Stephan: This story and the one after it report on the antipodes of what is happening with water. The entire American Southwest water system is breaking down. Within five years I think we will be seeing migrations out of the Southwest.
Lake Tahoe looked much different when it hosted NHL fans before a game played along its shores in February. Credit: Getty
Kokanee salmon normally make their way from Lake Tahoe to Taylor Creek this time of year to spawn. Thanks to climate change, the fish will have to find another route instead.
A combination of climate change and an ongoing drought have led to Lake Tahoe’s waters receding below the natural rim of 6,223 feet and continuing to plummet. This has stranded the lake so that its waters no longer flow to the Truckee River. Lake Tahoe is now considered “terminal” because it no longer has an outlet.
Conditions have impacted nearby waterways like Fallen Leaf Lake, which is connected to Lake Tahoe by Taylor Creek. Normally during salmon spawning season, the U.S. Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit boosts the flow of water from Fallen Leaf Lake to Taylor Creek, encouraging salmon to spawn there. Low water levels have rendered this nearly impossible and forced the Forest Service to cancel its annual […]
Stephan: Europe is going to be as impacted by sea rise as the United States. And yet where is the internal coordinated effort to cope with this.
Dozens of famous European landmarks could sink below sea-level if global temperatures rise by more than 1.5°C, new visualisations show.
Iconic sites like Buckingham Palace, Barcelona Cathedral and – ironically – the venue for COP26 in Glasgow could be submerged in hundreds of years due to decisions made this century.
The bleak visuals of besieged architecture are only the tip of the iceberg globally. New data from nonprofit Climate Central shows that roughly 10 per cent of the world’s population, over 800 million people, live on land which will be lost if current carbon emissions trends continue.
Using cutting-edge global elevation and population data, the scientists applied different scenarios of warming to see where communities are most vulnerable within the next 200 to 2,000 years.
Fifty major cities, mostly in Asia, would need to mount “globally unprecedented defenses” to survive, they found, while many small island nations face near-total loss of their land.
Climate Central’s new research was released just weeks before COP26 – widely viewed as the world’s “best last chance” to halt runaway climate change.
Stephan: Here is some very promising good news. Steel is essential in construction but the stell mills thsat are powered by coal, gas or petroleum produce horrible pollution, Now a company has worked out a way to run a steel mill on solar. Bravo them
Imagine when plants like this are powered by the sun everywhere. Photo: Morris MacMatzen Getty
An old steel mill is getting a new lease on life in Pueblo, Colorado. The company will be the first in the world to get the majority of its energy from solar power.
The EVRAZ Rocky Mountain Steel factory is opening a new chapter in its history. On Wednesday, a partnership called Lightsource BP—yes, that BP—unveiled the Bighorn Solar project, a new 300-megawatt solar farm. Most of the project’s 750,000 solar panels lie on the EVRAZ property itself, making the farm the largest on-site solar project in the nation dedicated to a single customer. The project was first announced in 2019 and is already partially operational. The companies say it will be fully online by next month.
Solar-powered steel is great. The iron and steel sector is responsible for 2.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions every year,
Stephan: Today I am publishing only two stories. After you read them you will see why I made this decision.
If you love America, and you want to make it a thriving democracy oriented towards wellbeing you better get to work. Because the only thing that is going to change what is happening in this country is Americans.
Stephan: I wrote this research paper because day after day as I read articles and viewed the news it became clearer and clearer to me that the United States in a desperate trouble, and a nation that will soon be unrecognizable from what it was as recently as the Obama administration, although the process creating this change traces back to Richard Nixon's administration, and has been engineered by the Republican Party and their corporate masters. But I do not want to talk about ideology and politics, I want to focus on objectively verifiable social outcome data. and here it is.
It is a near-universal article of faith amongst Americans that the United States is the best country in the world at nearly everything. It isn’t true, and the reason it isn’t can be clearly defined. We, as a culture, have made something other than fostering wellbeing our number one priority. Instead, everything is geared to profit and the power it bestows, Did that offend you? Let me be clear, I am not interested in partisan politics except anthropologically. Do not misread me. What I care about and have talked about for the 16 years I have been writing in Explore is wellbeing as measured by objectively verifiable data, social outcome data. Decades of social outcome research has proven to me that if you always choose the option that best fosters wellbeing at every level of earth’s matrix of life, you will always get the best outcome. Every other option places something else first and ends up diminishing wellbeing; it does not foster it.
So, let’s start with some social outcome data that defines us today. Although […]
