Welcome back to Starting Out, from Transom and me! If this is the first issue you’re reading, I’m Alice, a podcast producer and reporter. In the past few months, a lot of my friends have quit their jobs. Hell, I even did it recently. After pretty relentless work over the past year and a half, […]
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The amount of sunlight that Earth reflects back into space — measured by the dim glow seen on the dark portions of a crescent moon’s face — has decreased measurably in recent years. Whether the decline in earthshine is a short-term blip or yet another ominous sign for Earth’s climate is up in the air, scientists suggest.
Our planet, on average, typically reflects about 30 percent of the sunlight that shines on it. But a new analysis bolsters previous studies suggesting that Earth’s reflectance has been declining in recent years, says Philip Goode, an astrophysicist at Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. From 1998 to 2017, Earth’s reflectance declined about 0.5 percent, the team reported in the Sept. 8 Geophysical Research Letters.
Using ground-based instruments at Big Bear, Goode and his colleagues measured earthshine — the light that reflects off our planet, to the moon and then back to Earth — from 1998 to 2017. Because earthshine is most easily gauged when the moon is a slim crescent and the weather is clear, the team collected a mere 801 data points during those 20 years, Goode and his colleagues report.
Much of the decrease in reflectance occurred during the last three years of the two-decade period the team studied, Goode says. Previous analyses of satellite data, he and his colleagues note, hint that the drop in reflectance stems from warmer temperatures along the Pacific coasts of North and South America, which in turn reduced low-altitude cloud cover and exposed the underlying, much darker and less reflective seas.
“Whether or not this is a long-term trend [in Earth’s reflectance] is yet to be seen,” says Edward Schwieterman, a planetary scientist at University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the new analysis. “This strengthens the argument for collecting more data,” he says.
Decreased cloudiness over the eastern Pacific isn’t the only thing trimming Earth’s reflectance, or albedo, says Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton University. Many studies point to a long-term decline in sea ice (especially in the Arctic), ice on land, and tiny pollutants called aerosols — all of which scatter sunlight back into space to cool Earth.
With ice cover declining, Earth is absorbing more radiation. The extra radiation absorbed by Earth in recent decades goes toward warming the oceans and melting more ice, which can contribute to even more warming via a vicious feedback loop, says Schwieterman.
Altogether, Goode and his colleagues estimate, the decline in Earth’s reflectance from 1998 to 2017 means that each square meter of our planet’s surface is absorbing, on average, an extra 0.5 watts of energy. For comparison, the researchers note in their study, planet-warming greenhouse gases and other human activity over the same period boosted energy input to Earth’s surface by an estimated 0.6 watts of energy per square meter. That means the decline in Earth’s reflectance has, over that 20-year period, almost doubled the warming effect our planet experienced.
Last year, during the pandemic, Ruby Schwartz says she was questioning everything about her identity and whether she should be an audio producer and reporter. On top of that, she was wrestling with a creative lull. Again, it was the pandemic. Anxiety and desolation was in the air. Seemed like everyone was feeling emotionally beat […]
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New Climate Central research shows that under the current emissions pathway leading toward 3°C global warming, about 50 major cities around the world will need to mount globally unprecedented defenses or lose most of their populated areas to unremitting sea level rise lasting hundreds of years but set in motion by pollution this century and earlier.
We have the opportunity now to change this future. Meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris Climate Agreement will likely reduce exposure by roughly half, allowing nations to avoid building untested defenses or abandoning many coastal megacities.
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Climate Central’s scientists examined where populations are most vulnerable within the next 200 to 2000 years and under different scenarios of warming. The results are alarming:
Written in collaboration with researchers at Princeton University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, Climate Central’s peer-reviewed research paper focuses on the contrast between 4°C and 2°C warming scenarios, and appears in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters. This summary report instead focuses on the contrast between 3°C and 1.5°C scenarios, which correspond to continuing the current trajectory vs. making deep and immediate cuts to climate pollution, dropping to roughly half of today’s annual emissions by 2030.
The peer-reviewed research has enabled Climate Central to develop a number of powerful visual tools to communicate the future risks of warming and to show what we can save.
Figure 1. Sapporo, Japan: Projected Future Sea Levels
Utilizing Google Earth images, Climate Central developed realistic renderings of coastal locations under different future warming scenarios. Through the Picturing Our Future interface, users can select from among hundreds of images of at-risk sites around the world, including financial centers, stadiums, museums, temples and churches, and other historically or culturally significant buildings. Each image allows toggling between a number of scenarios. Users can look at current conditions and compare where water levels could end up after 1.5°C of warming (if we implement measures to sharply cut carbon pollution) up to 4°C (if we allow unchecked carbon pollution).
Figure 2. Bangkok, Thailand: Coastal Risk Screening Tool
Climate Central’s updated mapping tool allows users to compare sea level projections after different temperature increases, highlighting the areas that could be saved by reducing our carbon pollution and limiting global warming. Users can enter nearly any global coastal address or location to see where land is projected to be below the high tide line. Sliders allow users to see the projected effects set by different amounts of global warming, from 1.0°C to 4.0°C and can choose between roadmap and satellite settings.
Figure 3. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Projected Future Sea Levels
Climate Central worked with visual artist Nickolay Lamm to create photorealistic illustrations of the multi-century sea level rise consequences of 1.5°C and 3°C of warming at a number of iconic locations identified as vulnerable in the research.
Figure 4. Glasgow, United Kingdom: Projected Future Sea Levels
We have created fly-over videos contrasting the projected future sea levels after 1.5°C vs. 3°C of global warming in many coastal cities around the world where 3-D building data is currently available in Google Earth.
As detailed in the newly published peer-reviewed research, these findings are based on localized long-term sea level projections published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Strauss et al. 2015), overlain against the AI-based coastal elevation dataset CoastalDEM version 1.1 (Kulp and Strauss 2018) and 100-meter-resolution global population density data from WorldPop. Exposure estimates were aggregated to city level using urban agglomeration boundary data from Natural Earth, and aggregated to national level using administrative boundary data from GADM 2.0.
Each year since 2015, Science News has featured the work of outstanding early- and mid-career scientists in our SN 10: Scientists to Watch list. They’re nominated by Nobel laureates and members of the National Academy of Sciences, and are recognized because of their curiosity, passion, determination and, of course, their discoveries.
But we decided that 2021 begs for something different. The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage worldwide, with its burdens falling hardest on those least able to bear them — inequities already on our minds due to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and other social movements. At the same time, we’re learning that the window to reverse some of climate change’s most devastating effects is closing fast. With all the upheaval, we wondered: How do these extraordinary times change a scientist’s work?
Here, we catch up with 10 noteworthy Scientists to Watch alumni. Emily Fischer, who studies wildfire smoke, has faced the threat of fires firsthand, cognitive neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon is fighting sexual harassment in the sciences and economist Parag Pathak is taking his efforts to make institutions more equitable from schools to hospitals. Other scientists reveal how their work has gained new urgency and meaning for them. The interviews that follow have been edited for length and clarity.
— Elizabeth Quill
Cognitive neuroscientist
Carnegie Mellon University
Jessica Cantlon, featured in 2016, studies the evolution and development of complex mathematical thinking, including the traits that set humans apart from other primates. In 2017, she was recognized as a Time Person of the Year, as a “silence breaker” speaking out against sexual harassment during the height of the #MeToo movement.
We’ve expanded our repertoire to compare people across different cultures, who have different educational practices. We’ve been going to Bolivia to work with this group of people called the Tsimane, who live in rural parts of the Amazon forest. They don’t have the rigid, formal schooling where kids go through these particular curricula to achieve mathematical cognition. Instead, education there is more organic and more deeply connected to their way of life. That allows us to try to understand what effect does a particular type of education have on numerical thinking.
There was one study that we did, comparing species — nonhuman primates and humans — to understand the evolution of these concepts. Across all species and stages of development and cultural groups, there’s this bias that when you’re looking at a set of objects, and you’re trying to quantify it, you think about that set numerically. And you don’t have to; you can think about that set of objects spatially, as an amount of stuff, you can think about how much surface area is there, or the perimeter around it. But primates, including humans, [tend to] think about that set as a set of discrete objects, and count them up.
We’ve looked at the similarities and differences between boys and girls as their brains develop. We’ve done some of the first, early studies comparing children’s brains that can truly allow us to collect evidence on the trajectory of similarity between boys and girls…. We’ve shown that very early in development, between around 3 and 8 years of age, there’s evidence during mathematical processing that most of the brain — over 95 percent — shows functional similarity in that processing between boys and girls.
But as we know, much later on in development, we see a severe underrepresentation of girls in mathematics-related fields. What’s happening? There’s evidence in the field … that what happens in late childhood and adolescence is that children’s interests are shaped culturally.
In 2016, [some of my colleagues at the University of Rochester and I] filed a sexual harassment complaint against a faculty member in our department who was sexually harassing women — undergraduate and graduate students and faculty. It became this situation that hijacked my career for a number of years.… We went public with our complaint, partly to protect ourselves, but also partly to let people know at other universities that this kind of thing is happening to students, and it’s affecting women’s career paths in ways that are discriminatory and unequal.
Ultimately, it was really important. Our complaint went public in September of 2017. In October 2017, the Harvey Weinstein story came out in the New York Times, and that kicked off a series of reactions that ultimately culminated in millions of people saying #MeToo, which I think was really powerful and important, and was something that we got to be a part of.
I’ve had dozens of women reach out to me for advice, about how to file a complaint at their university, how to take legal action, if that’s what they’re thinking, what the risks and benefits are. And so, part of my career now — and I’m excited by it, and I think it’s really important work — is to be an advocate for women who are experiencing discrimination and harassment at universities.
One response that we thought was really great was that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine did a full study on sexual harassment in the sciences…. It has a lot of ideas about what might effect larger-scale change.
— Interview by Aina Abell
Economist
MIT
Parag Pathak, featured in 2019, strives to make public education more equitable. He has used data and algorithms to overhaul school choice systems in Boston, New York and other U.S. cities. Now he’s applying his research to the question of how to equitably distribute vaccines and other medical resources.
Since we last talked, I released a paper on the effects of universal preschool. A lot of people are interested right now because [universal preschool, which is open to everyone with no income rule,] is part of the White House’s agenda. Because of the work we had done with Boston with their school choice algorithm over the years, we had some files on school admissions going back to the late 1990s. Boston was a leader nationwide in expanding slots for children in preschool. But, like many cities, there weren’t enough slots for demand, so they had to ration. And that’s where the lotteries come in.
Fast forward to now. We linked these applicant cohorts to standardized test scores and educational outcomes all the way into college. And what we found was pretty exciting: Those who won the [preschool] lottery are more likely to graduate high school, they score higher on SATs and they’re more likely to enroll in college. Boston has continued to refine and try to improve [the lottery system]. It’s a model for other cities that are expanding public preschool.
COVID-19 was this huge shock. We all were looking around for how we could be useful, using our respective toolboxes. Tayfun Sönmez, M. Utku Ünver and M. Bumin Yenmez, all of Boston College — the four of us — started to study how scarce medical resources are rationed. And it turns out, there are some parallels with the way school seats are rationed.
One of the ideas that we’ve explored is the idea of a reserve system. In cases where people can’t agree on what’s fair, who should get a vaccine first? It’s very similar to who should get into a school. And the way that [schools] have handled that is they set up more elaborate versions of priority systems. With a vaccine reserve system, you basically have a [supply] that’s reserved for cardiac communities, and one that’s reserved for frontline medical personnel, so on and so forth…. States like California and Massachusetts have used some of our ideas [for their reserve systems].
My wife [Ruma Rajbhandari] is a medical doctor, and my sister [Sapana Adhikari] is an emergency room physician. A big part of my interest in medical rationing guidelines was their having to go to the hospital in March 2020 not knowing what the risks were and not having personal protective equipment. That was something that got me really keen on this debate about frontline health care workers, do they get first priority or not?
I have a kindergartner who was virtual this past year. And he did an amazing job with it. I think what the pandemic has done is rip the Band-Aid off on these lingering problems in society — inequitable access to health care, inequitable access to education, inefficiencies in both of the systems — and has made them much more pronounced. That’s been the theme of our research throughout. We hope more people take these issues on, because the way COVID-19 played out was really a scarring event in terms of haves and the have-nots.
— Interview by Cassie Martin
Evolutionary anthropologist
Duke University
Jenny Tung, featured in 2018, studies how social environments — including social status, relationships and isolation — influence primates’ genes and health. Her study subjects have included captive rhesus macaques and wild baboons.
We have built layers of complexity onto [our] initial story. A few years ago we were showing that it’s possible for social interactions to have profound effects on the function of our genome. And now we’re trying to derive a much better understanding of how and why and when, and what are the exceptions.
The other thing I’m really excited about is our ability to move away from this very powerful but very artificial system using captive primates and to ask about what’s going on in the field with wild monkeys. I’ve studied wild baboons in Kenya for many, many years. We know a lot about the social environments, the social experiences. And now with the ability to collect some simple blood samples, we’re also seeing strong signatures of things like social status and social integration, social bonds, social connectedness in the function of these animals’ genomes. That’s pretty exciting because lab studies are powerful and wonderful, but there’s always this question of, “Well, is this real in the real world?”
It was a real honor. It has encouraged us to continue down some of these paths … and to also do some more comparative work and think about species beyond the ones that I have traditionally studied. So in the past few years, I’ve picked up work in other social mammals — wild meerkats and these very social rodents called mole rats — that have their own advantages in giving us insight into how our social world has shaped both how we came to be, our evolutionary past, and how we do day to day in our present.
I’ve been doing more work on something that’s an old love of mine: trying to understand the evolutionary consequences of intermixing between different primates. The population of baboons that I study in Kenya actually sits right at the edge of where the ranges of two different species of baboons meet. And so this population is intermixed between one species, the Anubis baboon, and this other species, the yellow baboon.… We think those patterns of intermixture influence some things about what [the animals] look like, how they behave and so on.…
We know that [humans] have also intermixed a lot with some groups that don’t even exist today, like Neandertals and Denisovans. That process of admixture that we observe right now in living primates [is] potentially relevant to understanding our species’s history.
In many ways, I felt very fortunate during the pandemic; as an academic with tenure, I have a secure job. But we were also home with a 3-year-old for a long stretch. I spend usually at least a month a year in Kenya, and I have since 2006. But not in 2020. We had to figure out some way of keeping [the research] continuous without any ability to travel there. We have a permanent staff in Kenya — they are Kenyan — who are very important to us and have been working with our project in some cases for many decades, and they were having their own issues, and isolation, and risks in the face of a lot of uncertainty.
I spend a lot of time in my research life thinking about social interactions. And every species that I study … they live in groups. And humans, to a large extent, we live together. We didn’t evolve to be on our own for a long period of time. And so I spent a lot of time reading and thinking and working on, “Why when you don’t have the right sort of social connections, why does your risk of death just shoot up? What’s the consequence of chronic social stress?” One of the things that I really appreciate in a more visceral manner [now] is how important my social network is to me. I think that we’re all looking for ways to connect during the pandemic. And that’s when your personal experience and the things that you’re writing papers about and thinking about really collide.
— Interview by Aina Abell
Molecular biologist
Thrive Early Detection
Isaac Kinde, featured in 2015, is developing tests to detect cancer early, when treatment is more likely to be successful. In 2019, PapGene, a small biotech start-up where he was chief scientific officer, was acquired by Thrive, cofounded by Kinde. Just this year, it got the backing of the much larger cancer diagnostics firm Exact Sciences.
Thrive basically acquired the predecessor company [PapGene]…. There was a lot more money, there’s a lot more expertise, but the core mission didn’t change, which is to develop cancer diagnostic products that we think will have an impact on the lives of people with cancer. We have essentially turbocharged and focused our efforts, leading with the most promising product, which is CancerSEEK.
The premise is we can reduce cancer morbidity and mortality through earlier detection. CancerSEEK is a blood test, and it is a multi-cancer test. That contrasts with the current paradigm, which is one test, one cancer.… Right now, all of our efforts are on making it commercially available.
There’s good evidence for detecting over 60 to 70 percent of the cancers that cause the most deaths per year. That boils down to … colon, breast, lung…. But the [full] range is bigger than those three. There’s esophageal, gastric, kidney, pancreatic. There’s data that support maybe 12 to 13 different cancers.
We call it a landmark study because it was the first demonstration in a prospective setting of how a multicancer blood test could be used in real time to report results to patients with cancer.
We looked at 10,000 women in the Geisinger Health system. It’s primarily women who are in Pennsylvania…. In the study, 24 [women had cancers] detected with standard-of-care screening: colonoscopy, mammography or low-dose CT scan for lung. Then there were 26 cancers in which the CancerSEEK test detected the cancer first…. Sixty-five percent of the cancers we detected were at a stage prior to stage 4. So [the addition of CancerSEEK] doubled the number of cases that were [found before symptoms were reported] — in many, many cases early enough where some effective therapies could be implemented.
And then it was also safe…. There were very few false positives, and we could very quickly resolve the false positives with whole-body PET-CT imaging. At least two patients [who first had detections from CancerSEEK] had their cancers successfully removed and are thriving as of the last time we checked.
It fans the flame, right? The reason why cancer screening went down is not because there was less cancer. It was [just] more difficult for whatever reason to get the appropriate standard-of-care test.… All this did was just strengthen the case that more tools, easier tools are needed for cancer screening. And I think maybe the other feeling is just wishing we could go even faster, but balancing a commercial launch with having all the right pieces in place that will set us up for success.
— Interview by Ashley Braun
Biologist
Qihan Biotech
When featured in 2017, Luhan Yang had cofounded and was chief scientific officer of eGenesis, a biotech start-up. She is now cofounder and CEO of Qihan Biotech, based in Hangzhou, China, which aims to develop animal organs that are safe for human transplant and to make cell therapies that can treat conditions such as cancer and autoimmune diseases more widely accessible.
The concept of xenotransplantation is to use animal organs as an alternative resource for human transplantation, since there is a huge unmet need for organs. There are two fundamental issues to be addressed. One is [that] there are endogenous retroviruses in the pig genome — some virus sequences — and they can jump around within the pig genome. The viruses can also jump from the pig cell to the human cell. So there is a potential cross-species transmission, which is a huge safety and regulatory concern.… The second hurdle of using pig organs for human transplant, as you can imagine, is rejection, and it is tremendous.
Those are the two fundamental problems … and that’s where we think gene editing can come into play. By 2017, our team had knocked out 62 [retrovirus copies]. Since then, there are three notable milestones: First, we have created our Pig 2.0, with 15 modifications for immunology…. Last year in Nature Biomedical Engineering, we showed that those modifications are properly expressed in the pig cell, and the resulting pig is healthy, as well as fertile, and the genetic modification can be passed to the offspring. The second part is we combined the [retrovirus] knockout and the immune rejection–related modification in a single pig. We call it Pig 3.0. So that is a prototype close to clinical trial.
The third part is the most exciting part for us: We need to test the function. [In a recent study published in the American Journal of Transplantation,] we put the pig kidney into a monkey. If it’s a normal pig kidney, it will be rejected in a few minutes. And right now the longest survival of our monkey is about one year.… The monkey experiment demonstrates the possibility of achieving long-term xenotransplantation.
Being a leader in biotech is not all business. There are three components that are needed. The first part is to set the vision and strategy of the company. In such an innovative area, I think the scientific knowledge, the breadth of the exposure, I think that’s my strength.… The second part is to recruit, retain and train people. And the last part is some business judgment, like how to do fund-raising, how to organize a project, the accounting. I have to admit, I’m not the expert. But I think at my position, the key is to recruit the best people to do the job.… And I started to embrace that every leader has different strengths and weaknesses.
I was hoping we could have more in-person meetings or travels, but right now, China still has the quarantine policy that makes it super inconvenient for international travel. Hopefully with the vaccine, the world will become what it was.
I feel the world is more divided compared with 10 years before. And I hope at least for medicine, we can see that our enemy is not a different country, but our enemy is cancer, is organ failure, is COVID, that we can keep and strengthen the collaboration across borders.
— Interview by Aina Abell
Scientist and designer
CarbonPlan
When he was featured in 2016, Jeremy Freeman was developing new tools and methods to help scientists better analyze brain data. Now he is executive director of CarbonPlan, a nonprofit organization that he founded in March 2020 to tackle the climate crisis through open-source data and research.
I moved very far from neuroscience, and I’m now exclusively working on climate change. Our focus [at CarbonPlan] is the scientific integrity and transparency of climate solutions. [We do] a combination of research on different areas of climate science and strategies for addressing climate change. We [also] produce a variety of resources and tools for both the research community and the public at large.
Despite being a radically different field, there are some interesting commonalities, in terms of the value of having very accessible, open, publicly available data that speaks to critical issues. [For climate change,] issues around both what is changing in the climate and how we might address that, in different strategies we might take. Having as much of that information be developed in the open, in a way that others can contribute to, and making work available for others to read and evaluate and criticize and engage with — those are [also] values I felt really strongly about in the world of biomedical science.
We have done a lot of analysis identifying very specific ways in which the implementation of forest carbon offset programs [the planting or preservation of trees to attempt to compensate for carbon emissions] haven’t worked. We did a comprehensive analysis of the role of forest carbon offsets in California’s cap-and-trade program, which is a massive sort of market of offsets on the order of $2 billion, and we identified about $400 million worth of offset credits that in our analysis do not reflect real climate benefits because of errors in how they were calculated with respect to issues that involve fundamental problems in statistics and ecology.
That team effort, led by Grayson Badgley and Danny Cullenward, along with a lot of other work that we’ve done on the role of offsets, is really starting to change the conversation, and wake people up to the fact that these approaches to dealing with climate change haven’t been working.
There’s an area known as carbon removal, which refers to any mechanisms that draw down CO2 from the atmosphere. And carbon removal is really, really complicated, because there are a lot of different ways to potentially accomplish that.… So that’s an area where we’ve been very involved, studying, analyzing, comparing. We helped write, edit and produce a book called the CDR Primer — carbon dioxide removal primer. It’s, of course, a publicly available resource.
Absolutely.… Climate change is so fundamentally an issue of equity and an issue of justice. The burdens of climate change are going to be borne by those who were not directly responsible for it, and those who in many ways have been responsible for it will be more able to avoid its impacts. And there’s a deep injustice in that.… How to think about that is an important aspect of our work.… We’re interested in finding a way to be really complementary to a lot of existing community efforts around these issues.
— Interview by Aina Abell
Astrophysicist
Universidad Diego Portales
Paula Jofré, featured in 2018, used the chemical composition of stars across the Milky Way like DNA to map the stars’ family tree. She recently filled in some details of the tree — and is filling a gap in the publishing world by writing a book about stars in Spanish.
In the first paper, the tree had three main branches. There was one that we could associate with a young thin disk, which is one of the populations in the Milky Way. Another was associated with an old, thick disk, which was the older component of the Milky Way. And then we had something in between…. Now, because we had more stars and more chemical elements and we made a better selection of which chemical elements to include, we could find that this strange population was actually an ancestor population of the thin disk. And one of the interpretations we had in the second paper [published in January in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society] was that they were produced all very quickly.
Other groups have found striking evidence of a galaxy that was merged into the Milky Way [billions of years ago]. And that [merging and mixing of gas] could have triggered what is called a star formation burst — lots of stars [forming] at the same time. So, it’s kind of exciting that we find in the tree a feature that could be attributed to a star formation burst … a few gigayears after the [merger of these two galaxies] that we know happened.
It’s going to be published in November [in Chile]. It’s a book in Spanish for the public. I am teaching a class about stars in the Milky Way, a general astronomy class. And I’ve been finding that there is no proper literature in Spanish for the students.… The level is sometimes way too basic or too complex. So I wanted to write something for their level.
[The book] explains how stars create the chemical elements, what’s the role of Gaia [a satellite mission to map the galaxy], what’s the role of the Milky Way Mapper [another survey using Earth-based telescopes], about all these big surveys, why we care, what’s going on.
When I started writing it, of course, I started reading other books…. In all these general astronomy books, women are never highlighted. In my book, I have lots of quotes from 40 different women all around the world, working in my field.… I want to make the point that you can be a woman, you can be clever, you can dedicate yourself to something that is mentally challenging. You can be like any of these 40 women.
The biggest challenge has been to promote hiring more women at the faculty level. Chile’s a very small country and they love new figures, young figures being highlighted by the United States. The moment I was in Science News,I became very popular [in Chile] very quickly. They needed the inspirational woman. And I kept saying, “I don’t want to be the only one. I want more women.”
I don’t know if you were aware of this collective Las Tesis; they made a dance for the social unrest that we had in Chile before the pandemic. It was a feminist movement that resonated for so many people in the world. The movement [says]: We want to be treated with respect, we want the same salary, we want the same opportunities, we want to feel safe on the streets.… But then, when you are fewer in academia, you’re not going to start jumping on the table and dancing, right? You have to argue … it’s difficult.
— Interview by Ashley Braun
Bioengineer
Stanford University
By disabling the DNA-cutting enzyme in the CRISPR system, Stanley Qi, featured in 2019, created a new and versatile tool. Attaching a range of molecules to these “dead Cas” enzymes has yielded an entire toolbox worth of DNA and RNA manipulators.
I feel it’s getting more popular, for a number of reasons: One, people use … this tool to study how the genome works. Two, there are some new efforts using the tool to treat some genetic diseases. And three, there are some other exciting uses of this tool to think about other diseases, other topics that we can possibly tackle.
For example, this CRISPR system came from bacteria cells, right? They were used as weapons by the bacteria to fight against invading viruses. So we said, “OK, humans also have many foes like invading viruses. Can we repurpose this CRISPR to help us fight our infectious diseases?” That was the idea before the COVID-19 pandemic. We practiced first on influenza, seasonal flu…. We adapted a type of CRISPR system that targets a specific RNA molecule, and it works pretty well. I remember it working in January [2020] when the news started reporting, “Oh, there’s a new virus, it’s an RNA virus,” and we thought immediately, “What if we use this tool on this new RNA virus?”
Instead [of using the live virus], we used synthetic biology to mimic the RNA sequence.… [And we found] we can still very rapidly cleave and destroy this RNA virus and its fragments in the human lung cells. We were really excited. Since then we’ve been working very hard to follow up on the idea, to make this as fast as possible into a possible antiviral. We called it PAC-MAN.
One bigger use is for treating disease like a gene therapy. However, there’s still a number of features that have not been ideal for easy use or testing in clinics.… [For patient care,] people always think about making the system very, very compact and suitable into a nanoparticle or into a viral particle, so we can deliver them with ease into the human body. So that requires a miniaturization of the CRISPR system. And we actually did some work on that…. They are like two-thirds smaller than what people use.
And second is, many of these natural proteins from bacteria don’t work very well [in human cells].… So we did some protein engineering. Following these efforts, we actually created some highly compact, yet highly efficient dCas systems that can be easily delivered into the human body to turn on or off genes.
We are bioengineers and we think our strength is in creating stuff, modifying. Now as we step into the domain of applying these tools to solve real-world problems, the challenge is how to build a bridge between where we are to where we want to go. That usually requires learning a significant amount about a disease, about a new field, and thinking creatively on how to interface two fields.
— Interview by Ashley Braun
Atmospheric chemist
Colorado State University
Emily Fischer, featured in 2020, is in the midst of one of the most comprehensive analyses of wildfire smoke ever attempted. Since we last chatted with Fischer, her wildfire research and the way she talks about it have become more personal.
We’re looking at the impact of smoke on the visible light range where photosynthesis occurs. There’s smoke blanketing the U.S. in summers now. Regardless of whether it’s at the ground, it’s somewhere in the atmosphere between the sun and the plants on the ground. In the Midwest, for example, over our corn and soybean belt, there’s smoke between a third to half of the days on average in July and August, during peak growing season. What does that mean for crops? How is that changing the light at the surface? If it’s boosting the diffuse fraction of radiation, and not decreasing the total radiation, that’s a boost to productivity.
We are a nonpartisan group of scientists who are also mothers. The goal of Science Moms is for us to speak directly [via a website, videos and events] on climate change to other mothers in ways that are accurate, digestible and also engaging. While roughly 60 percent of the U.S. population is worried about climate change, like 85 percent of moms are worried about climate change. But they don’t feel comfortable talking about it, or know how to talk to their representatives about it or even talk to their book club about it.
I get all sorts of messages: “This is so different than any other climate communication that I’ve ever seen.” We’re trained as scientists to take the emotion out of things, but actually it’s very important for people to understand the feeling of climate change.
Last summer [2020], extreme fires impacted my own home. We had smoke here for multiple months, and my family ran from the Cameron Peak Fire.… For me, there was a shift from “These are the numbers, these are the graphs,” to “Oh, this is what my graphs feel like, this is what this trend feels like.”
I’m the kind of person who studies what I see.… And so I should not have been surprised by that fire. I was out backpacking with my family, and it started one range over and my kids and I ran out, and we made it. So it was OK, but I was not sure it would be OK. When something like that happens to you, you have to respond to it. [Now] I think, when we calculate a change in something going forward, what does that mean? What are all the impacts that that could have?
Also, seeing the incident management teams working together to help people [during the fire] was very inspiring. I would say to my husband, “These teams are beautiful. They are functioning at such a high level under such hard conditions. If we could just harness this level of cooperation toward climate change action, or toward eliminating the pandemic, we [could] do anything.”
— Interview by Cassie Martin
Astronomer
Columbia University
After being featured in 2017, David Kipping and his colleagues formally reported in Science Advances the first detection of a potential exomoon — a moon orbiting a planet outside of the solar system. Signs of the Neptune-sized moon were spotted around a Jupiter-sized planet 8,000 light-years from Earth. Kipping has been hunting for more ever since, and has also become a hit on YouTube.
Well, I can’t really talk about that. We are close to releasing the results of a new survey of the ensemble of Jupiter-like planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. Such planets are thought to be the best hunting ground for moons, being far from the gravitational influence of their star and large enough to support potentially massive moons. Unfortunately, the results are still not quite ready.
The community is naturally skeptical. That was kind of the story of exoplanets. When researchers first discovered a hot Jupiter, no one believed it. It wasn’t until they discovered about 10 of them that people started to say that, actually, maybe these are real. I don’t know how it’s going to go with any exomoon candidate. Maybe what we’ve found is genuinely bogus, but I obviously hope not. We did our due diligence, and we’re very careful with the results.
It’s maybe not surprising that the first ones we find are going to be so large, because after all, they’re going to be the easiest to detect.… Actually, less than 1 percent of sunlike stars have hot Jupiters, but they dominated all of the first exoplanet detections just because they were so easy to find. Maybe the same thing will play out here.
It’s been pretty overwhelming to us, because I’d never expected to get anywhere near the number of people watching who have watched. The last video [on what’s called the red sky paradox] got 200,000 views, and the one before it got 500,000. I mean, that’s just bonkers. I get e-mails from people, really amazing e-mails, that say how much the channel and the videos mean to them. That’s really incredible.
We have lots of people actually financially supporting us now. We give them special access to the videos and early access to the papers we’re writing. We hang out with some of them once every two months on a livestream and chat about science. It’s starting to be enough that I’m funding students through donations. I have this dream that I do research, it produces cool ideas, I talk about it on my outreach channel, people get excited about it and they support us, which enables me to do more research.
I’m still [working to earn] tenure. It’s obviously one of the most stressful periods of your career because you don’t have that safety net yet that some young tenured colleagues enjoy. At the same time, you’re trying to raise a family and make sure you see your kids growing up. You don’t want to be a ghost at home. And so that’s been tricky, but [the pandemic] enabled me to spend a lot more time at home with the family.
— Interview by Cassie Martin
I. Pouring foundation One of my most viewed YouTube videos starts with a chattering 808 drum pattern. As the video fades in, the first thing you notice is a recording studio’s wall filled with checkerboarded golds and browns, evoking the basement of a single dad with an expensive hobby problem. It’s hard to tell if […]
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By John Upton, Kelly Van Baalen, Scott Kulp, Climate Central and Selena Vasquez, Joe Martucci, The Press of Atalntic City
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This story was produced through a partnership between Press of Atlantic City and Climate Central. |
ATLANTIC CITY — Paula Rudolph Stryker drives her grandson to the Brighton Avenue School almost every day. While the drive involves the usual bouts of slowdowns with traffic lights and rush-hour congestion, one thing has slowed her more often in recent years.
Flooding.
“I’ve found more problems with the flooding. ... There have been a couple of times when we’ve had a delayed opening because of the flooding,” said Stryker, 63.
As seas rise at a quickening pace, the water continues to creep closer to where the city’s students spend most of their days — in its 11 public schools.
Warming trends are aggravating threats to student health and threatening reliable access to classrooms nationwide, with the resort a poster child for flood impacts. As the effects of generations of federal underspending on infrastructure and schools trigger complaints and debate from Route 40 to Washington, D.C., experts warn that few American classrooms are ready for climate change.
“Long before this pandemic, our schools were all in dire need of repair,” U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross, D-1st, said in a statement in January after introducing a bill that would provide $130 billion for schools, targeted at those most in need. While that stalled as a standalone bill, House Democrats’ Build Back Better Act includes $82 billion for repairing and modernizing public school infrastructure.
Here, the impacts from worsening flooding occur around the school properties. And in a district of just 4 square miles where only the high school has busing, the city’s youth and their caretakers are increasingly forced to wade through and drive around floodwaters as part of their routines.
The impacts from sea level rise affect almost every facet of life here, from the economy to culture and physical landscape. To better understand how the sea continues to shape the resort, The Press of Atlantic City and Climate Central have spent much of 2021 examining the challenges, strategies and opportunities as the city deals with increasing flood risks.
Miriam Spellman, of Atlantic City, discusses the risk of flooding to the Pennsylvania Avenue School while picking up her great grandchildren William, 3, and Asa, 8. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer, Press of Atlantic City.
From 1993 to 2017, sea levels rose 1.9 inches per decade along the Jersey Shore, according to the Rutgers University Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel. The same study forecasts an 83% chance of an additional 11 inches of sea level rise by 2050.
Three of the city’s schools are in locations that make them prone to experiencing coastal flooding at least once a year on average, according to an analysis by Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and journalists in Princeton, Mercer County.
Another four have annual flooding somewhere on the school grounds, such as a parking lot or sports field. By 2050, that number will increase to 10 unless infrastructure is built to protect them from tidal flooding. The only exception is Atlantic City High School, which is a little less than a mile north of Absecon Island, on Great Island, due to its higher elevation. However, the sports fields on the western edge of the school property will face annual flood risk by then.
The Brighton Avenue School, where Stryker drops off her grandson, is one of the few that does not face an annual flood risk. However, by 2030, the lowest-lying parts of the school are expected to flood at least once a year and, by 2050, water will reach the steps at the entrances at the corners of Morris and Arctic avenues at least once a year on average. Reaching the school at those times will be a challenge, with those streets also covered by briny floodwaters.
The effects of heat-trapping pollution also are hitting American students particularly hard in their schools, many of which require upgrades or repairs. New Jersey has been the fastest warming state in the nation in the past 20 years when compared to the 20th century, according to FilterKing, which used data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Americans underspend on school maintenance and repairs by $46 billion a year, according to the 2016 “State of Our Schools” report co-produced by the 21st Century School Fund, the National Council on School Facilities and the U.S. Green Building Council.
“Schools are vulnerable to a lot of the climate impacts that we expect, particularly those in coastal zones,” said Perry Sheffield, a pediatrician and researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. She said those impacts are associated with “a longstanding neglect of environmental health” on school grounds.
The Press contacted principals of the most severely affected Atlantic City schools, but none returned requests for comment. Barry Caldwell, superintendent of the Atlantic City School District, in a text reply said preparing schools for future flooding challenges is on the district’s radar and that a meeting has been set with city officials for Thursday to discuss the issue.
Hurricanes and rainstorms are intensifying and seas are rising, bringing risks of mold alongside flood damage. Sheffield said flooding and fear of climate change can also affect the mental health of students.
Rising temperatures are worsening hazards for student athletes and can make it more difficult to concentrate and learn.
“There’s going to be an emerging literature — there’s some, but not a lot yet — on things like learning impacts and test scores, which affect graduation rates, which we know are directly related to overall life earning and well-being,” Sheffield said.
Some congressional Democrats have been pushing for an infusion of spending on America’s public schools following the upheaval wrought by COVID-19, which illuminated and exacerbated impacts of entrenched economic inequality. The average school building in the United States is more than 50 years old, with federal figures showing half of them require repairs.
On a recent cloudy, breezy Friday afternoon, students who attend the Pennsylvania Avenue School hung out on the playground. As kids giggled and yelled, parents patiently waited outside the school. The parents agreed they would take the clouds and breeze over the chance of coastal flooding any day.
“I don’t drive, and where I live, it floods really badly,” said Evelyn Coulbourne, 24, whose 9-year-old son, Anthony, attends the school. She said she has to pack extra shoes for Anthony if they walk to school during a flood. “I try to get a ride when it floods, but that’s not possible because everyone else works.”
Evelyn Coulbourne, 24, says flooding occasionally makes it difficult for her to get her son Anthony, 9, to the Pennsylvania Avenue School. “I try to get a ride when it floods but that's not possible because everyone else works,” Coulbourne said. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer, Press of Atlantic City
The Pennsylvania Avenue School is one of the newest public schools in Atlantic City, finished in 2012, when the concerns for increasing tidal flooding were well known. Still, most points on the property are at risk of at least one flood a year, with the entrance near Virginia Avenue facing potential flooding as many as eight times in a typical year. By 2050, some parts of the school property will likely flood more than 10 times a year, the analysis showed.
Councilman Jesse Kurtz, whose 6th Ward covers the Richmond Avenue School, Chelsea Heights School and Atlantic City High School, said schools have to be built with the possibility of coastal flooding in mind.
“I’d like to see the ‘get it done right the first time’ mentality. ... If you’re near water, that type of infrastructure should fit into the initial infrastructure,” Kurtz said.
By Caitlin Looby, Climate Central and Clarisa Diaz, Quartz
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Both of these fields are at risk
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This story was produced through a partnership between Quartz and Climate Central. |
Scientists have found that climate change will strain the global food supply as drought and heat waves collide more often in the future. That concerning finding comes from a new study published in Nature Food that analyzed historical data to project how drier heat waves will affect corn and soy fields around the world.
Corn and soybean yields may fall 5% globally between 2050 and 2100 because of the combination of a drier and hotter climate. That’s on top of losses due to hotter temperatures alone. The figures were determined by analyzing historical patterns in agriculture and weather along with a suite of climate model projections.
Yield is the portion of a crop that can be harvested and sold.
According to the study, North America, Europe, and Africa will experience the harsher effects brought on from the combination of drought and heat.
Adapting to climate change with sustainable farming practices
It’s going to be harder to irrigate farms in the future. Water will be more scarce and evaporate more quickly. Drier heat waves “put pressure on surface water resources, and could also slow the recharge of aquifers that farmers depend on for irrigation in many places,” said Lesk. “This all adds to the challenge of adaptation.”
Conserving and improving soil conditions will be important for crops to grow well in drier climates. Farmers will need to adapt to ensure their soil retains water, carbon, nutrients, and microbes. That includes minimizing tilling, continuously covering soils with plants or mulches to prevent erosion, and crop diversification.
Growing different types of crops in the same field can keep soil conditions stable and farmers on a better economic footing. If one type of crop fails the loss will be less than the entire farm failing. “It doesn’t necessarily always need to be conventional crops,” said Fenton Beed, an administrator at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
But if farmers want to stick to corn and soybeans, they can still diversify within those types of crops. “There are options of different crop varieties and combinations that may be better adapted to the local, changing conditions,” said Beed.
Breeders are trying to develop crop varieties that can survive in the new combination of stresses brought by climate change. For mass-grown crops like soy and corn, there are only a few suppliers who dominate the market. Consolidation in the industry further provokes the worry that there is not enough competition in the market to drive the innovation needed to confront the changing climate.
This story was produced through a collaboration with Climate Central, a non-advocacy science and news group.
Alix Spiegel is a master of narrative storytelling. Listen to any of the episodes of Invisibilia she hosted or any of the stories she produced for This American Life and, I suspect, you’ll agree. Even back when she was a science reporter for NPR covering human relations, her stories stood out from the pack because […]
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By Caitlin Looby, Climate Central and Amber Alexander, NBC WHO 13 Des Moines
IOWA — Jean Eells dug into the earth on her farm after the fall harvest and discovered a problem. It was 2016 and the farmer that rented her land had just left. When she pulled her spade from the ground she noticed the soil was hard and compact, with layers looking like “thinly stacked dinner plates.”
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This story was produced through a partnership between NBC WHO 13 Des Moines and Climate Central. |
Healthy soil soaks up and stores more water, helping farmers grow healthy, nutritious and productive crops. But warming temperatures are threatening the productivity of croplands through the Midwest, with new data showing how drought makes corn and soybean crops much more sensitive to heat.
“I want to make sure that my soils are in good shape, so that I will have a farmer that can make money,” says Eells. “And if my soil is degraded and doesn’t handle the drought, doesn’t handle wet conditions, I’m concerned about that.”
Good soil also helps crops withstand the types of weather extremes that are becoming more common as pollution traps heat. Heat waves, drought and floods will continue to become more intense as temperatures continue to rise. Like Iowans saw this summer, heat waves and drought will collide more often.
Eells said she decided to take a more active role in managing her land before a new tenant farmer took over. She switched to no-till practices and started to plant cover crops, like oat and rapeseed, because they help keep moisture in the soil before the upcoming growing season.
The U.S. just faced the warmest summer on record, tied with 1936 during the Dust Bowl. And a summer-long drought hit parts of Iowa and other Midwestern states. As drought and extreme heat hit the region more often and with greater intensity, its productive soils are at risk.
“We can’t till our way out of this,” says Eells.
The fall after she planted cover crops, Eells noticed her land looked healthier. One sign of this was the earthworms burrowing throughout the soil, which was now loose enough that they had space to move.
The new research on warming temperatures and drought warns that drier heat waves will reduce harvests, threatening to further narrow farmers’ profit margins.
Experts say that paying closer attention to soils and improving farming practices like Eells has done on her land in Webster County, will help crops and those that farm them handle the additional stress.
In a global study published Monday, scientists at Columbia University showed where drier heat waves will damage major types of crops as temperatures continue to increase.
The Midwest stood out as an international hotspot, where damage to corn and soybean yields may be upwards of 10 to 20 percent after 2050. Iowa and its economy will experience impacts, given its a top producer of corn and soybeans across the U.S.
Midwest farmers will likely see conditions that look a lot like Texas currently, says Corey Lesk, a climate scientist at Columbia University and lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Nature Food on Monday.
Some counties in the western part of Iowa may suffer financial losses nearing $60 million per year in corn and $30 million per year in soybeans later in the century, according to an analysis of Lesk’s and economic data.
The timing of these hot droughts will matter. “It’s better to have a drought form early in the season versus the middle of the growing season,” said Justin Glisan, Iowa’s state climatologist.
Even though Iowa is getting wetter, much of that rainfall is coming in heavy downpours, causing extreme flooding. And intense rainfall in the middle of a drought doesn’t always provide relief. “That rainfall runs off faster than it soaks and so drought acts almost as a concrete barrier,” Glisan said.
And there has been a reduction in rainfall in July, right when it’s getting hotter and corn is maturing, says Glisan.
Less rainfall in July is “a worst-case scenario because corn needs its water in the middle of the growing season,” said Dennis Todey, the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Midwest Climate Hub, which helps agricultural managers make climate-informed decisions.
If a drought strikes earlier in the summer, as was the case this year, by contrast, it can help with agricultural production by prompting corn and soybean crops to root more deeply in search of moisture. Roots can get up to six feet deep in Iowa, says Todey. Deep roots allow the plant to have more access to water beneath the soil surface, which is better for yields during stressful conditions.
While Iowa farmers saw some recent relief from rain, much of Iowa is still in a drought and in need of a soil water recharge going into winter.
There are also considerations when it comes to how crops are bred, says Lesk. It usually takes decades to develop crops. Crops are now being bred for combinations of climate stresses that rarely occurred in previous climates.
“Soils are the first line of defense dealing with these issues,” Todey said. Healthy soils can hold a lot more water than unhealthy soils, meaning more productive crops.
Status quo farming won’t work anymore, says Eells. But “farmers are fabulous problem solvers.”
One of the best things that farmers can do to protect their crops is to care for their soils.
Eells described visual tests that farmers like her use to check the health of their soils. If the soil is healthy it will look like coarse breadcrumbs, while she said unhealthy soil looks like cocoa powder. The coarse grains in healthy soil are filled with carbon and microbes that help “glue” the soil particles together.
Eells started using no-till practices when she noticed her soils were hard and compact. No-till leaves plant material left in the field after harvesting on top of the soil, creating a barrier that helps prevent water loss.
Tilling also breaks up healthy, coarse soil, releasing the carbon that growing plants put into the soil and killing some of the microbes. When this happens, the soil struggles to hold onto water and crops have less access to water on hot, dry days.
Eels also began planting oat and rapeseed as cover crops and continues to work on finding the best crops that work for the farm. Cover crops extend living roots out into the soil that help glue the soil particles back together, opening up space for water and air to move. They also keep the microbes alive.
“Cover crops and no-till practices are like insurance for topsoil,” says Eells.
No-till is the most common conservation practice used by farmers in Iowa and its usage is increasing, though 2017 research from Iowa State University showed it was only used on 27 percent of the state’s farmland. Cover crops are only used on 4 percent of the land, the researchers found, while one in five farmers here said they’d be willing to pay a portion of the cost of cover crops on leased land.
Adding another crop to the rotation, especially one that grows early, can change the kinds of microbes living in the soil. New and different crops give them an assorted menu.
“We have climate change upon us,” she said. “We can’t wait.”
Eells teaches conservation practices to fellow women farmers and landowners because she wants to make what? accessible.
“So often we perpetuate the same style of outreach in conservation and we find that by simply shifting that outreach it makes it accessible and lets women thrive as learners.”
Women are an invisible group in agriculture, she says. Although, in Iowa, women own or co-own nearly 50 percent of all farmland.
“If we do conservation without them, we are doing it with one arm tied behind our back,” she says.
She works with organizations like the Women Food and Agriculture Network, or WFAN and participates in a lot of peer-to-peer mentoring circles.
Women are stewardship partners, they don’t just sit back and collect a check, said Eells. When women leave a mentoring circle, the vast majority take action.
“Once they know there is a problem and that other women have solved those problems, they do it,” she said. “They take action.
“There’s no such thing as a podcast emergency.” I first read that quote on Twitter a few years ago, thanks to podcast producing icon Kathy Tu. I have worked on about a dozen productions since then and that phrase has helped me breathe through every one. When I first started working as an audio producer […]
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Meandering musings on audio consumption I. Recently I was listening to the podcast It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders, enjoying an episode about monoculture, specifically regarding the Olympics, and (separately) the Jennifer Lopez / Ben Affleck-inspired phenom known as “Bennifer.” After a spirited discussion of both topics, Sam led his guests through the final […]
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By Priyanka Runwal, Climate Central and Elisa Raffa, Fox 46 Charlotte
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This story was produced through a partnership between FOX 46 Charlotte and Climate Central. |
(FOX 46 CHARLOTTE) – On sweltering summer days, the Roof Above homeless shelter in Charlotte doubles as a cooling station. Air conditioning in the building, and more recently fans and misting units on the porch, provide respite from dangerous conditions outside.
“Heat is really tough on those folks that we serve,” says Randall Hitt, Roof Above’s vice president of engagement. “If you’re somebody who doesn’t have a place to call home, like you and I might have, it’s really hard spending hours outside when you’re talking about 90-degree-plus temperatures and a lot of humidity.”
An analysis of weather station data showed Charlotte was on average 2°F warmer last summer than it was in the summer of 1970, with 11 more days when the temperature reached 95°F.
As heat-trapping pollution continues to build in the atmosphere, cities and rural areas are getting hotter. Like most cities, Charlotte has been warming more quickly than surrounding areas because buildings, paved roads and parking lots trap heat during the day and release it more slowly overnight, compared with areas that have lots of trees and other plants.
This urban heat island effect pushes local temperatures on average 6 degrees higher than its surrounding rural areas, according to a recent analysis from Climate Central.
“If it’s already hot outside and then you get extra heat in the city, that’s where you start running into human health issues and heat stress and deaths,” said Dr. Matthew Eastin, an urban meteorology expert at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He has published research showing the urban heat island had nearly doubled in intensity between 1975 and 2014 in Charlotte.
High temperatures can harm health, particularly that of the elderly, children, pregnant women, individuals with heart and chest illnesses, outdoor workers and those experiencing homelessness.
From exhaustion, discomfort and nausea to excessive sweating, palpitations, and seizures, elevated temperatures, especially when stretched over several days, can cause health complications, says Liz Cary, a registered nurse who is on the advisory board of North Carolina Clinicians for Climate Action. Heat-trapping air pollution can worsen these health impacts by raising temperatures even further in cities.
Since 2010, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has recorded 2,813 to 5,057 heat-related emergency room visits every summer across the state. Hotter summers led to more hospitalizations.
However, the impact of heat is likely to be much larger than is shown in the data, as only a fraction of people seek emergency care for heat-related illnesses. At the Roof Above shelter, for instance, a part-time nurse looks for signs of tiredness and dehydration during health checkups in the summer months.
The impacts of these warming trends are being felt unequally across Charlotte, and across the world.
Research shows neighborhoods that are home to low-income residents and communities of color are disproportionately hotter than those with predominantly white homeowners. Jeremy Hoffman, a climate scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, led research that showed temperature differences can be as large as 20 degrees at the same time in different parts of the same city.
That’s because these hotter areas tend to be historically marginalized and underfunded neighborhoods in areas that were formerly redlined under racist federal urban policies. They contain more paved surfaces including asphalt lots, warehouses and industries, and fewer parks and trees that can cool the air.
“One of the first things cities can do is plan for reinviting nature into the city,” Hoffman said.
The city of Charlotte currently has 45 percent of its land covered by trees and the city aims to add another 5 percent to reach its 50 percent goal. Acknowledging that the existing tree canopy is not equally distributed, the city’s latest Tree Canopy Action Plan aims to “equitably and proactively expand the quality and quantity of the tree canopy for the benefit of all citizens of Charlotte.”
With increased daytime temperatures and reduced nighttime cooling when heat islands form, access to cool indoor spaces becomes important to protect those at risk.
For low-income communities who already live in warmer neighborhoods, air conditioning is often unaffordable. Day cooling centers like the Roof Above help, but people are unlikely to find relief late into the evening and night.
As the Queen City continues to grow rapidly, new developments bring opportunities to retain and incorporate green spaces through urban planning. Such natural cooling features would help protect future residents from increasingly extreme heat.
“It’s not something we can lackadaisically approach,” Dr. Eastin says. “We do need to take it seriously soon.”
There’s an illustration I’m sure you’ve seen. Look at it one way and you’ll see an older woman in a veil. Look at the same drawing a while longer and you see a younger woman wearing a hat with a feather plume. Same picture, different image. A trick of the eye. Megan Tan and I […]
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Welcome back y’all! Or welcome period, if this is your first issue. To catch you up, Starting Out is a partnership between me (Hi! I’m Alice!) and the folks at Transom. We’re glad you’re here! If you frequent a certain corner of Journalism Twitter you might have seen this tweet from The Washington Post, advertising their fall internship program: The […]
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Audio editing is a really weird job. You spend hours staring at a computer, sliding around pictures of soundwaves — it can be hard on your eyes — and your attention is often consumed by the absurd, like “why doesn’t this person ever say the letter D?” or by trying to edit out a sound […]
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This is true: I was so smitten by a story from the Kitchen Sisters airing on NPR’s All Things Considered, I brought my radio into the bathroom so I could shower and listen and get to where I needed to be that afternoon. I got delayed briefly because I ended up crying in the shower. […]
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Loudness Loudness is a helpful technology for any audio storyteller. It can help you balance voices to each other, know that your podcast will sound consistent from one episode to the next, or meet a specification set by a distribution platform. When this guide was originally published in 2015, loudness was new on the audio […]
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By Priyanka Runwal, data and science reporter, Climate Central and Lori Valigra, Bangor Daily News
A man crosses the street in downtown Biddeford on a scorching Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
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This segment and story were produced through a partnership between Climate Central and Bangor Daily News. |
BIDDEFORD, Maine — Duane Dennison knows more than most about the effects of hotter summers and heat lingering into the night: He lives near the Saco River in a tent community of about 20 people experiencing homelessness.
As temperatures soared into the mid-90s Aug. 12, the 61-year-old painter sought relief at the Seeds of Hope Neighborhood Center, which offers air conditioning, snacks and a place to socialize for up to 30 people at a time. His options to cool off in the summer are the cooling shelter, swimming in the river or hanging out at the local supermarket’s meat department.
“It’s harder in summer than the winter,” Dennison said of trying to stay comfortable outside.
Duane Dennison, 61, gets out of the summer heat at the Seeds of Hope Center in Biddeford on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. Dennison, a painter by trade, is currently living in a tent and said he’s grateful for the air conditioning at the center. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
Like many other Maine cities, Biddeford is regularly experiencing temperatures far higher than surrounding suburban and rural areas. On average, it is a little over 6 degrees warmer than its surroundings, about the same difference as in nearby Portland, according to an analysis from Climate Central, a nonprofit science and journalism organization.
That is because low tree cover and heat-absorbing infrastructure like roofs, buildings, pavement and parking lots trap more heat and release it slowly, creating a so-called urban heat island effect. But unlike other similar-sized cities, Biddeford is strategizing about how to minimize heat in the future by preserving and adding green spaces and using more porous surfaces.
Elevated temperatures can pose a threat to public health, especially older people, children and outdoor workers, contributing to their general discomfort and exhaustion, poor sleep and respiratory and heart problems. This urban heat and its health impacts are further aggravated by rising temperatures caused by heat-trapping pollution.
“[Climate change] is essentially raising that thermostat in the background,” Jeremy Hoffman, a climate scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, said. “On top of that, you’re adding the urban heat island effect.”
A sign on the door at the Seeds of Hope Center in Biddeford on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021 announces extended hours on days with heat advisories. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
Biddeford, Maine’s sixth-largest city with more than 21,000 residents, is located about 25 miles southwest of Portland in York County in the southern part of the state. The former textile mill city has undergone major redevelopment in the past decade to add upscale housing and retail stores. Mostly low-rise buildings and river breezes mitigate some of the heat, but the buildings have flat, dark roofs that trap the warmth.
The city has advanced climate and heat plans relatively quickly. In the fall of 2020 the city had already adopted a Climate Emergency Declaration Resolution, one of a handful of Maine municipalities to do so. It also formed the Biddeford Climate Task Force in January, charging it with creating a plan with adaptation, mitigation and sustainability strategies.
As that group looks at how climate change is affecting the city, it also is starting to look at ways to curtail heat buildup. Biddeford must consider current and future development carefully and preserve green spaces where carbon is sequestered, Steven Reiter, the task force’s chair, said.
The task force will consider adaptation strategies to mitigate the heat island effect, including rain gardens, tree planting and more porous surfaces for infrastructure, he said. It also is trying to educate the public.
Reiter said while taxpayers aren’t willing to shoulder many of the costs to invest in new or upgraded infrastructure, those costs will rise if mitigation efforts are delayed too long.
“If we do nothing, we’re in for a deep hurt,” Reiter said.
Andrew Russell, 45, eats breakfast near an air conditioner at the Seeds of Hope Center in Biddeford on a hot Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. Russell shares a non-air conditioned, two-bedroom apartment with his wife, their daughter and a roommate. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
Increased daytime temperatures and reduced nighttime cooling can trigger exhaustion, stress and even heart attacks, especially among the elderly who don’t adjust well to sudden temperature changes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For Maine, which is the oldest state in the nation by median age, heat presents elevated risks. Some 36 percent of heat-related deaths in the United States are people over age 65.
Additionally, low-income groups that live in far more areas with concrete and marginal green spaces within cities face severe health threats, according to a joint investigation by NPR and the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.
“Their neighborhood is already warmer,” Hoffman said. “In order to adapt, installing and using air conditioning units is a huge investment for people with less means.”
So far this summer, York County hospitals saw 33 heat-related emergency cases, with almost half of them occurring during the heatwave at the end of June, according to Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention data.
As cities in Maine continue to grow and face higher temperatures, intense heat waves and stronger urban heat islands, heat-related health issues are likely to become more pressing going forward. Preparing for extreme heat events and protecting the most vulnerable will be key.
A young couple share a phone while sitting under the disused black bridge over the Saco River in Biddeford on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
The city needs to step up its efforts following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report last week warning of widespread and intensifying climate change effects, said Mayor Alan Casavant, a lifelong Biddeford resident who recently read about the urban heat island effect in Portland and said his city must address the problem.
“Delay is not an option,” he said. “We have to come up with some plan of action for the community and hope that other communities are doing the same thing.”
That could provide more comfort for residents like Dennison, who is at the whim of the weather.
“When you’re hot, you’re hot,” he said.
This story was produced through a partnership with Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group.
It’s hard to imagine an experienced storyteller like Jonathan Goldstein feeling anxious about writing and putting a story together. But, he says the anxiety is always there. Ever since he was a kid and he had a story from school to tell his parents, he’d stand outside the apartment and linger for a while feeling […]
The post Goldstein on Writing, Fonts, and “The Goldstein” appeared first on Transom.
Hiya! Welcome to Starting Out, a newsletter for people entering into the audio industry. I’m Alice, a podcast producer/reporter and former intern. I’m thrilled to partner with Transom on this project. They are the gold standard in training and resources for public radio. When I was getting into this industry I was anxious all the […]
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Kate Ng meets the people who have become increasingly aware of the impact of climate change following extreme weather events and rising pollution levels
I thought the whole thing was kinda strange. It was some years ago. I was working with a producer and a reporter on a collaboration between the BBC and Marketplace. We were reporting on the Brazilian economy. And, we were about to interview an expert on the country’s precarious economic situation — a decline in […]
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I called up the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies out of the blue. I had read that Salt, a school in Portland, Maine, was considering adding a radio track to their longstanding writing and photography tracks. I had no background in documentary radio. Next to no background in journalism. Given that, I shouldn’t have called […]
Urban heat islands are metropolitan places that are hotter than their outlying areas, with the impacts felt most during summer months. About 85% of the U.S. population lives in metropolitan areas. Paved roads, parking lots, and buildings absorb and retain heat during the day and radiate that heat back into the surrounding air. Neighborhoods in a highly-developed city can experience mid-afternoon temperatures that are 15°F to 20°F hotter than nearby tree-lined communities or rural areas with fewer people and buildings.
Click here for city data and graphics
Climate change is making extreme heat events worse and more frequent, with summer temperatures stretching into the shoulder seasons of spring and fall. Heat events adversely affect health and quality of life—and this is especially acute in urban communities. Higher cooling demand strains the electric grid and raises electric bills. And heat-related impacts fall unequally, with historically underserved populations facing greater health threats.
This report will look at the factors that contribute to the heat island effect, and our analysis will show how they vary in places across the United States. We’ll discuss some of the impacts of higher temperatures on human health and the built environment. We’ll also take a look at how communities are adapting to these new normals and consider solutions for lessening some of the intensity of the urban heat island.
By Joe Martucci, Press of Atlantic City and Victoria Bouloubasis, Climate Central
A sign marks the height of the flooding inside Atlantic City's Vagabond Kitchen + Tap House during 2012's Superstorm Sandy. Vagabon and many restaurants on the Atlantic City coastline are facing increasing flooding risks. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer
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This segment and story were produced through a partnership between Climate Central and The Press of Atlantic City. |
ATLANTIC CITY — Whether it’s a nor’easter, tropical system or even a full moon with an east wind, restaurant manager Elvis Cadavid will survey the kitchen at Vagabond Kitchen + Tap House and brace himself.
“(Here) you’re in the worst possible flood zone,” Cadavid said.
About 1½ feet below the seating area inside, his refrigerators, prep tables, fryers and any other kitchen equipment are put on wheels and elevated a few inches off the ground. Nearly every part of the land beneath the popular brewpub and late-night venue on North Trenton Avenue faces a chronic risk of flooding, according to an analysis by Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group. There’s one exception: the patio on the Trenton Avenue side — that only faces a 10% chance of a flood each year, although by 2050, the patio also will become part of a frequent flood zone, the analysis found.
“I spend thousands of dollars a year pumping out the crawlspace,” said Cadavid. “Some future work calls for adding a couple of sump pumps so you don’t have to pay to drain it out each year.”
When the flooding is in moderate or major stage, which means a crest higher than 6.9 feet above the average low tide mark, the restaurant can lose a lunch or dinner shift, and with it, revenue and worker wages. On occasion, the flooding is so bad everything shuts down.
Since Superstorm Sandy in 2012, Cadavid has filed three flood insurance claims for loss, including damaged refrigerator units. While the insurance covers the loss, it means higher premiums for the next flooding event.
The impacts from sea level rise affect almost every facet of life in the resort city, from its economy to its culture and physical landscape. To better understand how the sea continues to shape the resort, The Press and Climate Central are spending this year looking at the challenges, coping strategies and opportunities facing the city as it deals with increasing flooding risks.
Climate Central analyzed the impact on 26 non-casino based restaurants and found that 10 would experience frequent or chronic coastal flood risks on their properties by 2050. Some, such as Vagabond, are already feeling the impact, while others have yet to see severe flooding.
Long-term plans call for raising West End Avenue. But in the meantine, Vagabon Kitchen + Tap House owner Elivs Cadavid stays alert when storms or flooding is expected. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer
From 1993 to 2017, sea levels in New Jersey have risen an average of 1.9 inches per decade, according to a Rutgers University Science and Technology panel. Of that 1.9-inch growth, nine-tenths of an inch comes from natural processes, such as sinking land. A warming world, driven by man-made greenhouse gas emissions, accounts for 0.87 inches, while 0.2 inches of the rise is due to unknown factors. The rate of sea-level rise is increasing globally, and it will continue to affect Atlantic City at a quickening pace.
The scars of each storm are etched on popular restaurants and bars like Vagabond.
“I got markers all around my property,” Cadavid said of the high water marks staining the outside of the building that sits on North Trenton Avenue along West End Avenue in the city’s Chelsea Heights neighborhood. The flooding inside his restaurant during Sandy reached 20 inches. Outside, it rendered West End Avenue, a major artery between the city and neighboring Ventnor, impassable.
Aaron Levine, founder and CEO of LG Insurance based in Long Branch, Monmouth County, has been monitoring federal policy related to flood insurance restrictions and what it could mean for private residences and business properties in New Jersey. FEMA’s new rules go into effect by October.
Flood insurance rates will go up as a result of the rule changes.
“It’s going to affect everybody,” he said, “but it’s going to be a bigger opportunity to spread the risk and allow lower-risk properties to take on a little more of the cost to offset the expense of the higher-risk properties.”
He added that climate-related threats won’t cease, and any business should remain prepared.
“Significant storm activity is happening on a consistent and regular basis throughout the world,” said Levine. “From a professional agent’s perspective, we have to look at the global risks.”
Levine’s advice: Get ahead of the game and mitigate risks. He suggests not waiting for a disaster to make building upgrades, for example. He also notes that insurance options are widely available through both federal programs and private companies.
“For business owners, especially in hospitality, read the insurance policies, understand what the coverage is and do a cost-risk analysis to understand exactly what’s going on so there are no surprises later,” he said.
Loss of revenue, higher insurance costs and increased threats of flooding are the last things the hospitality industry needs. Adjusted for seasonal workers, 35,000 people work in the hospitality industry in the Atlantic City-Hammonton region, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which tracks economic and labor data for the region.
Pre-pandemic, in April 2019, 44,100 people were working the industry, according to the Federal Reserve data.
Flooding can affect an employee’s ability to get to work. Cadavid said most of his team lives in flood-prone areas. Getting to the road on a day with coastal flooding may mean walking on crates from the front door of their home to a dry part of the street where their car is parked and then trying to find the route with the least amount of car-corrosive salt water. For some, it means making sure their legs don’t get wet as the jitney pulls in.
“I am very close to the water, so we do experience some flooding and it does make it a little difficult to get to work ... because you have to detour,” said Sania Alikoarti, a hostess at Vagabond, who moved here from Albany, New York, three years ago.
Cadavid says another Vagabond employee who lives in adjacent Ventnor Heights makes a plan for getting to work whenever coastal flooding is expected. If it’s significant, she’ll stay at another person’s house.
As Atlantic City continues to grapple with high unemployment rates — with one in three people out of a job — sea level rise and flooding threaten long-term prospects for steady income for hospitality workers.
Sea levels are projected to rise an additional 0.3 to 0.9 feet by 2030, according to the Rutgers study, regardless of how much more greenhouse gas pollution is released in the coming years. By 2050, it’s somewhere between 0.7 and 1.9 feet.
Some local entrepreneurs have resigned themselves to the fact that flooding is a way of life.
“It’s annoying, but I don’t feel like it necessarily hurts us,” said Mike Barham, owner of Gilchrist Restaurant, located on Rhode Island Avenue in an out-of-the-way, tourist-friendly spot known as Gardner’s Basin.
The Gilchrist Restaurant in Gardner's Basin does not normally flood but will by 2050, according to a review by Climate Central. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer
Across the parking lot sits another popular spot, Back Bay Ale House, where diners go for drinks, a meal or to watch the sun set from the open porches and picnic tables at its outside bar.
While the Gilchrist does not normally flood now, like Back Bay Ale House, it will by 2050, according Climate Central’s review.
One thing is clear, at least to City Councilman Jesse Kurtz, whose 6th Ward includes Vagabond: Atlantic City means too much to the state, investors and locals to be abandoned.
Kurtz said residents quickly identify flooding as a major problem, but seem resigned to it.
Solutions to the flooding exist, but action is needed, he said.
“In working through the issue ... there is a solution and fundamentally, we have to decide if we’re going to shore up infrastructure and make things livable for people that are here or are we going to abandon the islands,” Kurtz said.
Cadavid says he is working closely with Kurtz on the issue, including plans to raise the roads around his restaurant.
“One of the challenges here is that it’s the intersection of local, county and state roads,” Kurtz said of the intersections of West End and Trenton avenues and the adjacent Black Horse Pike.
Another issue: The nearby bay and marshland means the state Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could require permitting.
Kurtz said a short-term fix is in the works as the state plans to elevate the off-ramp of the southbound pike lanes onto West End Avenue. That will happen in a matter of months.
This will address the flooding issues, but only modestly.
Kurtz said the long-term plan to remove flooding from West End Avenue, which turns into Wellington Avenue in Ventnor, is to lift the entire road, similar to what was done for the pike in parts of Egg Harbor Township’s West Atlantic City neighborhood. The next phase calls for raising the pike from Naples Avenue to Bayport Drive by 2.5 feet at a cost of $27.5 million. That phase will happen in the next one to four years.
Meanwhile, the state is asking the private sector — businesses and homeowners alike — to absorb some of the costs by building higher.
In April, the state released a New Jersey Climate Change Resilience Strategy, which touted a plan to mitigate the effects of climate change. One of its recommendations was that all new construction in coastal zones be able to withstand roughly 5 feet of sea level rise by 2100. Some local governments and stakeholders have objected to the higher building requirements needed to meet that threshold, saying the state is forcing a response based on a threat that has only a 17% likelihood of happening.
In the meantime, Cadavid will continue to keep a careful eye on his restaurant, and will look out for flood warnings. His spot fared well during the pandemic, closing only briefly after a positive COVID-19 case on staff.
Still, Vagabond and many other restaurants on the Atlantic City coastline lost revenue last year, shifted staff and now likely face higher flood insurance costs due to sea level rise.
A return of indoor dining means more customers — and neither Cadavid nor Barnham of Gilchrist need another obstacle to filling their tables.
“When it’s the perfect storm at high tide and the full moon, the roads ... can be bad,” Barnham said. “It can almost be impossible to get to us.”
(Data analysis by Allison Kopicki of Climate Central.)
Cadavid, Edward Lea, Staff Photographer
Changes at Transom After so many years helping to steer the ship, Samantha Broun and Rob Rosenthal are leaving Transom to work on exciting new projects. At Transom, we’re all about providing people with the tools and encouragement to tell their own stories with sound. We hold open the door to public media for anyone […]
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Scientists have discovered heat-resistant corals in the Red Sea - but this is only the beginning of sustainable regeneration in the area
By Lori Valigra and John Upton
The city of Bath, nestled on the western banks of the Kennebec River, is especially endangered by climate change and rising sea levels. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
BATH, Maine — Peter Gerard had never seen so much water.
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This segment and story were produced through a partnership between Climate Central and Bangor Daily News. |
A torrential rain storm in late September 2015 coinciding with high tide waters and leaves clogging drains sent him racing to a low-lying Central Maine Power Co. substation near the Kennebec River to check equipment. The water was already 2 feet deep, so he could not get too close.
Gerard, an electromechanical worker and 33-year veteran of the electric utility, called the substation’s operations director, who decided to shut off power to the utility’s 4,000 customers in and around the midcoast city.
That included Bath Iron Works, a shipyard across the street that is one of Maine’s largest private employers and that the U.S. Navy designates as “strategic infrastructure.” The waters did not reach the shipyard, but the power outage forced it to send home first-shift workers and to cancel the second shift. A worker inside a shipyard assembly building was briefly stranded in a crane box because the structure’s electronic doors couldn’t be opened for the fire department’s ladder truck.
Bath, the 8,500-resident “City of Ships,” is among the places in Maine facing the greatest risks from increased coastal flooding because so much of it is low-lying. The rising sea level in Bath threatens businesses along Commercial and Washington streets and other parts of the downtown, according to an analysis by Climate Central, a nonprofit science and journalism organization.
Water levels reached their highest in the city during a record-breaking storm in 1978 at a little more than 4 feet over pre-2000 average high tides, and Climate Central’s sea level team found there’s a 1-in-4 chance of a 5-foot flood within 30 years. That level could submerge homes and three miles of road, cutting off communities that live on peninsulas, and inundate sites that manage wastewater and hazardous waste along with several museums.
“That event gives us a picture of what the future of some of these low-lying areas might look like,” Peter Slovinsky, a state marine geologist, said of the 2015 storm. “On top of almost a king tide, plus a bit of storm surge, you ended up with a pretty significant impact.”
A workman walks by an electrical substation in Bath that flooded in 2015, causing a major power outage. The substation is now undergoing work to make it less prone to flooding. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
Flooding is nothing new in Bath, nor around the brackish Kennebec or along Maine’s southern coast, where homes hug the ocean. Crucial tourism and working waterfront areas, including part of Bath’s downtown, sit on land that was once underwater and was filled. But as seas rise and the warming atmosphere fuels more intense storms, the threats that flooding poses to Bath are growing more severe.
Rising sea levels have already diminished property values across New England. Bath has already seen the highest property value losses in Maine caused by rising sea levels between 2005 and 2017, according to the First Street Foundation, a national group focused on flood risk. In all, $69.9 million was lost in Maine among $403 million across the region. Some 17 percent of Bath properties were at risk in 2019, and that could rise 9 percent in 30 years, with more than 8,000 residential properties at substantial risk statewide.
Residents and businesses are noticing increased flooding prompted by more frequent and severe weather events. Local officials are doing much of what they can to brace infrastructure and adapt the city. Solutions can be expensive and hard to fund, such as a levee that would cost millions of dollars and scenic views, leaving Bath at the vanguard of coastal cities in an uphill and ongoing fight to protect remaining land and their economies.
Perhaps nobody knows the threat better than Kristi Nygaard, who has owned the Kennebec Tavern Restaurant & Marina, one of the closest structures to the river, for 25 years. The eatery’s parking lot floods frequently, especially when strong southeast winds and rain come during a full-moon tide.
In 2009, Nygaard built a $1 million seawall. But it is not high enough to fully protect her business because of regulations that prevent it from impeding the river. Flood waters got inside only once, during a June 2012 windstorm that brought 8 inches of rain to Bath over a weekend, she said. No solution, including a concrete pad that elevates the building about 3 feet or scuppers to drain away water, is perfect.
Kristi Nygaard stands on a dock in the marina in front of her restaurant on the Bath waterfront on Wednesday June 24, 2021. The Kennebec Tavern is occasionally affected by rising floodwaters but Nygaard has adapted with a robust seawall and a special drainage system. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
“If we had been able to put the seawall up higher, the water might not come in, but then again, the storm drains on Commercial Street still would flood,” she said. “Nature tries to take back what it had.”
Maine has had catastrophic floods before, including in April 1987, when a storm combined with snowmelt created record flooding in central and southwestern Maine and led to disaster declarations in 14 of Maine’s 16 counties, causing $175 million in damage when adjusted for inflation.
But the likelihood of these types of floods is rising with temperatures. The average annual temperature in Maine has risen 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 124 years, with the six warmest days on record occurring since 1998, according to a 2020 update to a climate report from University of Maine. Gulf of Maine waters are warming faster than almost every other ocean in the world, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As the gulf waters absorb heat, they expand.
An atmospheric change over the last 20 years is contributing to more frequent heavy downpours, Sean Birkel, Maine state climatologist, said.
“With the warming climate, the oceans are warming and fueling more intense storms, and there is more moisture in the atmosphere overall,” Birkel said.
Seas at a federal tide gauge in nearby Portland have risen by about 8 inches during the past century, and several more feet of sea-level rise is likely this century along Maine’s coast. The Maine Climate Council has recommended that communities and state agencies commit to manage 1.5 feet of sea level rise by 2050 and nearly 4 feet by 2100.
It would come at a high cost. State estimates warn the damage from 3.9 feet of sea level rise by 2100 would cost the state well over $1 billion, almost evenly divided between building and gross domestic product losses.
Road closures that prevent access to homes and businesses cause some of the biggest economic hits from storm flooding, Jeremy Porter, the head of research and development at the First Street Foundation, said. Most cars are unable to be driven in 6 inches or more of water. That level could damage floors, carpets, drywall and insulated appliances and pollute groundwater. Rushing flood waters threaten wastewater treatment plants at the waterfront, potentially dumping raw sewage into the ocean or estuary, and can create safety hazards like a non-secured propane tank becoming a projectile in the water.
Floods also expose critical infrastructure. A new Climate Central analysis showed roughly a quarter of the Bath Iron Works site currently faces frequent flood risks, and those risks are projected to spread to affect two-thirds of the site by 2050. The shipyard is Maine’s fourth-largest private employer and one of two U.S. contractors that build Arleigh Burke-class destroyers for the Navy.
An atmospheric change over the last 20 years is contributing to more frequent heavy downpours, Sean Birkel, Maine state climatologist, said.
“With the warming climate, the oceans are warming and fueling more intense storms, and there is more moisture in the atmosphere overall,” Birkel said.
Seas at a federal tide gauge in nearby Portland have risen by about 8 inches during the past century, and several more feet of sea-level rise is likely this century along Maine’s coast. The Maine Climate Council has recommended that communities and state agencies commit to manage 1.5 feet of sea level rise by 2050 and nearly 4 feet by 2100.
It would come at a high cost. State estimates warn the damage from 3.9 feet of sea level rise by 2100 would cost the state well over $1 billion, almost evenly divided between building and gross domestic product losses.
Road closures that prevent access to homes and businesses cause some of the biggest economic hits from storm flooding, Jeremy Porter, the head of research and development at the First Street Foundation, said. Most cars are unable to be driven in 6 inches or more of water. That level could damage floors, carpets, drywall and insulated appliances and pollute groundwater. Rushing flood waters threaten wastewater treatment plants at the waterfront, potentially dumping raw sewage into the ocean or estuary, and can create safety hazards like a non-secured propane tank becoming a projectile in the water.
Floods also expose critical infrastructure. A new Climate Central analysis showed roughly a quarter of the Bath Iron Works site currently faces frequent flood risks, and those risks are projected to spread to affect two-thirds of the site by 2050. The shipyard is Maine’s fourth-largest private employer and one of two U.S. contractors that build Arleigh Burke-class destroyers for the Navy.
The Navy and other parts of the Defense Department have taken notice. Its inspector general’s office plans to conduct an audit this year to determine how the Navy should address environmental threats to shipyards. BIW spokesperson David Hench said the shipyard does not publicly discuss potential impacts to its facility or disclose long-range plans. The Navy did not respond to a request for comment.
Maine’s state, county and municipal governments are ahead of many other states in planning for climate change effects, according to Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy who lives in Portland, who said “other states aren’t even having those conversations.”
In December, the state released a four-year climate plan prepared by the Maine Climate Council. Gov. Janet Mills in June signed a law that would require key departments to mobilize a community resilience strategy and ask cities and towns to add climate strategies to their comprehensive plans.
Slovinsky, the marine geologist, said there are four strategies for adapting to climate change: avoiding building in flood-prone areas, adapting by building a seawall or raising structures on posts, retreating to a less risky area and fortifying critical infrastructure. Understanding vulnerabilities and developing resiliency strategies are good starting points to respond to ongoing sea level rise, he said.
Sagadahoc County is updating its 2016 hazard mitigation plan for the 10 towns and one unorganized territory it covers, including Bath, to include more climate change strategies. The revised plan should be submitted to and approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in December, and then reviewed by local authorities next year, Grainne Shaw, deputy director of the agency, said. The updated plan will identify new mitigation projects for each town, including pump station upgrades and flood-proofing buildings.
For Central Maine Power, the 2015 flood accelerated plans to upgrade the Bath substation, Kevin Therriault, director of substation operations, said. The utility plans to complete a $14.4 million investment this fall that includes elevating the control house containing the substation battery and protective relays by 18 inches and removing underground feeder cables and raising them overhead. The energized conductors and equipment will be 8 feet higher off the surface of the substation.
At the city level, Bath is more fully addressing climate change in its comprehensive plan update due to be completed this fall. It has established a nascent climate action commission to help the city achieve the plan’s recommendations. City planners also collaborated with American Institute of Architects’ experts on a study to use green infrastructure to make downtown Bath more resilient.
The city already is acting on recommendations from the institute’s Design & Resiliency Team study, Benjamin Averill, Bath’s city planner, said. It plans to add a walkway on the northern waterfront, initially envisioned for economic development, that will create a buffer to help avoid business flooding. The city plans to break ground in the next year. More green infrastructure is being examined for where the police station now stands. It has flooded in the past and could do so again, Averill said.
Bath will be one of the communities involved in an emergency drill later this year that will simulate a severe storm as part of an effort from a variety of groups that Eileen Johnson, an environmental studies lecturer at Bowdoin College, is helping to coordinate to prepare for worsening flooding.
“Bath is an important part of the midcoast community,” Johnson said. “It’s within this larger region of coastal towns with long peninsulas that, when access is cut off, it can have implications for the health and well-being of communities.”
What’s the truest form of journalism? “Letting others speak their own truth… Give them their voice. Letting them speak from their heart… It actually conveys a truer sense of what you’re trying to get the audience to hear in a more pure form.” Shapearl Wells speaks from experience. She’s the host and main character for […]
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By John Upton (Climate Central), Amber Alexander
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This segment and story were produced through a partnership between Climate Central and NBC Who13 Des Moines. |
Derek Gruis didn’t miss a day of work because of shutdowns during the pandemic, nor has he feared for his financial future amid the economic tumult it has unleashed. The 29-year-old lead technician at the Beaver Creek Wind Farm manages a team of 15 other wind energy technicians tasked with keeping 170 turbines spinning.
“We’re essentially a power plant so we were considered essential,” said Gruis, who described extensive protocols designed to protect the workers from COVID. He commutes about 45 minutes north from his home just south of Des Moines. “There’s always work needed to get done, so that kind of attests to what the job security is here.”
Despite strong demand for the workers, community colleges in Iowa and in other states without the kind of established energy industries found in Texas are having trouble recruiting enough students to fill the vacancies.
Wind technicians are members of one of the fastest-growing professional fields in the U.S. So, too, are solar installers, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects demand for both to grow at least another 50 percent this decade. While solar and wind installers help construct a project then move onto building a new one, technicians work throughout the life of a wind farm to service and maintain the turbines and sometimes the automated control systems.
As the wind and solar sectors expand, they’re improving air quality and slowing warming caused by pollution from gas and coal power plants. As more electric vehicles drive down streets and highways, the solar and wind energy that provides charges for these vehicles will reduce emissions from cars, buses and trucks. In recent years, transportation has become America’s leading source of heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution.
Of the nearly 500,000 Americans working in jobs that support the generation of renewable energy, including wind and solar, roughly 1,100 work in the cities of Des Moines and West Des Moines, according to the 2021 Clean Jobs, Better Jobs report from E2, a national group of clean energy industry companies and leaders. That represents about a fifth of such jobs across all of Iowa.
“We’ve seen coal plant retirements across the state and wind is picking up the slack,” said Jordan Oster of the Iowa Environment Council, a coalition of groups and individuals within the state focused on environmental quality. “We’re replacing polluting sources of energy with clean, renewable, emissions-free power.”
The Midwest is a hotspot for wind farming, and Iowa is among the states leading in this clean energy boom. Wind industry figures show nearly 6,000 turbines are currently operating across the state. According to an analysis of data gathered by Climate Central’s WeatherPower tool since the start of October, those turbines have been generating more than twice as much power as Iowa’s households alone consumed.
Brian Selinger, a state economic development official who works on energy projects, said Iowa has lots of wind blowing through it and plenty of space on farms for turbines. And he said the state has worked aggressively to support the growth of the wind energy sector, such as through grants and loans to support innovative projects.
“We actively promote and market our wind strengths,” Selinger said, noting that the growing abundance of clean energy is helping convince large tech corporations with ambitious clean energy goals to set up operations in Iowa. “It’s one of our greatest resources and one of our strongest economic development assets. It has a rippling effect across our state.”
President Joe Biden and others have been pushing for an effort to overhaul the nation’s electrical and transportation infrastructure to achieve ‘net-zero’ greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. If that’s successful, Princeton University Net-Zero America project analyses suggest the Hawkeye state could see roughly 70,000 workers directly and indirectly employed by the wind sector within a generation from now.
Such a national effort to reign in heat-trapping pollution would also protect Iowa and its farmers from rising temperatures and worsening floods and droughts.
With a two-year degree from a community college like Gruis attended, he says wind technicians could look forward to eventually earning “upwards of $70,000 to even close to six figures if they just jump into it with both feet and immerse themselves.” The E2 research indicates the average wage throughout the wind energy industry is $26 per hour.
The growth in wind farming in Iowa is providing economic opportunities beyond direct jobs. Farmers receive lease payments from wind farm operators, and those operators also pay local taxes. Wind energy manufacturers have opened new operations in the state, positioning themselves close to customers that purchase what are often heavy and difficult-to-transport components.
“The Midwest is really wind central and Iowa is a good demonstration of the significant direct and induced benefits that come from having a strong wind industry already in place,” said Katie Siegner, a researcher at RMI who co-authored the energy research group’s ‘Seeds of Opportunity’ report, which describes wind and solar energy as ‘new cash crops’ capable of providing more than $200 billion in direct economic benefits across the U.S. this decade. “It’s not just electricity and jobs they’re generating, they’re pumping a substantial amount of revenues into local rural economies.”
For students considering future careers as wind technicians, and for others mulling transitions into the field, Gruis said working at great heights is “going to be a factor” but “you become immune to it very quickly,” in part because of all the safety precautions put in place.
Gruis said an ideal candidate for the field would be “a well-motivated person that likes to work through solutions and work through problems, kind of free thinking and not afraid to get down and break a sweat and work with their hands.”
Demand for graduates of the two-year program for wind technicians at the Des Moines Area Community College, where Gruis did his training after finishing high school, is overwhelmingly strong. Still, instructor James Fitzpatrick says he struggles to fill his classrooms. This year, just nine of 20 available spots were filled by applicants.
“Most of them will be hired well before their graduation,” Fitzpatrick said. “There’s way too many jobs and not enough qualified technicians.”
By Clarisa Diaz, Quartz and John Upton
Towering wind turbines already speckle seas across Europe and Asia and a boom in construction is expected to bring an economic bonanza to the US East Coast. But even this climate-friendly technology could soon evolve into something bigger and better. Almost all the offshore wind turbines operating right now stand atop towers driven into sea beds. As the industry looks to push its turbines into deeper waters, technology is being developed so that wind farming can float.
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This segment and story were produced through a partnership between Quartz and Climate Central. Clarisa Diaz is a multimedia reporter on the Quartz Things team. |
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Floating turbines could be deployed in deeper waters further offshore. There, winds are stronger and more consistent. “You get more energy output when you have these higher wind speeds,” said Stephanie McClellan, an industry consultant and founder of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a Delaware-based project designed to spur offshore wind energy development. Fewer species of birds can be harmed by the spinning blades. The infrastructure would create fewer conflicts with fishermen and other users of the oceans. They can be out of sight from the shore.
Currently, there are three types of floating wind energy structures that serve as a basis for how farms could be built.
SPAR BUOY
Already being commercially used off the coast of Scotland, the Spar Buoy is the most commonly thought of structure for a floating wind turbine. It is anchored by a ballast underneath that keeps the turbine afloat. However the ballast is huge, heavy, and hard to test in water shallower than 100 m. This is because the mooring lines act as shock absorbers against waves, the longer the mooring lines, the better they keep the turbine upright.
TENSION LEG PLATFORM
This structure uses taut mooring lines connected to piles in the seafloor. It creates a very stable platform for the turbine. Though, if one leg loses tension, the whole structure will tip over. Adding additional legs or lines to the design may lower this risk.
SEMI-SUBMERSIBLE
This structure uses the area near the surface to achieve stability. The drawback is it takes up more sea area. Its modular design allows it to be more easily transported from ports in shallower waters.
Experiments for future turbines combine these types into hybrid structures that could be manufactured remotely and installed in fewer parts. For instance, could a Tension Leg Platform be easier to install if it was combined with a Semi-Submersible? A leader in this endeavor is Henrik Stiesdal the former CTO of Siemens. He used tubular steel components to create a kind of Semi-Submersible Spar Buoy. The modular layout allows for most of the turbine to be built off-site and then towed out to sea.
Offshore wind design and technology is still emerging with new kinds of structures. “I think this is going to be more common as we go forward,” said Walter Musial, a principal engineer that leads the offshore wind research platform at NREL. “It’s like a Transformer. You tow it out to the station and then you can drop a ballast weight down and it’s deployed in a stable position at site. But all the assembly and commissioning has already taken place in the harbor.”
Floating turbines would be needed to harvest offshore wind energy from the US West Coast, where the Pacific Ocean drops quickly to a depth that makes fixed-tower turbine technology unfeasible. Same goes for other locations in the nation including Hawaii and the Gulf of Maine.
The only floating wind farm generating meaningful amounts of electricity is Hywind Scotland, developed by Equinor in 2017. The nascent state of the technology means a variety of different construction styles are still being investigated. California and the federal government are soon to offer leases for wind farms at two Pacific Ocean sites where floating turbines would be needed. “We have to get started,” McClellan said “That’s what’s really promising about what’s happening in California. As we start to get these deployed, then we start to learn a lot more.”
By John Upton and Clarisa Diaz
To address global warming the White House has stated that president Biden’s green energy plan aims to set the US on a course toward achieving “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. If achieved, it would mean the country that currently ranks as the world’s worst historical climate polluter would stop adding new climate pollution to the atmosphere. All of the pathways for achieving this goal imagined under Princeton University’s Net Zero America project show enormous ramp-ups of electricity generated from wind turbines during the coming 30 years.
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This segment and story were produced through a partnership between Quartz and Climate Central. Clarisa Diaz is a multimedia reporter on the Quartz Things team. |
The turbines would be clustered on wind farms off the coasts and embedded among agricultural operations. They’ll be far enough from cities to protect urban residents from noise and strobe-like flickering caused by blades’ shadows, but close enough for the power to be economically delivered through electrical transmission lines. A Climate Central analysis of the Net Zero America data suggests that if the net zero goal is achieved, wind farms in Texas, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois could each have more capacity installed by 2050 than the 118 gigawatts of wind capacity currently operational in the US.
A fresh push by developers, newfound federal support for offshore wind energy under president Biden, and long-running efforts by states to drive up green energy production mean the US’s East Coast is poised for a rush of approvals of sweeping arrays of turbines fixed to towers driven into the Atlantic’s floor. Future booms are also possible along the Gulf of Mexico, in the Great Lakes, and off the West Coast. Turbines operating in deep Pacific and Gulf of Maine waters would need to be installed on floating platforms. Some of that technology is being adapted from gas and oil drilling operations, but so far floating deployments have been very limited worldwide.
A boom in offshore wind development has the potential to rejuvenate working waterfronts and ports with green energy jobs. Shipbuilding yards will be needed to manufacture vessels able to install and service the turbines and associated coastal facilities.
Building and maintaining all of the solar farms, wind farms, transmission lines and, other infrastructure needed to reach net zero emissions nationally by 2050 will require a lot of workers, helping to put former employees from fossil fuel and, other fading sectors to work. The Net Zero America data show a continued rise in employment in the solar energy sector. They forecasted the greatest growth of wind energy jobs, however, to begin a decade from now.
Then there are all the maritime jobs, and those needed to operate a sea port.
Maritime workers like vessel operators are necessary to transport crews for turbine and transmission cable repairs.
“Offshore wind is a once-in-a-generation economic opportunity to build a new industry,” said Ross Gould, the supply chain development vice president at the Business Network for Offshore Wind, a group that’s working to identify and help meet the future workforce and supply needs of offshore wind projects in the US. “Currently we’re seeing a boom in project management and project development jobs up and down the East Coast as the projects are beginning to move further along in their studying and assessment work.”
When wind energy generation rose to more than 8% of America’s utility-scale electricity production in 2020, it was more than 50 times higher than production in 2000, US Energy Information Administration data show. Almost all of this development was in rural areas, with much of the power being delivered through transmission lines into nearby metro areas.
The growth is providing new lease and tax revenues for farmers and local governments. It is also bringing job training for a growing army of maintenance workers known as wind energy technicians. The skills are being taught by hundreds of community colleges and other training institutions nationwide. “Our placement is incredible,” said Andrew Swapp, director of the wind energy technology course at Mesalands Community College in New Mexico. “If a person really wants to go to work, they’re going to get a job.”
Offshore wind farming has been booming in Europe for decades and more recently across parts of Asia. The US has been falling behind when it comes to generating wind power at sea. There is just one small offshore wind farm operating on US waters. It’s off the coast of Rhode Island. Industry insiders blame a reluctance by Americans to act on climate change and lack of federal leadership in permitting and pushing for more offshore wind projects.
“We’re a late-comer,” said Chris Wissemann, chief executive of wind energy developer Diamond Offshore Wind, who said the reason has been “literally climate denial.” But oceans are reliably blustery places. Calculations by the nonprofit Environment America indicate that offshore wind farms could provide almost all of the power Americans need by 2050. That means keeping the lights, heaters, and air conditioners on and fueling a nation’s worth of electrified cars, trucks, and transit systems, all from coastal wind farms.
Some years ago, I worked with Blunt Youth Radio in Portland, Maine. It was incredibly rewarding. The young people I spent time with were grateful an adult cared enough to hand them a microphone — especially because they were so curious and had so much to say. I helped students produce a weekly talk show. […]
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By Elisa Raffa, Fox 46 Charlotte and Charles Wohlforth—Climate Central
Three years later, some survivors of Hurricane Florence still aren’t home, but the damage was not evenly distributed. Flooding highlighted disparities, and today the most vulnerable of us continue to be at the highest risk of rising seas that increasingly threaten North Carolina’s coastal region.
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This segment and story were produced through a partnership between Fox46 and Climate Central. Elisa Raffa is a meteorologist with FOX46. Charles Wohlforth is a science writer and author working with Climate Central. |
Maristine Davis, a resident of the Beaufort area, can still see the damage outside her window. She and her husband have been unable to live in their home since Florence hit in September of 2018.
“My heart was overflooded,” Davis said. “I was like, Lord, what am I going to do? The Lord spoke to me and He said, ‘Don’t stress, you will be blessed.’”
For many low-income coastal residents, Florence was a long-term disaster they are still recovering from. For seniors—especially the 13 percent in North Carolina who are also low-income—the impact of flooding is even more challenging, as age adds issues of mobility and security to the hazards from storm.
And experts say these problems are getting worse as hurricanes grow stronger and sea level rises.
Florence tracked from east to west, making landfall just north of Wilmington. It drenched the state over three days with more than 30 inches of rain. The slow speed of the storm exacerbated the flooding and spread it all over the region, turning roads into rivers.
Florence was the wettest tropical storm ever recorded in the Carolinas.
Davis recalls the impact of the flooding after a 13-foot storm surge wiped away homes. The night of the hurricane, she had to stay overnight at the hospital where she works, and reached her husband by telephone.
“I asked him, ‘Did we get any damage? He said, ‘I’ve got to go to the house and check everything out when everything calms down,’” she recalled. “Sure enough, he called and he said, ‘Yep, I think we got it this time.’”
The storm left behind more than $16 billion dollars of damage across North Carolina. Forty-two people died, more than 5,000 were rescued from flood waters, and 74,000 structures were flooded.
Davis, who has lived in Beaufort since the 1970s, said the water had never come so high.
“This was the very first time that we got water, that much water in our house,” she said. “It got in my cabinets, my kitchen cabinets, my bathroom cabinets, everything just was flooded.”
The house has not been habitable since.
Experts say hurricanes hit low-income residents hard because they often lack insurance or financial resources for quick recovery, and because their homes may be less resilient to storms. In North Carolina, being older adds to the vulnerability.
Terri Lewis Lawrence came home after Florence to find six to eight inches of water in the house where she had lived since childhood. Over a long life in North Carolina, it was the first time water had ever come so high.
“It would threaten to almost come in the house a few times, but it never came in, since the house has been built,” she said. “Almost 70 years it had never come in the house.”
Hurricane Florence hit her home hard.
“The floors were just destroyed,” Lawrence said. “When you pulled the carpet up, the hardwood floors under it were buckled. Everything had to be ripped out at that point.”
Climate change has worsened hurricane flooding two ways. Warming ocean waters are spawning more severe storms, and the water itself has risen along North Carolina’s shores—about 9 inches since 1953 in Beaufort, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Climate Central projects it will rise another foot in Wilmington by 2050.
To prevent future flooding, Lawrence and Davis have both added 10 feet of elevation to their homes. That’s a common response to hurricanes and sea-level rise on the Carolina coast, as homeowners lift their foundations above potential waves. But this solution can be difficult for seniors, both because of the cost—around $70,000 for Lawrence’s home—and because the extra stairs make it difficult for elders to get to their front doors.
Lawrence has trouble with her knees and back and couldn’t manage the additional steps after her house was raised. The cost of adding a lift: an additional $10,000 to $30,000.
Beaufort Mayor Rett Newton said Florence recovery remains a major issue more than two years later, especially for older residents like Lawrence.
“We know we have a very senior population but when they get affected by a storm they may not have the capacity to recover,” Newton said. “They’ve got very limited resources, they’ve got very limited mobility.”
Newton said Florence inflicted disproportionate hardship on the poor and seniors—disparities that may have gone unnoticed before the disaster.
“That divide got exposed by Hurricane Florence, it got widened by Hurricane Dorian, and it’s been deepened by the pandemic,” Newton said.
Today, tarps still flap in the breeze, with nearly 500 families still displaced in Cartaret County alone. But while recovery lags for some, advocates also call for plans to keep sea level rise from creating more storm refugees in the future.
Rev. Robbie Phillips, a Presbyterian minister, helps lead the Carterat Long-Term Recovery Alliance, a group was born out of Florence devastation that is still working on disaster relief. She said it may be time for people to move out of threatened areas.
“There’s going to be some people that are going to be mad that I’m going to make this comment, but I’m going to be honest with you. None of these homes in this area should have ever been built here,” Phillips said. “Stop building in these areas, let’s build workforce housing that is in a good safe place.”
Phillips has seen unequal devastation from Florence and wants vulnerable populations protected next time.
“The poor are disproportionately impacted, the elderly, disabled, lower income families, families with children in the homes are going to be more impacted by this than people on the barrier islands,” she said.
The financial threat of climate change and sea level rise can challenge homeowners even when storm winds are not blowing. Rising waters have forced the Federal Emergency Management Agency to revise flood zone maps to account for wetter hurricanes and higher seas, accounting for several feet of higher water. That drives up flood insurance—with reports in North Carolina of premiums doubling, tripling or even quadrupling.
For low-income residents—including seniors—flood-prone land is expensive to insure, but cheap to buy. The low cost lures residents back, but without insurance. For seniors who may own relatively valuable old family homes but do not owe money on mortgages, all of their assets may be tied up in a house that is both at risk and uninsured.
Water is the most severe threat from coastal storms, according to Dr. Rich Luettich, a coastal oceanographer at the University of North Carolina, and one of the nation’s top storm surge experts.
“Water does three things: it causes the most damage, it kills the most people, and it takes the longest to recover from, and yet it’s often times what we ignore,” Luettich said.
And the threat is getting worse, not better.
“There’s no doubt that the last 50 years and the next 50 years will be very different, and climate change is the primary driver of that,” Luettich said. “Water starts to come up inch by inch and feet over decades, then all of a sudden you lost your safety zone, you lost your starting point, so the water is at your doorstep much more quickly.”
In North Carolina, flat, coastal lands allow rising seas to bring storm surges far inland. Eventually, those coastal areas may become too dangerous for homes. Local officials are beginning to take that into account.
“I do not want to have to retreat, but if we don’t reverse the effects of climate change, that’s going to be the option,” Mayor Newton said.
Slashing carbon emissions would slow warming and the rise of the seas, though so much pollution has already built up in the atmosphere that they’re bound to continue to rise. In the meantime, North Carolina residents are adapting to rising sea levels, even as they recover from intensifying storms.
Davis got help with her home and new furniture, steps that are bringing coastal communities a sense of hope.
“I’m ready to get in my house,” she said. “I always say there’s no place like home.”