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      A Deluge of Rain Poured Out of the Heavens. But There’s Still No Drinking Water.

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      City officials have refused to provide estimates of when the devastated water system in Asheville, N.C., will be back in operation.Since their home lost running water around 2 p.m. on Sept. 27 from Hurricane Helene, Etiska Jackson and her husband, Jayme, have been driving back and forth between their home in Asheville, N.C., and her brother’s in Madison County, about 25 miles north. There, they wash their clothes, take showers and fetch water from a well to flush their toilet.“I feel like I’m camping in my house,” Ms. Jackson, 61, who works as a receptionist at the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville, said from the front yard of her bungalow on Friday afternoon.For Ms. Jackson, the most troubling part of not having running water is not knowing when it may return. “They can’t even give us a time frame,” she said. About a foot of water poured out of the dark, gray sky when the remnants of Helene inundated Asheville and much of western North Carolina. More than a week later, not a drop comes out of most people’s faucets. For many of them, it could be weeks before that changes.Bottled water was the only potable water that residents of the city of 94,000 had as of Friday. A treatment plant capable of serving a part of the city that accounts for about 20 percent of its needs was back at full capacity on Friday and city workers were sampling water in pipes to see if it was safe to drink, said Ben Woody, the assistant city manager. Residents have been told to boil any water that does come to them, before drinking it.During the day, you can see Asheville’s water crisis on street corners and at parks throughout the city.Christian Monterrosa for The New York TimesAt Pack Square Park, just outside the Buncombe County Courthouse, the limit was two gallons per person, or five per family.Christian Monterrosa for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When Monet and Turner Found Beauty in London’s Toxic Fog

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      Monet and Turner found something sublime in the polluted 19th-century city — and maybe something darker, too.If you’ve been to London recently (or ever) you’ll probably recognize Claude Monet’s description: “Today the weather was maddening, gusts of snow, then sunshine, fog and dark weather and clear, it was magnificent but all too changeable.”Yet the French painter found London’s moody climate an inspiration, and he purposely came in only the colder months. During three visits from 1899 to 1901, he produced dozens of canvases of the city’s surging River Thames, 36 of which were shown to acclaim in Paris in 1904 but never exhibited in London.One hundred and twenty years later, the Courtauld Gallery has brought a selection of the series home for the first time in “Monet and London: Views of the Thames” (through Jan. 19, 2025). The effect is as radiant and sublime as Monet might have hoped — though today we might see those unsettled skies in a different light.“Every day I find London more beautiful to paint,” he wrote to his wife Alice from the swish Savoy Hotel, where he stayed on those visits. From his riverside balcony, the artist could observe the working waterway, chugging with boat traffic and steaming with trains on bridges above, from sunrise to sunset. Here, he would fulfill his enduring wish to “try to paint some fog effects on the Thames.”Monet’s “Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames” (1903)Alain Basset/Lyon MbaAt the Courtauld (less than half a mile from the Savoy), 21 canvases show the river in an atmospheric suite of cornflower blue, cobalt, dove gray and mauve. The choppy Thames glimmers in shades of silver and blue flecked with violet and pink, or flaming yellow, orange and crimson from the sun — “the little red ball,” Monet called it — that’s high above in a sky thick with “delicious fog.” “The extraordinary fog so very yellow,” he wrote, characterized the industrialized late-19th-century London. Locals already called it “the Big Smoke.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hurricane Helene Deaths Will Continue for Years, Study Suggests

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      Research on hundreds of tropical storms finds that mortality keeps rising for more than a decade afterward, for reasons you might not expect.Over the past week, the official death toll from Hurricane Helene has surpassed 100 as the vortex creeping inland from Florida submerged homes and swept away cars. But the full weight of lost lives will be realized only years from now — and it could number in the thousands.A paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday lays out the hidden toll of tropical storms in the continental United States. Looking at 501 events from 1930 to 2015, researchers found that the average tropical storm resulted in an additional 7,000 to 11,000 deaths over the 15 years that followed.Overall during the study period, tropical storms killed more people than automobile crashes, infectious diseases and combat for U.S. soldiers. It’s such a big number — especially compared with the 24 direct deaths caused by hurricanes on average, according to federal statistics — that the authors spent years checking the math to make sure they were right.“The scale of these results is dramatically different from what we expected,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University, who conducted the study with Rachel Young, the Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.The pair used a technique that has also provided a more complete understanding of “excess deaths” caused by Covid-19 and heat waves. It works by looking at typical mortality patterns and isolating anomalies that could have been caused only by the variable under study — in this case, a sizable storm.Previously, researchers examined deaths and hospitalizations after hurricanes over much shorter periods. One study published in Nature found elevated hospitalizations among older Medicaid patients in the week after a storm. Another, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, associated higher death rates with U.S. counties hit by cyclones. A study in The Lancet found that across 14 countries, cyclones led to a 6 percent bump in mortality in the ensuing two weeks.Deaths from tropical storms in the U.S. have been spiking Fatalities connected to storms that struck as many as 15 years ago – measured as the number of deaths above what would otherwise be expected – are rising faster as storms increase in frequency.

      Source: Solomon Hsiang and Rachel YoungBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Exchange on Climate Change Shows Gulf Between Vance and Walz

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      The devastation that Hurricane Helene wreaked across the South last week thrust the issue of climate change to the forefront of the vice-presidential debate early in its first hour, quickly demonstrating how the two major parties diverge when it comes to the threat posed by climate change.Senator JD Vance of Ohio, former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, said that people were “justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns,” a position that might seem at odds with his running mate, who recently called the focus on the environment “one of the greatest scams.” But Mr. Vance dismissed as “weird science” those who say that carbon emissions are causing climate change.He added that he and Mr. Trump wanted “the environment to be cleaner and safer.” And he said the climate crisis would be solved by growing American manufacturing.“You’d want to reassure as much American manufacturing as possible, and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world,” Mr. Vance said, asserting that overseas manufacturing and energy production had a greater carbon footprint.The United Nations has said that “the manufacturing industry is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.”Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, responded by noting that in the past Mr. Trump had called climate change a “hoax,” before pivoting to policies passed by the Biden administration.Mr. Walz called Mr. Vance’s depiction of manufacturing a “false choice” and pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act, saying that investments in electric vehicles and solar energy had resulted in new U.S. jobs.“We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current,” Mr. Walz said. “And that’s what absolutely makes sense.”At the end of the exchange, Norah O’Donnell, one of the moderators, offered a closing comment: “The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the Earth’s climate is warming at an unprecedented rate.” More

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      Britain Shuts Down Last Coal Plant, ‘Turning Its Back on Coal Forever’

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      The Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant was the last surviving coal-burning power station in a country that birthed the Industrial Revolution and fed it with coal.Britain, the nation that launched a global addiction to coal 150 years ago, is shutting down its last coal-burning power station on Monday.That makes Britain first among the world’s major, industrialized economies to wean itself off coal — all the more symbolic because it was also the first to burn tremendous amounts of it to fuel the Industrial Revolution, inspiring the rest of the world to follow suit.“The birthplace of coal power is turning its back on coal forever,” said Matt Webb, an associate director at the London-based research and advocacy group, E3G.On Monday, in the middle of England, the end of Britain’s coal era will be marked by the closure of the 2,000-megawatt Ratcliffe-on-Soar facility. Uniper, the power company that operated the plant, said the 750-acre site would be converted to a “low-carbon energy hub.”The closure comes 142 years after the world’s first coal-burning power plant began producing electricity at the Holborn Viaduct in London in 1882 and, in turn, accelerating Britain’s rise as a major industrial and imperial power.Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. When burned, it produces greenhouse gases that have heated the Earth’s atmosphere and supersized heat waves and storms. While it was long the cheapest and most abundant source of power in many countries, including Britain, it has been replaced in recent decades by gas, nuclear power and most recently, renewables, like wind and solar.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Across the World, Diplomats Gird for a Trump Assault on Climate Action

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      Some leaders insist that the global clean energy transition will happen with or without the United States.Climate negotiators from Europe, Latin America and some island nations are bracing for the potential return to the world stage of Donald J. Trump, who withdrew the United States from the fight against global warming during his first term.Nations will press forward without the United States if they must, according to climate negotiators who gathered in New York last week during the United Nations General Assembly. But the first Trump presidency was a setback in the climate fight, and a repeat would slow things down at a critical point when scientists say efforts need to speed up.“I don’t want this to happen, of course,” said Laurence Tubiana, who served as France’s climate ambassador during the creation of the 2015 Paris agreement, referring to a potential Trump victory. “But I think there will be a sentiment that we have to double down on the Paris agreement framework. I think everybody’s preparing for that.”The night before Donald J. Trump won the presidency in 2016, an adviser to developing nations in global climate negotiations declared, “No one believes Trump can win, so no real Plan B here!”After he beat Hillary Clinton to win the White House, Mr. Trump kept the world guessing for months about whether the United States would remain a global partner on climate change. Many leaders reserved early judgment, hopeful that people like Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, would convince him to stay in. They didn’t.Mr. Trump, who has dismissed global warming as a “hoax,” made the United States the first and only country to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement that calls on countries to cut the pollution from oil, gas and coal that is dangerously heating the planet. The Trump administration also worked with major oil producers like Saudi Arabia to weaken global pledges around fossil fuels. President Biden rejoined the Paris agreement on his first day in office.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Least 66 Die as Persistent Monsoon Rains Inundate Nepal

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      Disasters in the small Himalayan nation have become more frequent as the effects of climate change increase.At least 66 people have died and 69 were missing in Nepal after incessant monsoon rains unleashed flooding and landslides across the small Himalayan nation, which has been increasingly pummeled by the effects of climate change.Rescue operations were underway for thousands of people, Nepali officials said on Saturday. At least 60 have been injured, and the death toll was expected to rise, the officials said.More than half of the dead were from the Kathmandu Valley, which includes Kathmandu, the capital. Highways into the city were closed.Binod Ghimire, a senior superintendent of police, said that more than 5,000 police personnel equipped with helicopters, rafts, ropes and vehicles had been deployed for rescue operations.Rescuers have evacuated more than 3,000 people, but flooding victims complained of delays. A video circulating on social media showed people who were swept away by the floods after waiting on the roof of a hut for hours.Many parts of the country were without power. “Several districts are disconnected from communication, so we are struggling to compile loss of lives and properties,” said Dan Bahadur Karki, a spokesman for the Nepal Police.The authorities asked people to stay indoors if possible. The rainfall was expected to stop by Sunday.The flood disaster occurred just as Nepalis were preparing to celebrate the Hindu festival of Dashain, which is scheduled to begin on Thursday. Hindu devotees travel for days to far-flung villages to obtain the blessings of their elders.Nepal, with a population of about 30 million, is the fourth-most-vulnerable country to climate change, according to UNICEF. In recent years, the frequency of disasters — including the bursting of glacial lakes as temperatures rise — has increased, claiming more lives.Local news media, citing the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, recently reported that 225 people have died and 49 have gone missing in disasters related to the monsoon season, which runs from June to September. More

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      In Silicon Valley, a Rogue Plan to Alter the Climate

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      SARATOGA, Calif. — A silver Winnebago pulled up to a self storage warehouse on the outskirts of a Silicon Valley suburb and three renegade climate entrepreneurs piled out, all mohawks, mustaches and camouflage shorts.Working swiftly, the men unlocked a storage unit crammed with drones and canisters of pressurized gas. Using a dolly, they wheeled out four tanks containing sulfur dioxide and helium, and stacked them on the floor of the camper van. Then, almost as quickly as they arrived, they were on the road, headed for the golden hills near the Pacific Ocean.With their jury-rigged equipment and the confidence that comes with having raised more than $1 million in venture capital, they were executing a plan to release pollutants into the sky, all in the name of combating global warming.“We’re stealth,” said Luke Iseman, one of the co-founders of Make Sunsets, delighting in their anonymity as he rode in the back. “This looks like just another R.V.”Make Sunsets is one of the most unusual start-ups in a region brimming with wild ideas. Iseman, 41, and his co-founder, Andrew Song, 38, claim that by releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, they can reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space, thereby cooling the planet.It’s a gutsy undertaking, yet it has at least a partial grounding in science. For 50 years, climate scientists have suggested that releasing aerosols into the stratosphere could act as a buffer and reduce the heat from the sun. Volcanic eruptions have temporarily cooled the planet this way in the past, but no one has attempted to intentionally replicate the effect at scale.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More