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Environmental Concerns, Including Water Crises, Dominate Global Risks Report Rankings for First Time in History
By Brett Walton
The world's business elite, apprehensive about turbulent geopolitics after a year of international turmoil, nonetheless sees the biggest risks to society in the next decade coming from changes outside boardrooms and parliaments.
The last decade was the hottest since record-keeping began 150 years ago, according to the latest data from U.S. agencies the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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In a theater at Virginia Tech, audience members are invited to stand with their eyes closed and imagine themselves on a beach, wading into the ocean.
But then this relaxing visualization takes a turn. Their guide, performer Daniel Bird Tobin, asks them to imagine they're still standing in water, but not on the beach. They're in floodwater that has inundated the university drill field, bookstore and graduate center –
"all places where, on a hundred-year flood scenario, you could have waist-deep water," Tobin says.
His presentation, called "Flooding the Beach," is based on maps and data by Virginia Tech researcher Peter Sforza.
It's part of a larger effort to help people connect with science in a more visceral way.
"I think people learn, truly learn, on a deep level when they're able to find a personal connection to research," Tobin says. "And poster presentations are fantastic at getting a lot of clear data out there, but sometimes when you are able to use performance or other art forms to communicate science, people can find an emotional hook that brings them into the work."
So Tobin aims to get people's bodies, emotions and minds engaged with climate science.
Reposted with permission from Yale Climate Connections.
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By Uwe Hessler
In its 15th Global Risks Report published on Wednesday, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has said that for the first time in the report's history, all of the "top long-term risks by likelihood" are environmental. While in the previous decade economic and financial crises were seen as most dangerous, the report has found that risk perceptions have shifted to extreme weather, environmental disasters, biodiversity loss, natural catastrophes and failure to mitigate climate change.
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Last spring, students at Knox College in Illinois traded their notebooks for shovels and planted a rain garden on campus. The garden is not just a bunch of pretty plants. It's designed to reduce stress on the campus drainage system during heavy rain.
Last year's brutal heat waves that swept through Europe, caused wildfires in Alaska and Siberia, and have left Australia as a tinderbox registered as the second hottest year ever — 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit or 0.04 degrees Celsius cooler than 2016, according to scientists at the Copernicus Climate Change Service, an intergovernmental agency supported by the European Union, as The New York Times reported.
Australia, Your Country Is Burning — Dangerous Climate Change Is Here With You Now
By Michael Mann
After years studying the climate, my work has brought me to Sydney where I'm studying the linkages between climate change and extreme weather events.
By Michaela Cavanagh (with AFP)
The Russian government has unveiled a plan to adapt the country's economy and population to climate change.
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In 2012, Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on New York City's transportation system. Storm surge pushed a flood of seawater into vehicle tunnels, railyards, ferry terminals, and subway lines.
After nearly 15 inches of rain fell in one day and caused flash floods and landslides in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, that destroyed 60,000 homes and killed at least 43 people, the Indonesian Air Force sent two planes to drop salt on approaching rain clouds to break them up before they reached the city, according to Reuters.
By Jake Johnson
Ecologists at the University of Sydney are estimating that nearly half a billion animals have been killed in Australia's unprecedented and catastrophic wildfires, which have sparked a continent-wide crisis and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes in desperation.