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From Water Destruction to Deadly Heat, Associated Press Photographers Capture Climate Change in 2024

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Tuesday, December 17, 2024

After heat records were smashed and a torrent of extreme weather events rocked countless countries in 2023, some climate scientists believed that the waning of the El Nino weather pattern could mean 2024 would be slightly cooler.It didn’t happen that way. This year is expected to break 2023’s global average temperature record and the effects of the warming — more powerful hurricanes, floods, wildfires and suffocating heat — have upended lives and livelihoods. All year, Associated Press photographers around the globe have captured moments, from the brutality unleashed during extreme weather events to human resilience in the face of hardship, that tell the story of a changing Earth. January: Experiencing a changing world As seas rise, salty ocean water of the Pacific encroaches on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, hurting agriculture and the farmers and sellers who rely on it. Life for those on the Mekong now – paddling across markets and working and sleeping from houseboats – is quickly being altered. In Tahiti, the arrival of the Paris Olympics this year meant giant structures were built on one of their most precious reefs. The reefs sustain the life of sea creatures and in turn, the people of the island. February: Farming against tougher odds In many parts of the world, there were impacts when agriculture intersected with climate change. In Spain and other European countries, farmers were upset over increasing energy and fertilizer costs, cheaper farm imports entering the European Union and pesticide regulations, arguing all these changes could force them out of business. In Kenya, access to water continued to be a struggle for many, while fishers off the Indian coast of Mumbai had to contend with a rapidly warming Arabian Sea. There were bright spots, however, such as the increasing use of natural farming techniques that are more resistant to climate shocks. March: Struggling to get water More than 2 billion people around the world don’t have access to safely managed drinking water, according to the United Nations, a grim reality experienced in so many places. In Brazil, some residents collected water as it came down a mountain, while in India others filled up jugs from a street drain. Drinking from such sources can lead to many waterborne illnesses. April: Fighting to thrive For the Ojibwe tribe in the United States, spearfishing is an important tradition, one they maintained this year in the face of climate change. At the same time, in other parts of the world the impact of climate change was so severe that simply surviving was the best hope. Such was the case in Kenya, where floods took lives and forced many to evacuate, and in an Indian village where flooding is so constant that residents are constantly displaced. May: Getting forced from home When heavy rains led to massive flooding in Uruguay and Brazil, residents were forced from their homes. In both of these places, most people likely returned and were able to rebuild their lives. In other places, there was no going back. Such was the case for Quinault Indian Nation in the U.S., in the process of being relocated inland as coastal erosion threaten their homes. The Gardi Sugdub island off the coast of Panama faced a similar fate — hundreds of families are relocating to the mainland as sea levels rise. June: Suffering from heat From Mexico to Pakistan and beyond, high temperatures hit people hard. Unable to find relief, some sweated profusely while others ended up hospitalized. Many would die, such as in Saudi Arabia, where heat related illnesses killed more than 1,300 during the annual hajj pilgrimage. The heat didn't just impact people, but also oceans and animals, putting at risk some of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, such as Ecuador's Galapagos Islands. Rising temperatures and prolonged droughts create conditions for more and longer burning wildfires. One of the places that is consistently hard hit is the U.S. state of California. This year was no exception. Wildfires burned more than 1 million acres, chewed through hundreds of homes and led thousands of people to evacuate. As happens in every fire, countless animals also perished or were forced from their habitats. August: Mother nature shining through For all the destruction that climate change caused in 2024, mother nature showed off its beauty. That was on display at Churchill, Manitoba, a northern Canadian town that revels in its unofficial title as polar bear capital of the world. Like every year, tourists enjoyed stunning views of the Hudson Bay, watched beluga whales swim and, of course, came into contact with polar bears. Water is central for humans and animals, but it can also take lives and leave a path of destruction. It did both in 2024. The scenes were shocking: students in India using rope to cross a flooded street, a little girl in Cuba floating in a container and Nigerians wading through floodwaters after a dam collapsed in the wake of heavy rains. October: Experiencing extremes Throughout the year, there was way too much water in some places and not enough in others, increasingly common as climate change alters natural weather patterns. In the Sahara Desert in Morocco, heavy rain left sand dunes with pools of water. By contrast, the Amazon region in South America, normally lush as a largely tropical area, experienced severe drought. November: Astonishing destruction Around the world, numerous storms unleashed powerful winds and dumped large amounts of water. The result: buildings and homes that looked like they had been hit with a wrecking ball, clothes and other household goods caked in mud and scattered on the ground, and residents walking through floodwaters. December: Looking to 2025 As the end of 2024 approached, the arrival of winter in the Northern Hemisphere meant relief from the heat in the form of cold temperatures and idyllic scenes like snow-frosted trees. But there were also reminders that global warming had already altered Earth so much that climate-driven disasters, such as raging wildfires even during winter months, are never far off. While impossible to predict when and where disaster may strike, one thing is all but certain in 2025: the storms, floods, heat waves, droughts and wildfires will continue. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

It didn’t happen that way.

This year is expected to break 2023’s global average temperature record and the effects of the warming — more powerful hurricanes, floods, wildfires and suffocating heat — have upended lives and livelihoods.

All year, Associated Press photographers around the globe have captured moments, from the brutality unleashed during extreme weather events to human resilience in the face of hardship, that tell the story of a changing Earth.

January: Experiencing a changing world

As seas rise, salty ocean water of the Pacific encroaches on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, hurting agriculture and the farmers and sellers who rely on it. Life for those on the Mekong now – paddling across markets and working and sleeping from houseboats – is quickly being altered. In Tahiti, the arrival of the Paris Olympics this year meant giant structures were built on one of their most precious reefs. The reefs sustain the life of sea creatures and in turn, the people of the island.

February: Farming against tougher odds

In many parts of the world, there were impacts when agriculture intersected with climate change. In Spain and other European countries, farmers were upset over increasing energy and fertilizer costs, cheaper farm imports entering the European Union and pesticide regulations, arguing all these changes could force them out of business. In Kenya, access to water continued to be a struggle for many, while fishers off the Indian coast of Mumbai had to contend with a rapidly warming Arabian Sea. There were bright spots, however, such as the increasing use of natural farming techniques that are more resistant to climate shocks.

March: Struggling to get water

More than 2 billion people around the world don’t have access to safely managed drinking water, according to the United Nations, a grim reality experienced in so many places. In Brazil, some residents collected water as it came down a mountain, while in India others filled up jugs from a street drain. Drinking from such sources can lead to many waterborne illnesses.

April: Fighting to thrive

For the Ojibwe tribe in the United States, spearfishing is an important tradition, one they maintained this year in the face of climate change. At the same time, in other parts of the world the impact of climate change was so severe that simply surviving was the best hope. Such was the case in Kenya, where floods took lives and forced many to evacuate, and in an Indian village where flooding is so constant that residents are constantly displaced.

May: Getting forced from home

When heavy rains led to massive flooding in Uruguay and Brazil, residents were forced from their homes. In both of these places, most people likely returned and were able to rebuild their lives. In other places, there was no going back. Such was the case for Quinault Indian Nation in the U.S., in the process of being relocated inland as coastal erosion threaten their homes. The Gardi Sugdub island off the coast of Panama faced a similar fate — hundreds of families are relocating to the mainland as sea levels rise.

June: Suffering from heat

From Mexico to Pakistan and beyond, high temperatures hit people hard. Unable to find relief, some sweated profusely while others ended up hospitalized. Many would die, such as in Saudi Arabia, where heat related illnesses killed more than 1,300 during the annual hajj pilgrimage. The heat didn't just impact people, but also oceans and animals, putting at risk some of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, such as Ecuador's Galapagos Islands.

Rising temperatures and prolonged droughts create conditions for more and longer burning wildfires. One of the places that is consistently hard hit is the U.S. state of California. This year was no exception. Wildfires burned more than 1 million acres, chewed through hundreds of homes and led thousands of people to evacuate. As happens in every fire, countless animals also perished or were forced from their habitats.

August: Mother nature shining through

For all the destruction that climate change caused in 2024, mother nature showed off its beauty. That was on display at Churchill, Manitoba, a northern Canadian town that revels in its unofficial title as polar bear capital of the world. Like every year, tourists enjoyed stunning views of the Hudson Bay, watched beluga whales swim and, of course, came into contact with polar bears.

Water is central for humans and animals, but it can also take lives and leave a path of destruction. It did both in 2024. The scenes were shocking: students in India using rope to cross a flooded street, a little girl in Cuba floating in a container and Nigerians wading through floodwaters after a dam collapsed in the wake of heavy rains.

October: Experiencing extremes

Throughout the year, there was way too much water in some places and not enough in others, increasingly common as climate change alters natural weather patterns. In the Sahara Desert in Morocco, heavy rain left sand dunes with pools of water. By contrast, the Amazon region in South America, normally lush as a largely tropical area, experienced severe drought.

November: Astonishing destruction

Around the world, numerous storms unleashed powerful winds and dumped large amounts of water. The result: buildings and homes that looked like they had been hit with a wrecking ball, clothes and other household goods caked in mud and scattered on the ground, and residents walking through floodwaters.

December: Looking to 2025

As the end of 2024 approached, the arrival of winter in the Northern Hemisphere meant relief from the heat in the form of cold temperatures and idyllic scenes like snow-frosted trees. But there were also reminders that global warming had already altered Earth so much that climate-driven disasters, such as raging wildfires even during winter months, are never far off. While impossible to predict when and where disaster may strike, one thing is all but certain in 2025: the storms, floods, heat waves, droughts and wildfires will continue.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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Related News

The Next Viral Pandemic Is Coming. Here’s How We Can Stop It

A new combo of climate and habitat crises, along with immune system stress, is driving more bat-borne viruses to afflict us

At 4:30 on a chilly morning in Australia, headlights burned through a dark forest in central Woodford, a small rural town 50 miles north of Brisbane, Queensland. Hundreds of flying foxes—magnificent fruit-eating bats with big eyes, fluffy coats, and a wingspan nearly that of an eagle—had just returned from foraging and dangled on tree branches like gigantic Christmas ornaments. Below them, rather incongruously, a large plastic sheet covered the ground. It had been placed there by a team of ecologists to collect urine and feces that the animals dropped.The scientists, from Griffith University in Brisbane, were probing bat droppings because of a grave human-health concern: plagues now come at us from the skies. Viruses carried by the world’s only flying mammals, bats, have infected people. In the past decades a series of viral attackers—many of them deadly—have been found in or linked to bats: Marburg, Ebola, Hendra, Nipah, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV and, most recently, SARS-CoV-2. COVID, the disease that last virus causes, has killed more than seven million people across the world. Bat-derived viruses seem to threaten our health with disturbing frequency.But why bats? And why now? After decades of searching for clues and putting together puzzle pieces involving evolution, ecology and climate, scientists have come up with a good answer. Bats have evolved a unique immune system that lets them coexist with a horde of otherwise harmful viruses, a development that seems tied, in surprising ways, to their ability to fly. But when people destroy their habitats and food and trigger disturbing changes in climate—all of which have coincided recently—bats’ immune systems can be strained to the breaking point. The animals can no longer keep viruses in check. Their burgeoning population of microbes rains down on other animals and eventually infects people.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The search for further evidence to bolster this hypothesis, as well as early warnings of bat-virus outbreaks, had brought the Griffith team to Woodford last year. The investigators were looking for signs of nutrition problems or biomarkers of impaired immunity in the bats, among other indicators. Alison Peel, one of the ecologists, carefully transferred puddles of bat urine from the plastic sheet into test tubes. Then she felt something hard land on her back. “Great, I just got hit by bat poop,” she said with a grimace. The first light of dawn began filtering through the dense forest canopy.The team will be spending several years in the field, trying to pick out causes of virus shedding that can be easily obscured in a wild environment. “Such long-term studies are extremely hard but absolutely critical,” says James Wood, an infectious disease ecologist at the University of Cambridge, who has been working on Hendra-like viruses in African bats in Ghana and Madagascar. The basic links between environmental stress on bats and increased spread of disease were documented in 2022, in a landmark paper in Nature. It connected climate variability, deforestation and food shortages over a quarter of a century to pulses of heightened virus infections in bats, other animals and people.In Queensland, Australia, large groups of black flying foxes hang from trees.One of the authors of that paper was Raina Plowright, an infectious disease ecologist at Cornell University who has been studying flying foxes and viruses for two decades. The interwoven nature of these causes, she says, means that any public-health intervention to prevent future pandemics will need to tackle the whole environmental tapestry, not just pull on a single thread. “Halting deforestation and climate change will help address the root cause,” she says.On a March evening in 2006, Plowright was in the bushland in northern Australia’s Nitmiluk National Park when she felt that something was not quite right. She had set up a finely meshed net under the forest canopy to capture flying foxes, then sat back and stared at the sky. Plowright, a graduate student at the time, was waiting for what she called a flying river of animals—hundreds of thousands of them rushing from their roosts to feed as the sun went down—letting out a cacophony of high-pitched calls. “It’s absolutely spectacular,” she says. “They are the wildebeests of the Northern Territory.”But that twilight was eerily quiet. Plowright could barely find a trickle of flying foxes, let alone a gushing river. It was extremely unusual. “Where have the bats gone?” she recalls wondering.Plowright was part of a team trying to understand why flying foxes had been spreading the Hendra virus to horses and people. Hendra had killed two humans at that point, and it had killed and sickened many more equines, threatening an industry worth several billions of dollars to Australia. The scientists’ job was to periodically measure the extent of virus infection in wild bats and monitor their health.When the researchers finally managed to capture a few bats, they realized all was not well. The animals were skinny and in bad shape; it looked as if they had not been eating. “The bats were basically starving and in really poor health,” Plowright says. And even though it was just after the mating season, none of the captured females was pregnant. The team couldn’t detect any Hendra genetic material in the animals—which is notoriously tricky to do—but nearly 80 percent of the bats had immune system antibody proteins against the virus. That was nearly twice the level measured the year before, and it meant the bats had caught the pathogen. “It was the first clue that nutritional stress may have a role in an increased susceptibility to virus infection,” Plowright says.Hendra, the virus that Plowright and others were tracking, had made its fearsome debut on the outskirts of Brisbane, in the state of Queensland, in September 1994. On a breezy spring afternoon a thoroughbred mare named Drama Series started to look sickly while grazing at a paddock near Hendra, a sleepy area known for its racehorses. Drama Series deteriorated precipitously, and she died two days later, says Peter Reid, the equine veterinarian who treated her.Within a few days a dozen more horses fell ill; most of them had shared a stable with Drama Series. Some soon died, and the rest were euthanized to prevent possible transmission to humans. But it was too late, Reid says. Within a week flulike symptoms descended on Drama Series’ trainer, who eventually succumbed to respiratory and kidney failure.Around the same time, another outbreak killed two horses in Mackay, 600 miles north of Brisbane. But the cause remained a mystery until their owner died 14 months later. Medical examinations showed that the cause of his death—and that of his horses—was the same viral pathogen that launched the deadly attacks in Hendra.Researchers spread a plastic sheet under a flying fox roost in Queensland to collect urine and feces samples.The same virus in two deadly outbreaks 600 miles apart: this context gave scientists an ominous clue to the pathogen’s source. “We started to consider the possibility that the virus was transmitted by a flying animal,” says Linfa Wang, an infectious disease expert who was then at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory (now known as the Australian Center for Disease Preparedness).But which animal? Scientists decided to focus their attention on insects, birds and bats. These creatures were the airborne members of a long list of wild animals, including rodents, snakes and marsupials, that field researchers had been trapping and another team of molecular biologists, including Wang, had been analyzing. Their goal was to pinpoint the source of the disease. Wang, now at Duke–National University of Singapore Medical School, says the work soon paid off. Blood samples from all four of the flying fox species in Australia had antibodies to Hendra. In the ensuing years, the team managed to isolate the virus from a bat and obtained the full sequence of its genome.That discovery focused attention on bats as virus carriers, and scientists have since discovered dozens of bat-borne pathogens. They learned, for instance, that bats are vectors for the Nipah virus, which killed around 100 people and led to the culling of one million pigs in Malaysia in 1998–1999. In the aftermath of SARS in 2005, Wang and his colleagues in China, Australia and the U.S. reported in Science that bats might also be the source of the new contagion.These discoveries posed a conundrum. Nipah, Hendra, and other viruses can make humans and other animals sick, often with devastating consequences, yet bats seem to tolerate them well. Wang wanted to understand why. He was shocked when he realized how little was known. “It was like stepping into a void,” Wang says. “Our understanding of bat immunity was almost zero.” It was a void that, beginning in the early 2000s, he and other scientists started to fill.In 2008 the Australian government gave Wang a coveted blue-sky research grant, one awarded to scientists deemed on a path toward breakthrough discoveries. With around $2 million to spend over five years, he could do whatever he wanted. There was only one thing on his mind. “I wanted to be the first person in the world to sequence bat genomes,” he says. What he didn’t expect was that the effort would lead to a fascinating link between bats’ unusual immune system and their even more unusual evolution.Of the 6,400 or so living mammalian species, bats are the only ones that can fly. More than one in five mammalian species is a bat—it is one of the most diverse groups in the class, second only to rodents. Bats’ lifespans are extraordinary. Some bats weigh only a few grams but can live as long as 40 years, equivalent to humans living for almost 1,000 years. Despite such longevity, bats rarely develop cancer.How and when the only flying mammals evolved wings and became airborne is still unclear. The oldest fossils of bats that “have all the hallmarks of a flying creature” are dated to 52.5 million years ago, says Nancy Simmons, a mammalogist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who worked on these exquisitely preserved skeletons from present-day Wyoming. The signs of wings and other flight features on the fossils indicate the animals’ unique path to the skies began to evolve millions of years earlier, and the lineage probably split from other mammalian species before the massive asteroid impact that wiped out dinosaurs and around 70 percent of all species worldwide 66 million years ago.“The advantages of flight are tremendous because you can cover much larger areas than similarly sized animals that can’t fly,” Simmons says. “It opened up a whole new set of resources that were not available to those that couldn’t fly.” Bats, in essence, became “birds of the night,” occupying many of the same ecological niches as birds but avoiding competition with them by being nocturnal.A scientist prepares to analyze DNA from flying fox feces samples.This high-flying lifestyle requires a lot of energy. In flight, some species of bats increase their metabolic rate more than 15-fold. Body temperature can rise from around 95 degrees Fahrenheit to 104 degrees F, and their heart rates can speed up from a resting pace of 200 to 400 beats per minute to 1,100 beats. From their roost sites, they often travel dozens of miles to feed in one night. Some migratory species can travel up to 1,240 miles from their summer locations to winter ones. The use of so much energy releases a large amount of metabolic by-products, such as damaged DNA and highly reactive chemicals. These substances trigger inflammatory responses similar to those caused by microbial infection. “Bats must have an efficient system to deal with the insults that come with flight,” Wang says. “It’s all about damage control.”With his blue-sky grant, Wang set out to systematically study how bats were physiologically different from other mammals—a question considered esoteric at the time. By collaborating with BGI, a Chinese genomics company that had already sequenced the genomes of organisms such as rice and the giant panda, Wang and his colleagues got the first chance to read the “genetic book” of two types of bats: a small, insect-eating species (Myotis davidii) from northern China and Russia, and a big, fruit-eating black flying fox (Pteropus alecto) from Australia. “It was like hitting a jackpot,” Wang says. Writing in Science in 2013, the team reported that bats have more genes responsible for repairing DNA damage than other mammals such as mice and humans do—possibly allowing the flying creatures to be more adept at fixing the molecular wear and tear caused by their high metabolism.There were also some helpful genetic absences. The genetic books of both of the bat species Wang’s team sequenced, for instance, have lost several “pages”—genes found in more grounded mammals—that encode certain immune system proteins. These proteins help to detect invading organisms and launch inflammatory responses. This scenario might sound counterintuitive: Wouldn’t the lack of those genes make bats more vulnerable to infection? Scientists think not; it’s often the immunological overdrive in response to pathogens, rather than pathogens themselves, that kills the host. (A lethal aspect of COVID, early in the pandemic, was a “storm” of immunological overreaction that damaged organs beyond repair.) “This was the first tantalizing clue to how bats deal with infection,” Wang says.A hint about what happens when this delicate infection-control system goes awry came from earlier bat-surveillance studies: when the animals shed more virus, other species started to get sick. In June 2011 a Hendra outbreak hit horses in Australia’s eastern states of Queensland and New South Wales. By October of that year about two dozen horses perished, traced to not one but 18 separate transmissions of the virus from flying foxes. “It was unprecedented,” says Hamish McCallum, an expert on ecological modeling at Griffith University’s Southport campus. There had been only 14 transmission events since the first Hendra outbreak in 1994.At about the same time, a team led by Peel (who would go on to collect samples in Woodford) uncovered another troubling phenomenon: bats were shedding a whole bunch of viruses other than Hendra. Since November 2010, her colleagues had been collecting urine samples from flying foxes—mostly the black flying fox and the grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus)—at their roost sites on a monthly basis. Their studies show that the bat populations usually have a variety of viruses at low levels. But the levels tended to rise in the cold and dry winter months, between June and August, when risks of virus transmission are heightened.In winter 2011 the levels of eight viruses—including Hendra, its cousin the Cedar virus and the Menangle virus (which can also infect humans)—peaked in urine samples collected from bats in Queensland. This bump did not happen in subsequent winters or in the state of Victoria, where there were no reported cases of Hendra infection in horses, Peel says. “That was when it became clear that flying foxes shed multiple viruses simultaneously in discrete pulses,” says Plowright, who collaborated with both Peel and McCallum for the study. The pulse seemed to coincide with the times when the horses got infected. A rise in virus shedding therefore seems to be a critical step—and a sentinel indicator—for cross-species transmission.To bat immunologists such as Tony Schountz of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, the level of virus shedding is intricately related to the so-called immunological détente between pathogens and their bat hosts. “It’s a relationship in which the virus and the host effectively say to each other, ‘If you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you,’” he says.Two strategies are in place to maintain the détente. One typically entails the constant expression of immune system signals that are switched on in other mammals only when the animals are invaded by pathogens. In some bat species, this includes type I interferons (a group of signaling molecules regarded as the first line of defense against viral infection) and heat-shock proteins (which in other animals are induced in response to stress). “Bats are always in a state of ‘ready to fight,’” says Zhou Peng, an expert on bat virology at the Guangzhou National Laboratory in China. “This helps to keep the viruses in check.”The grey-headed flying fox also carries the Hendra virus, which threatens people and other animals.The other strategy is to have only minimal inflammation, avoiding the overreactions that can damage organs. Bats show only small signs of tissue inflammation even when infected by viruses, Schountz notes. Such dampened responses can leave bats vulnerable to viruses, but the “ready to fight” immune system components usually take care of the invaders with a more targeted, precise counterattack that goes after the viruses and not the organs they are in. “They never go overboard” in their defenses, Schountz says.This finely tuned interaction, developed over a long history as bats and viruses learned to coexist, can explain bats’ remarkable ability to harbor viruses without getting sick. “It’s all about yin and yang,” Wang says. “But the balance can be tipped.”Changes in the environment can do the tipping. That might be what happened to the bats the Griffith team sampled in 2011. Research over decades has shown that food availability predicts virus shedding. Several times a year since 2006, scientists have conducted detailed assessments of environmental conditions within the foraging radius of several flying fox roosts in Queensland. They found that the eucalyptus forests at those sites provided the highest abundance of food resources in late summer—especially highly nutritious pollen and nectar. The amount of food dropped to the lowest point in winter months, when Hendra cases can rise.What was particularly striking was how well the levels of virus shedding and horse infection correlated with food availability. When food was hard to find, bats tended to shed more virus, and horse infections shot up. But when food was abundant, virus-related problems dropped. The food ups and downs, it turned out, were affected by a pattern of climate variability known as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the preceding months or years. ENSO lurches between two states: El Niño, when surface waters in the tropical central and eastern Pacific are unusually warm, results in hot and dry years in Australia. La Niña, when waters are exceptionally cool, leads to wetter weather on land. Recent studies have shown that global warming might have made the switches more intense and more frequent.In 2011—the year scientists uncovered the big surge of virus shedding and horse infection—Australia was coming out of two strong El Niño years. The drought had created a prolonged food shortage for bats because eucalyptus trees didn’t flower. “There was little nectar around,” McCallum says. “The bats were probably starving.” Food availability during the winter of 2010 hit one of the lowest points during the entire period the scientists studied.The findings are also consistent with what Plowright saw in the spring of 2006 in Nitmiluk: starving and unhealthy bats, as well as a large number with signs of Hendra infection. That period followed a major cyclone that reduced food availability. Scientists suspect that food shortages and nutrition deficiencies, possibly exacerbated by an increasingly erratic ENSO, might have thrown off the balance of the animals’ immune systems, leading to increased levels of virus infection, replication and shedding.But ENSO is not the only culprit behind food shortages for flying foxes. The species have suffered from habitat loss for decades. Plowright’s team found that 70 percent of the forest that provided winter habitats for the animals was cut down and cleared, mostly for agriculture, mining and urban development, by 1996. Nearly a third of the remaining habitat was gone by 2018—often without proper regulatory approval, Plowright says. Millions more acres are set to be cleared in the coming decade, she adds, making Australia one of the worst deforesters in the world. The 2022 Nature paper she co-authored, which highlighted the correlations between environmental changes and fluctuations in virus activity, showed that Hendra shedding was curtailed when there were unexpected pulses of winter flowering in remnant forests. The blooms provided nutrition for the flying foxes, most likely improving their health and ability to keep viruses in check.Just after sunset, flying foxes take off to feed over the Australian town of Gympie, showing how close the bats live to people.The overall trend of development and loss of foraging habitat is forcing flying foxes to move into urban and agricultural landscapes. They scavenge foods such as weeds and leaves of shade and ornamental trees, which are less nutritious, hard to digest and possibly even harmful. “It’s a choice between you starve and die or you find new sources of food,” Plowright says. “They’re really just trying to survive.” At the same time that urbanization is depriving the animals of nutrition, it is also bringing them much closer to horses and humans. Both trends increase the likelihood of virus transmission. Plowright and her colleagues found that more than two thirds of all incidents of Hendra infection in horses, as of 2010, occurred within the foraging areas of bat colonies in urban settings.Australia is certainly not alone in driving bats out of their traditional habitats, says disease ecologist Richard Suu-Ire of the University of Ghana in Accra. In Africa, Suu-Ire’s team has identified an increasing number of Hendra-like viruses in straw-colored fruits bats (Eidolon helvum) and also found that pigs near deforested areas or bat colonies in urban settlements have been infected by those viruses. “It’s quite alarming,” he says. This aligns with other studies that suggest cross-species virus transmission may happen far more frequently than previously recognized.It’s become increasingly clear that disease emergence from flying mammals is about the alignment of several elements. The virus reservoir, such as a bat colony, has to be infected, and bats have to shed significant amounts of virus. The environment—including factors such as temperature and precipitation level—has to support pathogen survival. And infection victims such as horses and people must come in contact with bats or the virus that they shed. “All of these things have to align to create the perfect storm,” Plowright says.El Niño, global warming and habitat loss have conspired to catalyze this alignment with an increasing frequency. Some researchers suspect the combination might also have contributed to the emergence of COVID, although investigations into the origins of that disease are ongoing. If the link to food shortages continues to hold up, scientists may be able to predict the risk of virus shedding by simulating ecological factors, climate conditions and bat physiology. The environmental connection could also be tested to see how it affects the spread of other bat-borne viruses—especially Nipah, one of the World Health Organization’s top-10 priority diseases for research. Killing up to three quarters of the people it infects and, unlike Hendra, capable of human-to-human transmission, the virus has caused frequent outbreaks in South and Southeast Asia since its emergence in 1998.The new findings also point at ways to lower the risk of disease emergence. One is to plant tree species that flower in winter when food shortages tend to occur and to do so away from human settlements. This could provide flying foxes with badly needed foraging habitats. Scientists say this could keep the animals healthy and away from urban settings during vulnerable times of the year. “It’s about safeguarding public health through habitat conservation,” McCallum says. And Peel’s team is working to identify biomarkers of deteriorating bat nutrition and health that could serve as early warnings of virus shedding. Those markers will enable researchers to fine-tune computer models that predict habitat changes that elevate the risk of virus spread.Ultimately disease risks, habitat loss and climate change are all interconnected elements of the same gigantic challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Yet international initiatives have typically tackled those challenges separately, says Alice Hughes, an ecologist at the University of Hong Kong. For instance, an agreement negotiated during the past three years by WHO member states and set to be finalized in May 2025 includes few provisions that factor biodiversity loss and global warming into its strategies to prevent pandemics. “It’s a missed opportunity,” Hughes says. One hopeful sign is a global action plan that came out of the 2024 U.N. Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The plan aims to address the connections among environmental degradation, wildlife exploitation and pathogen emergence.The flying foxes missing from that March evening in 2006 pointed Plowright toward many of the interlaced elements driving elevated disease risks. It’s since become abundantly clear that virus transmission is not only about the behavior of bats. It is also deeply tied to the actions of people and our increasingly tortured relationship with nature. Repairing that relationship will require coordinated global action. Such tasks are never easy, but the benefits of success are reduced pandemic risks and improved health for mammals that walk on the ground and fly through the air.This reporting was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Climate

Agriculture

Chemicals

Unified approach could improve nature, climate and health all at once

The biodiversity, climate, health, water and food crises need to be addressed together rather than regarded as separate issues, urges a major report

Tree planting projects designed to maximise carbon absorption can impact water suppliesCostfoto/NurPhoto The major environmental, social and economic crises facing the world today – involving biodiversity, climate change, health, food and water – are inextricably interlinked, and tackling them together has many benefits. Focusing on one issue alone, however, can make the other crises worse. That’s the conclusion of a major report put together by 165 experts from 57 countries over the past three years, and approved by the governments of 147 countries. The UN conventions on issues such as biodiversity and climate focus on these issues individually, says Paula Harrison at UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who co-chaired the assessment process for the report. “So what hasn’t been done before that we now do in this report is to join all of that together and show looking at these crises individually not only is inefficient but actually has a real danger,” she says. “Action is urgent but if we don’t do act in a way that takes account of these interdependences, it will try cause new problems or make existing problems worse.” Harrison says the scientific studies assessed for the report provide strong evidence that there are many actions that can be taken that have beneficial effects in all five areas simultaneously. These include conserving and restoring mangrove forests, boosting soil health and carbon content, creating early warning systems for all kinds of hazards, reducing the risk of diseases spreading from animals to humans, universal healthcare and international cooperation on related technologies. There are trade-offs, she says. The actions with wide-ranging benefits are not the same as the actions that are most optimal solution to any one problem, she says. “What you can’t do is get the highest possible value all at the same time,” Harrison says. “You can’t optimise food production and not have negative impacts on everything else, but you can have a balanced approach across them all that benefits them all.” Harrison gives the example of planting trees to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If the focus is solely on climate, the trees chosen may be fast-growing exotic species that do not support any wildlife and impact water supplies by taking up too much water. But if projects take a more holistic approach, they would choose native tree species that use less water and boost biodiversity. “They might not sequester quite as much carbon, but they will provide a lot of value for other aspects of the system,” says Harrison. There are also economic benefits to an integrated approach that helps preserve biodiversity as well as achieving other goals. The Nexus report, as it’s officially known, says that more than half of global gross domestic product – $50 trillion – is moderately to highly dependent on nature. “It is estimated that the unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to economic activity – reflecting impacts on biodiversity, water, health and climate change, including from food production – are at least $10 to 25 trillion per year,” Pamela McElwee of Rutgers University in New Jersey, the other co-chair, said in a statement. “There’s a lot of evidence now if we carry on the way that we are, there are very strong and increasing biophysical risks to economic prosperity and financial stability,” says Harrison. The Nexus report was put together by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which is a non-UN body but works in a similar way to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report was officially approved on 16 December by representatives of the 147 member states of IPBES, meeting in Namibia. The report is very ambitious, says Anne Larigauderie, the executive secretary of IPBES. The aim is to provide the science and evidence needed to support achievement of other international treaties including the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement on climate change, she says.

Climate

Health

Nature

Spending Christmas with ‘Dr. Doom’

How my climate-obsessed dad brought our family closer together.

I was 11 years old the year my older stepsister brought her high school boyfriend home for the first time. It was Thanksgiving in 2006, and his Southern manners fit right in as we bantered between mouthfuls of cornbread stuffing, fried okra, and marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole. Then, in the overstuffed lull before the desserts were served, my dad plunked his laptop in the center of the table. He opened it up and began clicking through a PowerPoint presentation chock full of data on ice sheet melt and global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. My stepsister’s eyes grew wide with embarrassment. In an effort to welcome her sweetheart to the family, my dad had rolled out his version of a red carpet: one of his many family lectures on the horrors of climate change. This wasn’t the first — or last — time my dad’s climate obsession took center stage at our family gatherings. On that particular occasion, he was doling out factoids about Arctic amplification — the prevalence of which was then a debate among climate scientists. It was just a warm-up to a typical holiday season spent quibbling over the ethics of farmed Christmas trees and openly scoffing at scientific inaccuracies during a movie theater showing of Happy Feet, the year’s seasonal offering about a dancing penguin named Mumble. A month later, on Christmas Eve, he forwarded me an email about how Santa Claus’ body would disintegrate if he were to travel through the atmosphere at the speeds necessary to meet his seasonal duties, adding a personal note: “Not to mention the emissions!” Over the years, these tendencies earned him the family nickname “Dr. Doom” — a nod to his university professor title and compulsive need to share terrifying facts about our warming world. My dad hammed it up, interrupting his own lamentations by hooting out, “We’re all gonna die!” in a cartoonish falsetto. More than anything, it was a term of endearment. After all, we knew other households that spent their holidays arguing over whether climate change was even real. Many of us know a Dr. Doom in our lives, or at the very least, a pessimist with a particular fixation. We each have our own ways of responding to it, such as my brother’s pragmatism, my stepmom’s knee-jerk optimism, my stepsister’s exasperation. Or, perhaps you are the doomer yourself. I’m usually tempted to respond with, “I see hope in the next generation.” But doomerism — a label often used to describe climate defeatists — doesn’t typically leave room to talk about a better future. It’s a contagious kind of despair, often too credible to dismiss. Nowadays, my brother and I both work in climate-related fields, undeniably thanks to Dr. Doom’s influence. But growing up, it only took a few days of dad’s soapboxing before I’d tune out of anything climate-related until the New Year. This Christmas, as we once again prepare to pass around the cranberry sauce and discuss the end of the world, I can’t help but wonder how my dad became Dr. Doom. And in a world of rising doomerism, what influence do such tidings have on others? Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist My dad’s journey to becoming “Dr. Doom” started with his formal training as a tropical ecologist. Until the early 2000s, his work meant trudging through rainforests, studying photosynthesis while battling mosquitoes. Then, the wear of human activity on his surroundings became too much to bear. He switched gears and has since spent his career leap-frogging between climate education jobs — from director of an environmental science program at the University of Idaho to president of a small school in Maine, which, in 2012, he led to become the first college to divest fully from fossil fuels. Those entrenched in science, like my dad, seem to be especially susceptible to climate despair. That’s according to experts like Rebecca Weston, the co-executive director of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, a community of mental health professionals trained to address the emotional and psychological challenges emerging in our warming world. Many in scientific fields, Weston says, are first to document and review the data behind irreversible loss. The facts of the crisis are so dire that despair seems to be a hazard for many — scientists or not. After all, a study by researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that some 7 percent of U.S. adults report potentially serious levels of psychological distress about climate change. Gale Sinatra, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education who studies how people learn about climate change, put it more simply: “Your dad’s problem is that he knows too much.” The issue only gets worse when the climate-informed try to share what they know. In a short-lived position in 2007 as science advisor to the Florida state government (back when then-Governor Charlie Crist would actually acknowledge “climate change”) my dad was silenced during a presentation to the Legislature. A report later said that the “awkward” situation arose when a Republican senator took issue with a discussion topic that “had not yet been accepted as fact.” According to my dad, the controversy stemmed from his decision to share the famous “hockey stick” graph, a data visual that shows that global average temperatures began spiking after human societies industrialized. “We’re starting to understand it as moral injury,” said Kristan Childs, co-chair of a committee to support climate scientists with the Climate Psychology Alliance, referring to a psychological phenomenon that happens when people witness actions that violate their beliefs or damage their conscience. “They’ve been informing people for so long, and there’s just such a betrayal because people are not believing them, or are not doing enough to act on it.” Like many, my dad’s response to this was to get louder — and darker. There’s conflicting research on how different kinds of messaging can affect peoples’ behavior. Some studies show that those experiencing distress are also more active, while others say that emphasizing worst-case scenarios, like so-called climate “tipping points,” is an ineffective strategy that can overwhelm and demotivate audiences instead. It can also backfire on a personal level: Listeners of the podcast “This American Life” may be familiar with a story about a climate activist dad whose zeal led to his children cutting him out of their lives. Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist As a journalist on the climate beat, I’ve interviewed dozens of self-described “doomers,” and yet I’ve found the term is a bit of a misnomer. While many fixate on the worst possible climate scenarios, they’re generally not quitters. As Childs put it, “I don’t know anyone who’s just given up on it all.” Instead, nearly all have dedicated their lives to addressing climate change. And they can’t help but evangelize, warning everybody within earshot of the ways the coming century could change their lives. Throughout these interviews, I’m tacitly looking for any insight that might help my own Dr. Doom. (Recently, I accompanied my dad to a physical therapy appointment where, upon seeing a disposable blood pressure cuff, he attempted to regale his doctor with facts about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the U.S. healthcare system.) Childs might just have one. She offers a 10-step program for professionals who work in science-oriented fields, affiliated with a larger collection of support groups offered by the Good Grief Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to processing emotions on climate change. “The group work is powerful because it really, really helps dissolve the sense of isolation,” Childs said. As she spoke, I shifted uncomfortably, wondering how many times my teenage tendency to tune out or respond flippantly made my dad feel I was invalidating his concerns. The best place to start is often the hardest: acknowledging how bad the problem is. “It’s actually helpful to give people a place to share their biggest fears,” she said, adding that the typical workplace culture in scientific fields discourages expressing emotions. “Somehow some acceptance of how bad it is, and the fact that we can then still stay engaged, shifts the question to who we can be in these times.” Weston agrees that entirely erasing climate anxiety isn’t realistic, especially as the effects of Earth’s changing atmosphere become more apparent and frightening. Instead, her group suggests reframing ideas of what having a meaningful impact looks like. “It depends on breaking through a kind of individualist understanding of achievement. It’s about facing something that will be resolved past our own lifetimes,” she said. My dad has spent his career chasing that elusive sense of fulfilment — never quite satisfied with the work he’s doing. But lately, he’s found a reason to stay put. In 2019, he returned to my hometown to teach climate change to undergraduates at the University of Florida. Now and again, I’ve wondered how these 18- to 22-year-olds, many of whom grew up in the increasingly red state, respond to his doomsaying. This year, while home around Thanksgiving, I sat in on his last lecture of the semester — a doozy on how economic systems can destroy natural resources. His students seemed completely at ease — chatting with him at the beginning of class, easily participating when he asked questions. I was already surprised. “He’s just sharing the facts,” one of his students told me, when I asked a group of them about his teaching style after the class. Another quickly interjected: “He’s too dogmatic. It’s super depressing, it’s super doom.” Others nodded. A third chimed in: “It helps me feel motivated.” Later that week, while I was reporting a different story at a local climate event, both his former students and local activists flagged me down to say how much they appreciated my dad’s courses and op-eds in local newspapers. “We need all sorts of climate communication. People are responsive to different messages,” said Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the markedly anti-doomer author of What If We Get It Right?, a recent book that puts possibility at the center of climate action. In 2019, a Yale study on how people respond to different messaging tactics underscored this point — finding that “hope is not always good, and doubt is not always bad.” For Johnson, getting through the climate crisis starts with who you surround yourself with. “This is not solitary work. Individual changemakers are not really a thing,” she said. “We never know the ripples that we’re going to have.” Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist The Christmas stockings on the mantle at my dad’s house haven’t changed in years, but the dinner conversations have. Now, Instead of trying to brush aside Dr. Doom’s digressions, we lean in. Our evenings are spent butting heads over the recent climate optimism book, Not the End of the World, by data scientist Hannah Ritchie; swapping notes on heat pumps; and debating how to make the most of used-EV tax credits. My baby nephew, Auggie, the latest generation to be saddled with our hopes and fears, brightens the room with his cooing at all manner of round fruits and toy trucks. Between sips from warm mugs, my dad leans back in his chair and frowns at some news on his phone’s screen. “The wheels are really coming off the wagon, kids. Humanity faces an existential threat,” he says, to no one in particular. From the next room, my step mom calls, “The sky’s been falling since I met you, Stephen.” It’s hard not to smile. Who knows how many people my dad has influenced, or if he will ever feel satisfied with his mission. But as his doomy, gloomy self, he’s built a community and family that shares his values. At that moment, I find myself thinking of something Childs told me: “You cannot protect your kids from climate change. But you can protect them from being alone with climate change.” In our changing world, these conversations feel like something to be thankful for. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Spending Christmas with ‘Dr. Doom’ on Dec 17, 2024.

Climate

Activism

Culture

Yet another reason why heat pumps are awesome: health benefits

Switching to heat pumps is one of the most energy-efficient and cost-effective ways to reduce the climate impact of buildings, which account for more than a third of U.S. carbon emissions. It can also save lives by cleaning the air we breathe, according to new research by Rewiring America, a nonprofit that advocates for home electrification. The group’s latest report explores what would happen to outdoor air pollution if all U.S. homes installed heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and heat pump clothes dryers. Researchers found that replacing oil and gas furnaces would eliminate in-home fossil-fuel combustion that vents pollutants like ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide into the outside air. Swapping out inefficient electric resistance heaters, meanwhile, would reduce air pollution from fossil-fueled electricity production by minimizing the amount of power that households use. In all, those changes would slash 300,000 tons of fine particulate matter pollution each year, equal to taking 40 million cars off the road — and prevent thousands of deaths. Most people don’t realize that improved air quality is a benefit of home electrification because the connection is less obvious than, say, energy efficiency and utility savings, said lead author and senior research associate Wael Kanj. “We have these appliances in our homes, and so we don’t really think about how they’re impacting outdoor air quality,” Kanj said. Using data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the federal Energy Information Administration, Kanj’s team sought to quantify the public health benefits that would result from cleaner air. They found that households would experience 3,400 fewer premature deaths, 1,300 fewer hospital visits, 220,000 fewer asthma attacks, and 670,000 fewer days of missed work and activities each year. Those outcomes would add up to $40 billion worth of annual health improvements. Not all states would experience the same level of health benefits, though. The degree of pollution reduction depends on a wide range of local factors, including population density, as well as how clean the electric grid is and what kind of heating and cooling equipment households already use. In cold Northeast states with dense populations that rely heavily on gas and fuel to heat their homes, for example, switching to heat pumps would have a greater impact than in warmer states like Florida, where electric resistance heating is widespread, the report noted. Another important factor is the clean energy transition. To calculate annual health benefits over the next 15 years — the average lifetime of a heat pump appliance — Rewiring America’s analysis used a grid forecast that assumes a 95 percent decarbonized grid by 2050. In reality, any policy that speeds up or slows down that transition could significantly affect projected health outcomes. Roughly speaking, a faster rate of decarbonization would mean even fewer deaths, hospital visits, and asthma attacks than the group’s modeling.

Climate

Energy

Health

Feds launch special air monitoring at Portland fuel storage terminal

The Environmental Protection Agency is investigating whether companies at Portland’s fuel storage hub are following requirements to prevent the release of excess toxic vapors and hazardous air pollutants from storage tanks.

The Environmental Protection Agency is investigating whether companies at Portland’s fuel storage hub on the Willamette River are following requirements to prevent the release of excess toxic vapors and hazardous air pollutants from storage tanks.The agency said nine facilities at the Critical Energy Infrastructure hub on the river, including the controversial Zenith Energy, are required to collect air monitoring data for concentrations of five volatile organic compounds. Air monitors will collect samples of benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, xylenes and hexane at the property lines of the companies’ sites for one year.The air monitoring started earlier this fall, said EPA spokesperson Suzanne Skadowski. Companies must submit the data to the agency every two weeks.The focus on Portland’s fuel storage terminal is part of a federal initiative to reduce pollution in communities that suffer disproportionate impacts from higher levels or multiple sources of toxic air pollution. Earlier this year, the EPA identified Portland among 27 communities across the U.S. where air monitoring is to take place. The agency uses a screening tool that combines environmental and socioeconomic data to determine which communities are most overburdened by pollution.The Portland hub is a 6-mile stretch along U.S. 30 between the Fremont Bridge and the southern tip of Sauvie Island. More than 90% of Oregon’s supply of fuels – mostly gasoline, but also diesel, liquified natural gas and renewable fuels such as biodiesel and ethanol – comes through the hub.Eleven companies operate 400 active storage tanks with the capacity to hold at least 350 million gallons of fuels. The companies also load fuel onto barges and trucks for distribution at the hub.Both the storage and loading operations emit vapors containing volatile organic compounds which can increase ozone levels and create smog.The federal agency said it has conducted over 184 inspections, including at the Portland hub. The inspections have indicated that some companies may not be maintaining or operating storage tanks and other activities to adequately minimize or prevent emissions.The EPA declined to specify when it inspected the fuel terminals or how many times. The agency said it’s still evaluating the inspections’ results.Companies that must collect the new air monitoring data in Portland are: Chevron, Kinder Morgan (two terminal locations), McCall Oil, Phillips 66, Seaport Midstream Partners, NuStar Energy, Shell and Zenith Energy.These companies are regulated by the Clean Air Act and must secure air quality permits from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.The EPA said it will use the new air monitoring data, along with the on-site inspections and other information, to help determine compliance with federal clean air standards. The monitoring results will be provided to the public.The agency said the monitoring data will not show the concentrations of pollutants in the community, the concentrations that people are exposed to or the potential impacts to public health.— Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at gwozniacka@oregonian.com or 971-421-3154.Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com.

Climate

Energy

Health

Suggested Viewing

Crossing the Divide

An Iowa farmer reacts swiftly when he hears that radical climate marchers plan to disrupt peace in his tiny town. What he does after that offers a lesson for would-be peacemakers everywhere.

Inspirational

Activism

Climate

Resilience

In 1998, a vast power grid serving 5 million people in Canada was destroyed by an ice storm. Twenty years later researchers of that disaster are developing a new kind of resilient power grid. Based in part on the book The Grid and the Village, the film explores how to protect grids and the people they serve from war, terrorist attack, and extreme weather.

Energy

Climate

Crisis

A Low Carbon Future for China’s Furnace Cities

China’s economic development and rapid urbanization has led to a dramatic rise in energy consumption due to excessive heating and air-conditioning causing carbon emissions of immense proportions. China’s government has set the ambitious target of reducing CO2 emissions by 40–45% by 2020 against the 2005 baseline. A UK/China-funded team working on how to solve the problem in some of the most extreme climate regions in China. The team discovers groundbreaking solutions using computational-fluid-dynamics simulations.

CO2

Energy

Climate

Talking Trees

Yes, trees can talk. They communicate through their roots. Please listen to what they have to say in this short film.

Forests

Extinction

Climate

Inside The Grand Canyon

This guerrilla style documentary film captures a Colorado River rafting expedition through the Grand Canyon. Exhilarating and sometimes dangerous expeditions like this are not often considered when discussing global climate change but could be helpful to enlighten more folks about the changes to our planet. This rafting trip will soon be a thing of the past with record draughts continuing due to ongoing global climate change caused largely by humans. This is just a tiny slice of natures many warning signs of things to come. We find ourselves in a world of ongoing disbelief and hesitation in lieu of planning for the clear and present dangers from climate change. The Colorado River has already reached devastating levels for communities that depend on the water and electrical power resource. Government study in 2022 showed that Lake Powell could reach ""dead pool"" by 2023. There is no plan to mitigate the catastrophe that will leave over a million and a half people with no electricity.

Water

Climate

Sustainable

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From Water Destruction to Deadly Heat, Associated Press Photographers Capture Climate Change in 2024

Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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Spending Christmas with ‘Dr. Doom’

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Feds launch special air monitoring at Portland fuel storage terminal

Suggested Viewing

Crossing the Divide

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A Low Carbon Future for China’s Furnace Cities

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From Water Destruction to Deadly Heat, Associated Press Photographers Capture Climate Change in 2024

Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Related News

The Next Viral Pandemic Is Coming. Here’s How We Can Stop It

Unified approach could improve nature, climate and health all at once

Spending Christmas with ‘Dr. Doom’

Yet another reason why heat pumps are awesome: health benefits

Feds launch special air monitoring at Portland fuel storage terminal

Suggested Viewing

Crossing the Divide

Resilience

A Low Carbon Future for China’s Furnace Cities

Talking Trees

Inside The Grand Canyon

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sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Join us to forge
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