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      Another North Carolina House Collapses Amid Hurricane Ernesto’s Waves

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      In Rodanthe, N.C., seven homes have been lost to the ocean in the last four years, as rising sea levels erode shorelines and put more buildings at risk. In the community of Rodanthe on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, residents witnessed on Friday an event that was not new and is unfortunately becoming more frequent: A house on the picturesque shoreline collapsed into the ocean.Weather experts said that crashing waves produced by Hurricane Ernesto hundreds of miles away, combined with especially high tides, appeared to be the cause, though local officials also said that the house was at risk of collapsing before the storm. For those on the Outer Banks, the destruction was one more stark reminder of the larger force at play — climate change, which is making storms more intense and sea levels higher, accelerating the erosion of beach fronts.Rodanthe, home to about 200 people, has lost seven homes to the ocean in the past four years. The house that was destroyed on Friday was unoccupied at the time of the collapse. There have been no reports of injuries from any of the seven collapses, according to the National Park Service. Officials warned that many more homes are at risk for damage or collapse in the coming days as Hurricane Ernesto pummels the East Coast from afar, even as it follows a path that is not expected to hit the mainland United States. Some other homes near Rodanthe have already appeared to sustain damage. Forecasters predict that the storm could bring dangerous rip currents and a high surf along the East Coast through the weekend. The risks could persist in the Outer Banks through early next week, they said. In North Carolina, climate change has caused the sea level to rise by about half a foot since 2000, and the level could rise by about another foot by 2050, said William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.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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      How Air-Conditioning Made Us Expect Arizona to Feel the Same as Maine

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      It’s a quiet force that contributes to a sameness across the country and to climate change.One force has quietly shaped much of the world around us — our homes, our offices, the look of our cities, the migration patterns of Americans and the economic fortunes of different parts of the country.That is: air-conditioning.It’s become so widespread as to be unremarkable, an assumed feature of every interior environment. Nearly 90 percent of Americans use some kind of air-conditioning at home. It is humming in the background just about everywhere else you go: in your car, at the mall, on an airplane.But, as we discuss in an episode of “The Daily” podcast today, our dependence on it increasingly poses a knotty problem, as the energy needed to power all this air-conditioning produces emissions that contribute to the warming world. The more we use the thing that helps us cope with heat, the hotter it will get.“This cycle where air-conditioning is both the solution and the problem is really where we’re collectively kind of stuck,” said Daniel Barber, head of the school of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney.Or, as he has written more bluntly: The comfort air-conditioning gives us inside is predicated on the worsening instability of the climate outside.My colleagues Ronda Kaysen and Aatish Bhatia wrote about an illustration of this relationship on Monday. In some of the fastest-growing major metro areas in the U.S., like Las Vegas, the nights are rapidly getting hotter. That drives demand for even more air-conditioning. And in fact, without air-conditioning, it’s unlikely so many people would have moved to Las Vegas in the first place.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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      Deadly Landslides in India Made Worse by Climate Change, Study Finds

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      Extreme rainfall made 10 percent heavier by human-caused climate change triggered landslides that killed hundreds, according to a new study.A sudden burst of rainfall on July 30 caused a cascade of landslides that buried hundreds of people in the mountainous Kerala region of southern India.That downpour was 10 percent heavier because of human-caused climate change, according to a study by World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists who quantify how climate change can influence extreme weather. Nearly six inches, or 150 millimeters, of rain fell on soils already highly saturated from two months of monsoon and marked the third highest single-day rain event on record for India.“The devastation in northern Kerala is concerning not only because of the difficult humanitarian situation faced by thousands today, but also because this disaster occurred in a continually warming world,” said Maja Vahlberg, a climate risk consultant at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “The increase in climate-change-driven rainfall found in this study is likely to increase the number of landslides that could be triggered in the future.”In a state that is highly prone to landslides, the Wayanad district is considered the riskiest part. As of Tuesday, at least 231 people had died and 100 remained missing.The Kerala landslides were the second extreme landslide event in July, following one in Ethiopia that killed 257 people. July was the second-worst month on record, after July 2019, with 95 landslide events that caused 1,167 fatalities, according to data maintained by Dave Petley, the vice-chancellor of the University of Hull. Together, they caused roughly one-third of the more than 3,600 deaths resulting from some 429 fatal landslides recorded this year, Dr. Petley said in an email.Already, 2024 is an outlier, Dr. Petley posted to The Landslide Blog on Tuesday. He wrote that he could “only speculate on the likely underlying reasons for this very high incidence of fatal landslides,” but “the most likely cause continues to be the exceptionally high global surface temperatures, and the resultant increase in high intensity rainfall events.”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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      Heat Contributed to 47,000 Deaths in Europe Last Year, but Relief Programs Helped

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      A new study shows that behavioral and social changes can reduce heat mortality. But challenges remain as temperatures continue to rise.More than 47,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes during 2023, the world’s hottest year on record, a new report in Nature Medicine has found.But the number could have been much higher.Without adaptations to rising temperatures over the past two decades — including advances in health care, more widespread air-conditioning and improved public information that kept people indoors and hydrated during extreme temperatures — the death toll for Europeans experiencing the same temperatures at the start of the 21st century could have been 80 percent higher, according to the new study. For people over 80 years old, the death toll could have doubled.“We need to consider climate change as a health issue,” said Elisa Gallo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, a nonprofit research center, and the lead author of the study. “We still have thousands of deaths caused by heat every year, so we still have to work a lot and we have to work faster.”Counting deaths from extreme heat is difficult, in part because death certificates don’t always reflect the role heat played in a person’s death. The study used publicly available death records in 35 countries, representing about 543 million Europeans and provided by Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union.The researchers used an epidemiological model to analyze the deaths alongside 2023 weekly temperature records to estimate what fraction of deaths could be attributable to heat.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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      How Close Are the Planet’s Climate Tipping Points?

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      Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us. We might also be changing the climate […] More

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      What to Know About the Park Fire, the 4th Largest in California History

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      The rapidly spreading fire has consumed over 426,000 acres since it started burning in late July. The Park fire, the largest wildfire currently burning in the United States, has torn through over 426,000 acres in Northern California in recent weeks and has destroyed hundreds of homes and other structures.The fire ballooned in size in a matter of days, and it is the largest blaze in California so far this year. Thousands of firefighters and other personnel, some from as far as Utah and Texas, are battling the fire, which was 34 percent contained as of Wednesday.The hot and dry weather has made it difficult for firefighters to suppress the blaze, which is spreading northeast within Lassen National Forest and “ascending slopes with critically dry fuel,” according to Cal Fire. But forecasters say the coming days could bring lower temperatures and higher humidity levels in the fire zone. Current unseasonably warm temperatures are expected to steadily fade and give way to highs in the 70s next week.“It’s not a dramatic change, it’s slow. But each day is getting a little better,” said Eric Kurth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Sacramento. “That’s certainly helpful.”Here’s what to know about the fire.The Park fire has burned more than 426,000 acres.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesWhen and how did the fire start?The fire ignited on July 24 near Chico, a college town in Butte County, north of Sacramento. After igniting, the fire exploded to more than 120,000 acres by the next day and then nearly doubled in size the night after that. Officials said the cause of the fire was arson.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