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Daily Archives: April 17, 2024

The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What”

ProPublica – The complex, contradictory and heartbreaking process of American climate migration is underway –  “This article is an excerpt from the book “On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America,” about climate migration in the U.S. For more, see abrahm.com. “Another great American migration is now underway, this time forced by the warming that is altering how and where people can live. For now, it’s just a trickle. But in the corners of the country’s most vulnerable landscapes — on the shores of its sinking bayous and on the eroding bluffs of its coastal defenses — populations are already in disarray…People have always moved as their environment has changed. But today, the climate is warming faster, and the population is larger, than at any point in history. As the U.S. gets hotter, its coastal waters rise higher, its wildfires burn larger and its droughts last longer, the notion that humankind can triumph over nature is fading, and with it, slowly, goes the belief that self-determination and personal preference can be the driving factors in choosing where to live. Scientific modeling of these pressures suggest a sweeping change is coming in the shape and location of communities across America, a change that promises to transform the country’s politics, culture and economy. It has already begun. More Americans are displaced by catastrophic climate-change-driven storms and floods and fires every year. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the global nongovernmental organization researchers rely on to measure the number of people forcibly cast out of their homes by natural disasters, counted very few displaced Americans in 2009, 2010 and 2011, years in which few natural disasters struck the United States. But by 2016 the numbers had begun to surge, with between 1 million and 1.7 million newly displaced people annually. The disasters and heat waves each year have become legion. But the statistics show the human side of what has appeared to be a turning point in both the severity and frequency of wildfires and hurricanes. As the number of displaced people continues to grow, an ever-larger portion of those affected will make their moves permanent, migrating to safer ground or supportive communities. They will do so either because a singular disaster like the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California — or Hurricane Harvey, which struck the Texas and Louisiana coasts — is so destructive it forces them to, or because the subtler “slow onset” change in their surroundings gradually grows so intolerable, uncomfortable or inconvenient that they make the decision to leave, proactively, by choice. In a 2021 study published in the journal Climatic Change, researchers found that 57% of the Americans they surveyed believed that changes in their climate would push them to consider a move sometime in the next decade…”

Follow Podcasts and Music feeds on the Fediverse

Podcast AP: “PodcastAP uses the PodcastIndex.org API, the Mastodon API and a user’s subscription feeds imported via OPML to follow Podcast, Music and other feeds on the Fediverse. The feeds are bridged from the XML feed to the Podcast Index database to the Podcast Index Activity Pub bridge (ap.podcastindex.org). When a user logs in using… Continue Reading

Where our food crops come from

‘Explore the geographic origins of our food crops – where they were initially domesticated and evolved over time – and discover how important these “primary regions of diversity” are to our current diets and agricultural production areas.” Read more about the study → The interactive crop map displays the native origins and primary regions of… Continue Reading

OpenAI GPTs: Creating Your Own Custom AI Assistants

Open Culture: “Last fall, OpenAI started letting users create custom versions of ChatGPT–ones that would let people create AI assistants to complete tasks in their personal or professional lives. In the months that followed, some users created AI apps that could generate recipes and meals. Others developed GPTs to create logos for their businesses. You… Continue Reading

UK online safety regulator research to guide our online safety work

“Today we’re publishing our online safety research agenda, which sets out the areas of research that will help to inform and underpin our long-term work as the UK’s online safety regulator. As an evidence-based regulator, we use research and data to guide our activity across our various workstreams. This is no different for our online… Continue Reading

Unregulated water contaminants

Via Data is Plural: “Through the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, the Environmental Protection Agency “collect[s] data for contaminants that are suspected to be present in drinking water and do not have health-based standards set under the Safe Drinking Water Act.” The current version of the rule requires public water systems to test for lithium and… Continue Reading

Child Opportunity Score for 100 largest US metros

Axios: “Metro areas across the South and Southwest, with few exceptions, offer worse conditions for children to grow up healthy and become successful adults, according to data from researchers at Brandeis University. Why it matters: The Child Opportunity Index seeks to quantify childhood opportunity based on education, health care and the environment, Axios’ Alex Fitzpatrick,… Continue Reading

Climate crisis: average world incomes to drop by nearly a fifth by 2050

The Guardian: “Average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years as a result of the climate crisis, according to a study that predicts the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C. Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense… Continue Reading