents, disease, poverty, overpopulation, drought and more. So I feel a certain sense of duty to inform those who are interested, but it’s probably healthier to ‘chop wood, carry water’ than to spend too much time following the world’s problems. Most people can’t really stop the machine anyway.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump violating right to life with anti-environment orders, youth lawsuit says

      by

      Twenty-two young Americans have filed a new lawsuit against the Trump administration over its anti-environment executive orders. By intentionally boosting oil and gas production and stymying carbon-free energy, federal officials are violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty, alleges the lawsuit, filed on Thursday.The federal government is engaging in unlawful executive overreach by breaching congressional mandates to protect ecosystems and public health, argue the plaintiffs, who are between the ages of seven and 25 and hail from the heavily climate-impacted states of Montana, Hawaii, Oregon, California and Florida. They also say officials’ emissions-increasing and science-suppressing orders have violated the state-created danger doctrine, a legal principle meant to prevent government actors from inflicting injury upon their citizens.“At its core, this suit is about the health of children, it’s about the right to life, it’s about the right to form families,” said Julia Olson, attorney and founder of Our Children’s Trust, the non-profit law firm that brought the suit. “We all have constitutional rights, and if we don’t use our constitution – if we walk away from it and we walk away from our youth – we will not have a democracy.”The lawsuit specifically targets three of the slew of pro-fossil fuel executive orders Trump has signed during his second term. Among them are two day-one Trump moves to declare a “national energy emergency” and “unleash American energy”, and another April order aimed at “reinvigorating” the domestic production of coal – the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel.View image in fullscreenAll three orders aimed to bolster already-booming US energy production. They also led agencies to stymy renewable energy production and to suppress climate research and data, flaunting congressional environmental protections, the lawsuit argues.The litigation is the latest in a series of youth-led climate cases brought by the non-profit law firm Our Children’s Trust. The lead plaintiff in the new case, 19-year-old Eva Lighthiser, was also a plaintiff in the firm’s Held v Montana lawsuit, which notched a landmark win in 2023 when a judge ruled that the state’s pro-fossil fuel policies violated their rights under the state’s constitution.“Trump’s fossil fuel orders are a death sentence for my generation,” said Lighthiser.Lighthiser has already seen the impacts of the climate crisis in her life: flood-related destruction to roads and bridges one summer forced her family to sell their house in Livingston, Montana.“The effects of climate change cause Eva persistent stress and anxiety about her future,” the lawsuit says. “Every additional ton of [greenhouse gas] pollution and increment of heat Defendants cause will cause Eva more harm.”Other plaintiffs in the new case previously participated in other Our Children’s Trust lawsuits, including one that reached a historic settlement in Hawaii last year; another filed by Florida youth against their state government; and a third, the federal case Juliana v US, which was filed a decade ago and dismissed without prejudice last year.Lighthiser said Trump’s re-election last year felt “like such a heavy thing”. In the wake of her 2023 win in the Montana lawsuit, she said it felt like taking “one step forward, three steps back”.She fears Trump’s policies will directly affect her well-being. In moves to prop up the dying coal industry in recent months, for instance, the administration has granted relief to both the Spring Creek coal mine and Colstrip coal-fired power station in Montana; trains transporting coal from one to the other run through Lighthiser’s hometown.“The coal cars are brimming with coal that just blows [dust] out all over my town,” said Lighthiser. “That could effect my own body and my own health, and it feels very intimidating, because it’s not something that feels like it’s in my control right now.”The lawsuit names Trump and the US as defendants, as well as the office of management and budget, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the departments of interior, energy and transportation, in addition to the head of each agency.“These are agencies that are really deeply involved in making sure that more fossil fuels stay online,” said Olson.It also targets scientific organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and its parent agency, the Department of Commerce, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – agencies that are “suppressing science” in their attempts to comply with Trump’s executive orders, said Olson.Reached for comment, Elizabeth Peace, spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, said her agency “remains committed to stewarding our natural and cultural resources, honoring Tribal trust responsibilities, and managing public lands for all Americans – while upholding fiscal responsibility”. She said the department does not comment on litigation “as a matter of policy”.Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said: “The American people are more concerned with the future generations’ economic and national security, which is why they elected President Trump in a landslide victory to restore America’s energy dominance. Future generations should not have to foot the bill of the left’s radical climate agenda.”The EPA also declined to comment.The youth plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the three executive orders unconstitutional and block their implementation. They are also demanding that it protect the rights to a clean environment granted by certain state constitutions like Montana and Hawaii, which they say the Trump directives have impinged upon.In Olson’s view, the case is winnable, particularly because it only brings claims under rights that are explicitly granted under the US constitution, and which have already been recognized by the supreme court. (Juliana v US, by contrast, argued that Americans have an implicit, but unstated, constitutional right to a life-sustaining climate system.)No matter how the case is eventually ruled, Olson said, the filing of the lawsuit is “itself a success”.“Having young people rise up at a time when democracy is threatened and when there’s retaliation against so many people in this country for standing up against the administration, that is success,” she said. “It’s about having the bravery to bring claims in the court, of not being too afraid to use their rights.”Though it is “scary to take on the man in the highest position of power”, Lighthiser said, the lawsuit is “absolutely necessary”.She hopes it will eventually help slow global warming, which has led to more frequent and intense wildfires, droughts and floods in her home state of Montana. And she hopes it will afford youth the ability to “just be kids”.She recalled one day during the summer of 2022, when the Yellowstone River flooded her hometown. “I spent seven hours that day filling sandbags for people to take to their homes,” she said.“That kind of thing is going to become more common [with] climate change,” she said. “That doesn’t sound to me like we’re getting to live freely.” More

    • 200 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s new ‘gold standard’ rule will destroy American science as we know it | Colette Delawalla

      by

      Science is under siege.On Friday evening, the White House released an executive order called Restoring Gold Standard Science. At face value, this order promises a commitment to federally funded research that is “transparent, rigorous, and impactful” and policy that is informed by “the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available”. But hidden beneath the scientific rhetoric is a plan that would destroy scientific independence in the US by giving political appointees the latitude to dismiss entire bodies of research and punish researchers who fail to fall in line with the current administration’s objectives. In other words: this is Fool’s-Gold Standard Science.According to the order, “Gold Standard Science means science conducted in a manner that is:(i) reproducible;(ii) transparent;(iii) communicative of error and uncertainty;(iv) collaborative and interdisciplinary;(v) skeptical of its findings and assumptions;(vi) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses;(vii) subject to unbiased peer review;(viii) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and(ix) without conflicts of interest.”The order mimics the language of an active reform movement in science to increase rigor and transparency of research – a movement commonly called the open science movement, to which some of us are contributors. Science is, by nature, a continuous work in progress, constantly self-scrutinized and always looking for opportunities to improve. We should all be able to celebrate any administration’s investment in improving the openness, integrity and reproducibility of research.But, with this executive order, we cannot.Instead of being about open science, it grants administration-aligned political appointees the power to designate any research as scientific misconduct based on their own “judgment” and includes the power to punish the scientists involved accordingly; this would weaponize government counter to the public interest.The consequences of state-dictated science can be catastrophic. When Trofim Lysenko, a researcher who denied the reality of genetic inheritance and natural selection, won favor with Joseph Stalin and took control of agriculture in the Soviet Union, thousands of scientists who disagreed with him were fired, imprisoned or killed. His disastrous agricultural prescriptions ultimately led to famines that killed millions in the USSR and in China.Science does not proceed by sequentially establishing unassailable conclusions, but rather by steadily accumulating numerous lines of evidence, scrutinizing weaknesses, and pursuing additional evidence. Almost any study, any source of evidence, any conclusion, falls short of meeting every aspect of the White House’s list of best practices. This has nothing to do with laziness, let alone misconduct by individual scientists; it’s simply a consequence of the fact that science is difficult. Scientists constantly grapple with uncertainty, and nevertheless can ultimately arrive at robust, valid conclusions, such as the fact that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet and wreaking havoc on our climate.Under the terms of the executive order, political appointees loyal to the president can willfully find justification to label any research finding as scientific misconduct, and then penalize the researchers involved accordingly. This administration has already appropriated the language of open science to assert control over and deal heavy blows to the scientific ecosystem of the United States – including cancelling thousands of active research grants in climate science, misinformation and disinformation, vaccines, mental health, women’s health, LGBTQ+ health and stem education. Calls to “revisit” decades of work that establish vaccine safety beyond a shadow of a doubt “because the only way you can get good science is through replication”, and demands for unethical vaccine clinical trial practices and additional data, further echo the bad-faith adoption of open science language.Trump has also advanced a congressional budget calling for massive cuts to federal spending on research and development and levied significant retaliation against universities that have not fallen in line with his demands. He has gone so far as to propose a rule change by the office of personnel management that would install policy police at all levels of federal agencies, converting thousands of employees into presidential appointees who can be summarily fired without due process for any arbitrary political reason. This new executive order raises the concern that many of our best scientists would be targeted in Lysenkoist purges. Meanwhile, the threat of such actions is already having a chilling effect on all scientists.Science is the most important long-term investment for humanity. Interference in the scientific process by political arbiters stifles scientists’ freedom of speech and thought. Science depends on unfettered speech – free and continuous discussion of data and ideas. We, like the rest of the scientific community, aspire to achieve greater openness, integrity and reproducibility of research to accelerate discovery, advance treatments and foster solutions to meet society’s greatest challenges. Meeting that objective will not occur by centralizing power over science and scientists according to the whims of any political administration. We see this executive order for what it is: an attempt to sell the US’s future for pyrite.

      Colette Delawalla is a PhD candidate at Emory University and executive director of Stand Up for Science. Victor Ambros is a 2024 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine at the Chan Medical School, University of Massachusetts. Carl Bergstrom is professor of biology at the University of Washington. Carol Greider is a 2009 Nobel laureate in medicine and distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Michael Mann is the presidential distinguished professor of earth and environmental science and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Brian Nosek is executive director of the Center for Open Science and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Flooding could end southern Appalachia’: the scientists on an urgent mission to save lives

      by

      The abandoned homes and razed lots along the meandering Troublesome Creek in rural eastern Kentucky is a constant reminder of the 2022 catastrophic floods that killed dozens of people and displaced thousands more.Among the hardest hit was Fisty, a tiny community where eight homes, two shops and nine people including a woman who uses a wheelchair, her husband and two children, were swept away by the rising creek. Some residents dismissed cellphone alerts of potential flooding due to mistrust and warning fatigue, while for others it was already too late to escape. Landslides trapped the survivors and the deceased for several days.In response, geologists from the University of Kentucky secured a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and raced around collecting perishable data in hope of better understanding the worst flooding event to hit the region in a generation.View image in fullscreenOn a recent morning in Fisty, Harold Baker sat smoking tobacco outside a new prefabricated home while his brother James worked on a car in a makeshift workshop. With no place else to go, the Baker family rebuilt the workshop on the same spot on Troublesome Creek with financial assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).“I feel depressed, everyone else is gone now. The days are long. It feels very lonely when the storms come in,” said Baker, 55, whose four dogs also drowned in 2022. With so few people left, the car repair business is way down, the road eerily quiet.Since the flood that took everything, Harold and James patrol the river every time it rains. The vigilance helped avert another catastrophe on Valentine’s Day after another so-called generational storm. No one died but the trauma, like the river, came roaring back.“I thought we were going to lose everything again, it was scary,” said Baker.At this spot in July 2022, geologist Ryan Thigpen found flood debris on top of two-storey buildings – 118in (3 metres) off the ground. The water mark on Harold’s new trailer shows the February flood hit 23in.Troublesome creek is a 40-mile narrow tributary of the north fork of the Kentucky River, which, like many waterways across southern Appalachia, does not have a single gauge. Yet these rural mountain hollers are getting slammed over and over by catastrophic flooding – and landslides – as the climate crisis increases rainfall across the region and warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico turbocharge storms.Two years after 45 people died in the 2022 floods, the scale of disaster grew with Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 230 people with almost half the deaths in Appalachia, after days of relentless rain turned calm streams into unstoppable torrents.Another 23 people died during the February 2025 rains, then 24 more in April during a four-day storm that climate scientists found was made significantly more likely and more severe by the warming planet.View image in fullscreenThe extreme weather is making life unbearable and economically unviable for a chronically underserved region where coal was once king, and climate skepticism remains high. Yet little is known about flooding in the Appalachian region. It’s why the geologists – also called earth scientists – got involved.“This is where most people are going to die unless we create reliable warning systems and model future flood risks for mitigation and to help mountain communities plan for long-term resilience. Otherwise, these extreme flooding events could be the end of southern Appalachia,” said Thigpen.Amid accelerating climate breakdown the urgency of the mission is clear. Yet this type of applied science could be derailed – or at least curtailed – by the unprecedented assault on science, scientists and federal agencies by Donald Trump and his billionaire donors.Danielle Baker, Harold’s sister-in-law (James’s wife), had her bags packed a week in advance of the February flood and was glued to local television weather reports, which, like the geologists, rely on meteorological forecasting by the taxpayer-funded National Weather Service (NWS).She was “scared to death” watching the creek rise so high again. But this time the entire family, including 11 dogs and several cats, evacuated to the church on the hill where they waited 26 hours for the water to subside.View image in fullscreen“The people in this community are the best you could meet, but it’s a ghost town now. I didn’t want to rebuild so close to the creek, but we had nowhere else to go. Every time it rains, I can’t sleep,” she said, wiping away tears with her shirt.Danielle was unaware of Trump’s plans to dismantle Fema and slash funding from the NWS and NSF. “A lot of people here would not know what to do without Fema’s help. We need more information about the weather, better warnings, because the rains are getting worse,” she said.A day after the Guardian’s visit in mid-May, a NWS office in eastern Kentucky scrambled to cover the overnight forecast as severe storms moved through the region, triggering multiple tornadoes that eventually killed 28 people. Hundreds of staff have left the NWS in recent months, through a combination of layoffs and buyouts at the behest of Trump mega-donor Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge).Yet statewide, two-thirds of Kentuckians voted for Trump last year, with his vote share closer to 80% in rural communities hit hard by extreme weather, where many still blame Barack Obama for coal mine closures.“It doesn’t matter if people don’t believe in climate change. It’s going to wallop them anyway. We need to think about watersheds differently. This is a new world of extremes and cascading hazards,” said Thigpen, the geologist.The rapidly changing climate is rendering the concept of once-in-a-generation floods, which is mostly based on research by hydrologists going back a hundred years or so, increasingly obsolete. Geologists, on the other hand, look back 10,000 years, which could help better understand flooding patterns when the planet was warmer.Thigpen is spearheading this close-knit group of earth scientists from the university’s hazards team based in Lexington. On a recent field trip, nerdy jokes and constant teasing helped keep the mood light, but the scientists are clearly affected by the devastation they have witnessed since 2022. The team has so far documented more than 3,000 landslides triggered by that single extreme rain event, and are still counting.View image in fullscreenThis work is part of a broader statewide push to increase climate resiliency and bolster economic growth using Kentucky-specific scientific research. Last year, the initiative got a major boost when the state secured $24m from the NSF for a five-year research project involving eight Kentucky institutions that has created dozens of science jobs and hundreds of new student opportunities.The grant helped pay for high-tech equipment – drones, radars, sensors and computers – the team needs to collect data and build models to improve hazard prediction and create real-time warning systems.View image in fullscreenAfter major storms, the team measures water levels and analyzes the sediment deposits left behind to calculate the scale and velocity of the flooding, which in turn helps calibrate the model.The models help better understand the impact of the topography and each community’s built and natural environment – important for future mitigation. In these parts, coal was extracted using mountaintop mine removal, which drastically altered the landscape. Mining – and redirected waterways – can affect the height of a flood, according to a recent study by PhD student Meredith Swallom.A paleo-flood project is also under way, and another PhD student, Luciano Cardone, will soon begin digging into a section of the Kentucky riverbank to collect layers of sediment that holds physical clues on the date, size and velocity of ancient floods. Cardone, who found one local missionary’s journal describing flooding in 1795, will provide a historical or geological perspective to catastrophic flooding in the region, which the team believe will help better predict future hazards under changing climatic conditions.View image in fullscreenAll this data is analyzed at the new lab located in the Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS) department where super-powerful computers are positioned around a ceiling-to-floor black board, with a groovy lamp and artwork to get the creative mathematical juices flowing.So far the team has developed one working flood risk model for a single section of the Kentucky River. This will serve as a template, as each watershed requires its own model so that the data is manageable, precise and useful.This sort of applied science has the capacity to directly improve the lives of local people, including many Trump voters, as well as benefiting other mountainous flood-prone areas across the US and globally. But a flood warning system can only work if there is reliable meteorological forecasting going forward.Reports suggest NWS weather balloons, which assess storm risk by measuring wind speed, humidity, temperature and other conditions that satellites may not detect, have been canceled in recent weeks from Nebraska to Florida due to staff shortages. At the busiest time for storm predictions, deadly heatwaves and wildfires, weather service staffing is down by more than 10% and, for the first time in almost half a century, some forecasting offices no longer have 24/7 cover.Trump’s team is also threatening to slash $1.52bn from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the weather service’s parent agency, which also monitors climate trends, manages coastal ecosystems and supports international shipping, among other things.“To build an effective and trusted warning system we need hyper-local data, including accurate weather forecasts and a more robust network of gauges,” said Summer Brown, a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky’s earth and environmental sciences department. “The thought of weakening our basic weather data is mind-boggling.”View image in fullscreenIt’s impossible not to worry about the cuts, especially as the grand plan is to create a southern Appalachian flood and hazard centre to better understand and prepare the entire region’s mountain communities for extreme weather and related hazards, including flash floods, landslides and tornadoes.For this, the team is currently awaiting a multimillion-dollar grant decision from the NSF, in what until recently was a merit-based, peer-reviewed process at the federal agency. The NSF director resigned in April after orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the $9bn budget and fire half of its 1,700-person staff. Then in an unprecedented move, a member of the governing body stepped down, lambasting Musk’s unqualified Doge team for interfering in grant decisions.The NSF is the principal federal investor in basic science and engineering, and the proposed cut will be devastating in the US and globally.“Rivers are different all over Appalachia, and if our research continues we can build accurate flood and landslide models that help communities plan for storms in a changing climate,” said Jason Dortch, who set up the flood lab. “We’ve submitted lots of great grant proposals, and while that is out of our hands, we will continue to push forwarded however we can.”Fleming-Neon is a former mining community in Letcher county with around 500 residents – a decline of almost 40% in the past two decades. The town was gutted by the 2022 storm, and only two businesses, a car repair shop and a florist, reopened. The launderette, pharmacy, dentist, clothing store and thrift shop were all abandoned.View image in fullscreenRandall and Bonnie Kincer, a local couple who have been married for 53 years, run the flower shop from an old movie theater on main street, which doubles up as a dance studio for elementary school children. The place was rammed with 120in of muddy water in 2022. In February it was 52in, and everything still reeks of mould.The couple have been convinced by disinformation spread by conspiracy theorists that the recent catastrophic floods across the region, including Helene, were down to inadequate river dredging and cloud seeding. The town’s sorry plight, according to the Kincers, is down to deliberate manipulation of the weather system paid for by mining companies to flood out the community in order to gain access to lithium. (There are no significant lithium deposits in the area.)Bonnie, 74, is on the brink of giving up on the dance classes that she has taught since sophomore year, but not on Trump. “I have total confidence in President Trump. The [federal] cuts will be tough for a little while but there’s a lot of waste, so it will level out,” said Bonnie, who is angry about not qualifying for Fema assistance.View image in fullscreen“We used all our life savings fixing the studio. But I cannot shovel any more mud, not even for the kids. I am done. I have PTSD, we are scared to death,” she said breaking down in tears several times.The fear is understandable. On the slope facing the studio, a tiered retainer wall has been anchored into the hill to stabilize the earth and prevent an avalanche from destroying the town below.And at the edge of town, next to the power station on an old mine site, is a towering pile of black sludgy earth littered with lumps of shiny coal – the remnants of a massive landslide that happened as residents cleaned up after the February storm.Thomas Hutton’s house was swamped with muddy water after the landslide blocked the creek, forcing it to temporarily change course towards a residential street. “The floods have made this a ghost town. I doubt it will survive another one. If you mess with Mother Nature, you lose,” said Hutton, 74, a retired miner.View image in fullscreenThe geologists fly drones fitted with Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) – a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed lasers to create high-res, 3D, color models of the Earth’s surface, and can shoot through trees and man-made structures to detect and monitor changes in terrain including landslides. The affordability and precision of the China-made Lidar has been a “game-changer” for landslides, but prices have recently rocketed thanks to Trump’s tariff war.The Lidar picked up fairly recent deforestation above the Fleming-Neon power plant, which likely further destabilized the earth. The team agrees that the landslide could keep moving, but without good soil data it’s impossible to know when.Last year’s NSF grant funded new soil and moisture sensors, and mini weather stations, which the landslide team is in the process of installing on 14 steep slopes in eastern Kentucky – the first time this has been done – including one opposite Hutton’s house.Back at the lab, the geologists will use the data the sensors send back every 15 minutes to create models – and eventually a website where residents and local emergency managers can see how the soil moisture is changing in real time. The end goal is to warn communities when there is a high landslide risk based on the soil saturation – and rain forecast.“We have taken so many resources from these slopes, we need to understand them better,” said Sarah Johnson, a landslide expert. “We’re not sitting in an ivory tower making money from research. The work we do is about making communities safer.” More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Plenty of time’ to solve climate crisis, interior secretary tells representatives

      by

      The US has “plenty of time” to solve the climate crisis,” the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told a House committee on Tuesday.The comment came on his first of two days of testimony to House and Senate appropriators in which he defended Donald Trump’s proposed budget, dubbed the “one big, beautiful bill”, that would extend tax reductions enacted during Trump’s first term, while cutting $5bn of funding for the Department of the Interior.In addition to slashing spending on national parks, historic preservation, and other key interior department programming, the budget proposal would cancels billions of dollars in infrastructure investments, environmental programs and research grants. It would also gut funding for renewable energy, including by rolling back clean tax credits from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.Maine representative Chellie Marie Pingree, the ranking member of the House appropriations committee, said this would amount to “effectively gutting this critical this critical sector”.“This disregards the climate change concerns that we have,” she told Burgum at Tuesday’s hearing.Scientists have long warned that world leaders must urgently phase out fossil fuels and boost green technology to avert the worse possible consequences of the climate crisis. But Burgum said that is not the threat the Trump administration is worried about.“The existential threats that this administrations is focusing on are: Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon, and we can’t lose the AI arms race to China,” he said. “That’s the number one and number two. If we solve those two things, then we will have plenty of time to solve any issues related to potential temperature change.”Despite Burgum’s reference to “potential” warming, there is scientific consensus that the climate crisis is already reshaping global weather patterns and ecosystems, increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather events, and costing the US billions of dollars a year.During Trump’s first four months in office, the interior department has already seen massive cuts to staff, including the firing of 2,300 probationary employees and the resignation of 2,700 workers who accepted buyout packages.“How you can sit there and hold somebody’s feet to the fire when there’s a whole bunch of empty desks,” asked Republican representative Mark Amodei of Nevada.Representative Pingree said she was “disappointed” by the changes to the agency.“In just four months, the department has been destabilized, and there’s been a stunning decline in its ability to meet its mission,” she told Burgum.Burgum’s firing-happy approach to leading the interior department, as well as his fossil fuel boosterism, have sparked outrage among activists in Washington DC. Ahead of his Tuesday testimony, consumer advocacy group Public Citizen unveiled a new video criticizing Burgum’s efforts to sell off public lands to the oil, gas and mining industries, which is being played on a mobile billboard circulating outside the Capitol.“Americans want clean air, access to nature, and a future where public lands stay public,” Alan Zibel, a research director with Public Citizen, said. “Instead, they’re getting a secretary more interested in pleasing big oil than protecting our shared resources.” More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Noaa to stop tracking cost of climate crisis-fueled disasters: ‘Major loss’

      by

      The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer track the cost of climate crisis-fueled weather disasters, including floods, heatwaves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change.Noaa falls under the US Department of Commerce and is tasked with daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate monitoring. It is also parent to the National Weather Service.The agency said its National Centers for Environmental Information would no longer update its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database beyond 2024, and that its information – going as far back as 1980 – would be archived.For decades, it has tracked hundreds of major events across the country, including destructive hurricanes, hailstorms, droughts and freezes that have totaled trillions of dollars in damage.The database uniquely pulls information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (Fema) assistance data, insurance organizations, state agencies and more to estimate overall losses from individual disasters.Noaa’s communications director, Kim Doster, said in a statement that the change was “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes”.In a separate development on Thursday, Fema’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was pushed out and replaced by another official from the Department of Homeland Security, a day after he testified on Capitol Hill that he did not agree with proposals to dismantle Fema, which Donald Trump has threatened to do.Scientists say extreme weather events are becoming increasingly more frequent, costly and severe with the climate crisis. Experts have attributed the growing intensity of recent debilitating heat, Hurricane Milton, the southern California wildfires and blasts of cold to the climate crisis.Assessing the impact of weather events fueled by the planet’s warming is key as insurance premiums rise, particularly in communities more prone to flooding, storms and fires. The climate crisis has wreaked havoc on the insurance industry, and homeowners are at risk of soaring rates.One limitation is that the dataset estimated only the nation’s most costly weather events.The information is generally seen as standardized and unduplicable, given the agency’s access to non-public data, and other private databases would be more limited in scope and likely not shared as widespread for proprietary reasons. Other datasets, however, also track death estimates from these disasters.Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections, pointed to substitutes from insurance brokers and the international disaster database as alternative sources of information.Still, “the Noaa database is the gold standard we use to evaluate the costs of extreme weather,” Masters said, “and it’s a major loss, since it comes at a time when we need to better understand how much climate change is increasing disaster losses.”These moves also do not “change the fact that these disasters are escalating year over year”, Kristina Dahl, the vice-president of science at non-profit climate organization Climate Central. “Extreme weather events that cause a lot of damage are one of the primary ways that the public sees that climate change is happening and is affecting people.“It’s critical that we highlight those events when they’re happening,” she added. “All of these changes will make Americans less safe in the face of climate change.”The move, reported on Thursday by CNN, is yet another of Trump’s efforts to remove references to the climate crisis and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the weather from the federal government’s lexicon and documents.The president has instead prioritized allies in the polluting coal, oil and gas industries, which studies say are linked or traced to climate damage.The Trump administration fired hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal Noaa employees on probationary status in February, part of Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” efforts to downsize the federal government workforce. It began a second round of more than 1,000 cuts at the agency in March, more than 10% of its workforce at the time.At the time, insiders said mass firings and changes to the agency would risk lives and negatively affect the US economy. Experts also noted fewer vital weather balloon launches under Noaa would worsen US weather forecasts.More changes to the agency are expected, which could include some of those proposed in the president’s preliminary budget.The agency’s weather service also paused providing language translations of its products last month – though it resumed those translations just weeks later. More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Puerto Rico drops climate lawsuit after DoJ sues states to block threats to big oil

      by

      Puerto Rico has voluntarily dismissed its 2024 climate lawsuit against big oil, a Friday legal filing shows, just two days after the US justice department sued two states over planned litigation against oil companies for their role in the climate crisis.Puerto Rico’s lawsuit, filed in July, alleged that the oil and gas giants had misled the public about the climate dangers associated with their products. It came as part of a wave of litigation filed by dozens of US states, cities and municipalities in recent years.Donald Trump’s administration has pledged to put an end to these cases, which he has called “frivolous” and claimed are unconstitutional. In court filings on Wednesday, his justice department claimed the Clean Air Act “displaces” states’ ability to regulate greenhouse gas outside their borders.The agency specifically targeted Michigan, whose Democratic attorney general last year tapped private law firms to work on such a case, and Hawaii, whose Democratic governor filed its suit on Thursday. Officials from both states condemned the justice department’s filings.Friday’s filing from Puerto Rico did not list a reason for the lawsuit’s dismissal. The Guardian has contacted the territory’s attorney general’s office for comment and asked whether it was related to the Trump administration’s moves on Wednesday.Reached for comment, John Lamson, a spokesperson for the San Francisco-based law firm Sher Edling, which filed the 2024 suit on behalf of Puerto Rico said: “We serve under the direction and control, and at the pleasure, of our clients in all of our representations.”Puerto Rico in November elected as governor the Republican Jenniffer González-Colón, a Trump ally. In February, González-Colón tapped Janet Parra-Mercado as the territory’s new attorney general.Climate-accountability litigation has also faced recent attacks in the media. Last month, an oilfield services executive published an op-ed in Forbes saying the Puerto Rico lawsuit “may derail” efforts to improve grid reliability.Groups tied to the far-right legal architect Leonard Leo have also campaigned against the lawsuits. And just days before the voluntary dismissal, the rightwing, pro-fossil fuel advocacy group American Energy Institute (AEI) sent a letter to González-Colón, Fox News reported, calling for an end to climate-focused “coordinated lawfare”.“Their goal is to bankrupt energy companies or to leverage the threat of tort damages to force outcomes that would be disastrous for Puerto Rico and the rest of the nation,” AEI’s CEO, Jason Isaac, wrote of the plaintiffs.AEI has attacked climate-focused legal efforts and has been linked to Leo, the Guardian has reported.In December, a California-based trade association of commercial fishers voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit accusing big oil of climate deception.In two earlier lawsuits, 37 Puerto Rico municipalities and the capital city of San Juan accused fossil fuel companies of conspiring to deceive the public about the climate crisis, seeking to hold them accountable for the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Justice department sues Michigan and Hawaii over climate suits against big oil

      by

      The US justice department on Wednesday filed lawsuits against Hawaii and Michigan over their planned legal action against fossil fuel companies for harms caused by the climate crisis, claiming the state actions conflict with federal government authority and Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda.The suits, which legal experts say are unprecedented, mark the latest of the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental work and raise concern over states’ abilities to retain the power to take climate action without federal opposition.In court filings, the justice department said the Clean Air Act – a federal law authorizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate air emissions – “creates a comprehensive program for regulating air pollution in the United States and ‘displaces’ the ability of states to regulate greenhouse gas emissions beyond their borders”.The justice department argues that Hawaii and Michigan are violating the intent of the act that enables the EPA authority to set nationwide standards for greenhouse gases, citing the states’ pending litigation against oil and gas companies for alleged climate damage.Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, last year tapped private law firms to go after the fossil fuel industry for negatively affecting the state’s climate and environment.Meanwhile, Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, another Democrat, plans to target fossil fuel companies that he said should take responsibility for their role in the state’s climate consequences, including 2023’s deadly Lahaina wildfire.When burned, fossil fuels release emissions such as carbon dioxide that warm the planet.Both states’ laws “impermissibly regulate out-of-state greenhouse gas emissions and obstruct the Clean Air Act’s comprehensive federal-state framework and EPA’s regulatory discretion”, the justice department’s court filings said.The justice department also repeated the Republican president’s claims of a US energy emergency and crisis. “At a time when states should be contributing to a national effort to secure reliable sources of domestic energy”, Hawaii and Michigan are “choosing to stand in the way”, the filings said.A spokesperson for the office of the Democratic Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, deferred to Nessel when asked for comment.“This lawsuit is at best frivolous and arguably sanctionable,” Nessel said in a statement, which noted that Michigan had not filed a lawsuit. “If the White House or big oil wish to challenge our claims, they can do so when our lawsuit is filed; they will not succeed in any attempt to pre-emptively bar our access to make our claims in the courts. I remain undeterred in my intention to file this lawsuit the president and his big oil donors so fear.”Green’s office and the Hawaii attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.But legal experts raised concern over the government’s arguments.Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said usual procedure was for the justice department to ask for a court to intervene in pending environmental litigation – as is the case in some instances across the country.While this week’s suits are consistent with Trump’s plans to oppose state actions that interfere with energy dominance, “it’s highly unusual”, Gerrard told the Associated Press. “What we expected is they would intervene in the pending lawsuits, not to try to pre-empt or prevent a lawsuit from being filed. It’s an aggressive move in support of the fossil fuel industry.“It raises all kinds of eyebrows,” he added. “It’s an intimidation tactic, and it’s telling the fossil fuel companies how much Trump loves them.”Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has previously consulted on climate litigation, said this week’s lawsuits look “like DoJ grasping at straws”, noting that the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, said his agency was seeking to overturn a finding under the Clean Air Act that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.“So on the one hand the US is saying Michigan, and other states, can’t regulate greenhouse gases because the Clean Air Act does so and therefore pre-empts states from regulating,” Carlson said. “On the other hand the US is trying to say that the Clean Air Act should not be used to regulate. The hypocrisy is pretty stunning.”The Trump administration has aggressively targeted climate policy in the name of fossil fuel investment. Federal agencies have announced plans to bolster coal power, roll back landmark water and air regulations, block renewable energy sources, and double down on oil and gas expansion. More