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      Climate Change Can Cause Bridges to ‘Fall Apart Like Tinkertoys,’ Experts Say

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      Extreme heat and flooding are accelerating the deterioration of bridges, engineers say, posting a quiet but growing threat.On a 95-degree day this summer, New York City’s Third Avenue Bridge, connecting the Bronx and Manhattan, got stuck in the open position for hours. As heat and flooding scorched and scoured the Midwest, a steel railroad bridge connecting Iowa with South Dakota collapsed under surging waters. In Lewiston, Maine, a bridge closed after the pavement buckled from fluctuating temperatures.America’s bridges, a quarter of which were built before 1960, were already in need of repair. But now, extreme heat and increased flooding linked to climate change are accelerating the disintegration of the nation’s bridges, engineers say, essentially causing them to age prematurely.The result is a quiet but growing threat to the safe movement of people and goods around the country, and another example of how climate change is reshaping daily life in ways Americans may not realize.“We have a bridge crisis that is specifically tied to extreme weather events,” said Paul Chinowsky, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder who researches the effects of climate change on infrastructure. “These are not things that would happen under normal climate circumstances. These are not things that we’ve ever seen at this rate.”Bridges designed and built decades ago with materials not intended to withstand sharp temperature swings are now rapidly swelling and contracting, leaving them weakened.“It’s getting so hot that the pieces that hold the concrete and steel, those bridges can literally fall apart like Tinkertoys,” Dr. Chinowsky said.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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      Is This Massive Attack Concert the Gold Standard for a Green Gig?

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      Coldplay and Billie Eilish have tried to drive down carbon emissions while touring, but the British band Massive Attack has tried to take the efforts even further.When the British band Massive Attack was halfway through a West Coast tour in 2019, flying from show to show, the rapper and singer Robert Del Naja had a moment of crisis. Given all the carbon emitted by moving the band and its equipment around, he recalled wondering: Can I justify this anymore?Not long afterward, the band made a decision. It would work with climate scientists to develop a model for touring that made as little climate impact as possible.On Sunday, Massive Attack staged a daylong 35,000-person festival in the band’s home city of Bristol, England, to showcase the carbon-cutting measures it has developed with the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, a British organization, and A Greener Future, a nonprofit focused on lowering the music industry’s emissions.The concert on Sunday was powered by batteries charged from wind and solar energy.Sandra Mickiewicz for The New York TimesFans were encouraged to travel to the show by walking, cycling or using public transportation.Sandra Mickiewicz for The New York TimesWhereas other bands, including Coldplay, have staged attention-grabbing stunts to draw awareness to the industry’s climate impacts, they have sometimes ignored the main sources of emissions from gigs, such as audience travel and venues’ power supplies. With its show on Sunday, Massive Attack wanted to show how to tackle all of the polluting parts of a show.In an interview a few days before the event, Del Naja said that previous music industry efforts to cut emissions had not been in line with the United Nations-agreed goal to stop average temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit.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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      Climate Change Is Not a Key Talking Point for Harris Campaign

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      In the 2020 presidential election, climate activists demanded that Democratic candidates explain, in detail, how they planned to tackle the planet’s greatest environmental threat.But in the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris ascended the 2024 Democratic ticket, she has mentioned climate change only in passing, and offered no specifics on how she would curb dangerous levels of warming. Climate leaders say they are fine with that.“I am not concerned,” said Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington, who made climate change the centerpiece of his own 2019 bid for the presidency. Mr. Inslee said he believes it is more important for Ms. Harris to draw a distinction between her and her Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, than to drill down on policy nitty-gritty.“I am totally confident that when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will,” Gov. Inslee said.As Ms. Harris prepares to address the nation on Thursday at the Democratic National Convention, she faces the challenge of energizing party loyalists while also reaching out to disaffected Republicans and moderate voters. So far Ms. Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, have embraced a pragmatic agenda, calling for things like a minimum-wage increase and child-care funding.While President Biden has made climate change a signature issue, signing into law the largest clean energy investments in American history, Ms. Harris has yet to detail for voters her climate or clean-energy positions. Some analysts chalked that up to strategy and said new promises to slash greenhouse gas emissions or rein in fossil fuels could alienate voters particularly in the energy-rich swing state of Pennsylvania.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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      Greenpeace Tries a Novel Tactic in Lawsuit Over Dakota Access Pipeline

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      The environmental group, which is being sued by the pipeline company in North Dakota, threatened to use new European rules to try to limit potential damages.The NewsGreenpeace recently unveiled a new strategy for fighting a costly lawsuit by an energy company that the group contends is designed to silence critics of the oil industry.The suit, first filed in federal court in 2017, alleged that Greenpeace had incited the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016 and 2017, and it sought $300 million in damages.Greenpeace disputes the claims. It says the lawsuit is designed to essentially force the environmental group to go out of business with an expensive legal fight.Its new tactic, led by Greenpeace International in Amsterdam, would use the European legal system to try to minimize the financial consequences of a potential loss in United States courts. In a letter to the company last month, lawyers for the group cited a new European Union directive aimed at curbing SLAPP suits, or Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. Those are defined as meritless suits that seek to shut down civil society groups.The letter called on the company suing it, Dallas-based Energy Transfer, to drop its suit against Greenpeace International, and to pay damages for its legal costs, or risk a countersuit under the new European rules.The BackgroundAfter the Dakota Access Pipeline was approved in 2016, it became the target of high-profile protests by Native American tribes and environmental groups. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe argued that the pipeline encroached on reservation land and endangered the water supply. Thousands of its supporters joined a nearly eight-month protest encampment near the reservation, and tribal leaders mounted their own legal challenge to the project.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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      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