The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world.

On a sweltering Thursday evening in Manhattan last month, people across New York City were preparing for what meteorologists predicted would be the hottest weekend of the year. Over the past two decades, every record for peak electricity use in the city has occurred during a heatwave, as millions of people turn on their air conditioning units at the same time. And so, at the midtown headquarters of Con Edison, the company that supplies more than 10 million people in the New York area with electricity, employees were busy turning a conference room on the 19th floor into an emergency command centre.

The warmer it gets, the more we use air conditioning.
The more we use air conditioning, the warmer it gets. 

Inside the conference room, close to 80 engineers and company executives, joined by representatives of the city’s emergency management department, monitored the status of the city power grid, directed ground crews and watched a set of dials displaying each borough’s electricity use tick upward. “It’s like the bridge in Star Trek in there,” Anthony Suozzo, a former senior system operator with the company, told me. “You’ve got all hands on deck, they’re telling Scotty to fix things, the system is running at max capacity.”

Read the story from The Guardian by Stephen Buranyi - “The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world.”

Wallace Broecker, 87, Dies; Sounded Early Warning on Climate Change.

Dr. Wallace S. Broecker, one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about climate change and the researcher who popularized the term “global warming,” died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 87.

Dr. Wallace S. Broecker in 2010.
His research into the oceans,
the atmosphere and the planet’s ice
gave him a deep understanding
 of global warming — a term he
helped establish in the popular
 imagination.

His death, at a hospital, was announced by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, his academic home for 67 years. It said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Dr. Broecker, a geologist by training whose questing mind led him to rove from field to field, had an uncanny ability to draw a comprehensive understanding of the Earth’s climate system from research into the oceans, the atmosphere, the planet’s ice and more.

He gave early warning of a planetary crisis if humans continued to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He published a landmark scientific paper in 1975 that asked in its title, “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”

Read the story from The New York Times by John Schwartz - “Wallace Broecker, 87, Dies; Sounded Early Warning on Climate Change.”

Urban greening is good for the environment. Let's hope it's good for local people too

December 12, 2017 — The New York City High Line is a section of the New York Central Railroad, an elevated freight rail line, located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. It was under threat of demolition until 1999, when the community-based organization Friends of the Highline began a campaign to preserve it.

Today the Highline is an iconic urban green space that has inspired cities around the world to incorporate the built as well as the natural environment in their economic development plans, allowing them to combat blight and foster urban renewal while at the same time being environmentally friendly. Indeed, the High Line, the Atlanta BeltLine, the 606 in Chicago, and many other projects have all documented economic improvement in the surrounding area.

However, there’s another side to the story

Read the Ensia story by Manohar Patole - “OPINION: URBAN GREENING IS GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. LET’S ENSURE IT’S GOOD FOR LOCAL PEOPLE, TOO.”

With enough evidence, even skepticism will thaw

Keith Nicholls, left, and Andreas Muenchow
 look out of the helicopter to check the
condition of equipment they had installed
a year earlier.

Half a decade before he took this trip to the farthest reaches of the north, Andreas Muenchow had his doubts about whether warming temperatures were causing one of the world’s great platforms of ice to melt and fall apart.

He even stood before Congress in 2010 and balked on whether climate change might have caused a mammoth chunk of ice, four times the size of Manhattan, to break off from this floating, 300-square-mile shelf. The University of Delaware oceanographer said he wasn’t sure. He needed more evidence.

But then the Petermann Ice Shelf lost another two Manhattans of ice in 2012, and Muenchow decided to see for himself, launching a project to study the ice shelf intensively.

He was back again in late August, no longer a skeptic. It was hard not to be a believer here at 81 degrees north latitude, where Greenland and Canada very nearly touch. The surface of the bumpy and misshapen ice was covered with pools and puddles, in some cases frozen over but with piercing blue water beneath. Streams carved through the vast shelf, swelling into larger ponds or even small lakes.

Read/listen/watchThe Washington Post story - “With enough evidence, even skepticism will thaw.”

Can New York City be saved in the era of global wamring?

Hurricane Sandy flooded huge
 parts of Lower
Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn.

It's a bright spring day in New York, with sunlight dancing on the East River and robins singing Broadway tunes. I'm walking along the sea wall on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with Daniel Zarrilli, 41, the head of New York's Office of Resilience and Recovery – basically Mayor Bill de Blasio's point man for preparing the city for the coming decades of storms and sea-level rise. Zarrilli is dressed in his usual City Hall attire: white shirt and tie, polished black shoes. He has short-cropped gray hair, dark eyes and an edgy I've-got-a-job-to-do manner. Zarrilli may be the only person in the world who holds in his head the full catastrophe of what rising seas and increasingly violent storms mean to the greatest city in America. Not surprisingly, instead of musing about the beautiful weather, he points to the East River, where the water is innocently bouncing off the sea wall about six feet below us. "During Sandy," he says, darkly, "the storm surge was about nine feet above high tide. You and I would be standing in about four feet of water right now."

As Zarrilli knows better than anyone, Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York in October 2012, flooding more than 88,000 buildings in the city and killing 44 people, was a transformative event. It did not just reveal how vulnerable New York is to a powerful storm, but it also gave a preview of what the city faces over the next century, when sea levels are projected to rise five, six, seven feet or more, causing Sandy-like flooding (or much worse) to occur with increasing frequency. "The problem for New York is, climate science is getting better and better, and storm intensity and sea-level-rise projections are getting more and more alarming," says Chris Ward, the former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency in charge of airports, tunnels and other transportation infrastructure. "It fundamentally calls into question New York's existence. The water is coming, and the long-term implications are gigantic."

Read Jeff Goodell’s Rolling Stone story - “Can New York Be Saved in the Era of Global Warming?”

Teenage hip-hop artist tackles climate change

R

ecently, on the east side of Manhattan, there was a dignified gathering to discuss the end of the world.

At the U.N.'s high-level event on climate change, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon criticized what he called the snail's pace of the last negotiations before the COP21 – the major climate conference coming up later this year in Paris. Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, delivered a mournful report on the massive relocation of his drowning island nation.

And then, a relative unknown took the mic. Dressed in a donated suit, with dark hair skimming his waist, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the youth director of Earth Guardians, issued a brief prayer in both Spanish and the Nahuatl language. As befuddled U.N. staffers reached for headphones, seeking translation, he began an extemporaneous speech on the folly of climate dithering.

Read the Rolling Stone story - “Meet the Teenage Indigenous Hip-Hop Artist Taking on Climate Change.”