Breaking Waves: Ocean News

The Idaho camp where Nora Zavala Gallion harvested sugar beets in 1968 felt like a prison because it had been one – for Japanese Americans in the second world war My mother, Nora Zavala Gallion, was 11 years old when she first set foot inside the farm labor camp in Caldwell, Idaho. It was 1968, and her family had traveled over 2,000 miles (3,218km) by car from Texas’s Rio Grande valley to harvest sugar beets as migrant laborers. While my family had worked numerous crops across the country for decades, the girl who would become my mother sensed something very different about this location. The camp’s small, dilapidated wooden living quarters were called “barracks” and featured open, latrine-style bathrooms and showers. Somehow, my mother knew this place had a troubling past. Continue reading...

The Austrian capital has been spared the worst of recent flooding. Its experience could be a lesson in how to tackle the climate crisis Floods are seemingly unavoidable these days. Florida, North Carolina, Nigeria, Tunisia, Mexico, India, Nepal, Vietnam, Poland and Austria are among the places that have experienced flooding in the last month. Those floods should no longer come as much of a surprise. Climate change leads to more frequent and intense rain almost everywhere on the planet, and most infrastructure, from roads and bridges to canals and hydroelectric dams, is simply not built to withstand such extremes. That’s where Vienna stands out. The floods that have deluged central Europe over the past two weeks caused plenty of disruptions in Lower Austria, including to a newly built train station meant to connect the burgeoning suburbs to the city. But aside from some disruption to Vienna’s otherwise well-functioning subway system, Viennese homes were largely spared. Why? It’s not because Vienna sits on higher ground than the surrounding areas (by and large it does not). The reason the city escaped the worst of the floods is because of human engineering and political foresight dating back to the 1960s, which emerged in response to earlier floods that devastated parts of the city. Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. He is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Wiener Klimarat, Vienna’s climate council The caption to the picture in the text of this piece was altered on 2 October; the view is not of Donaustadt as it said previously, but shows the Donauinsel on the right in the River Donau Continue reading...

Excessive heat warnings bring elevated wildfire risk, potential for power outages and rising death toll San Francisco recorded its hottest day of the year on Tuesday, and Phoenix set a record for the hottest 1 October on record, as the National Weather Service predicted record-high fall temperatures across the south-western US. With temperatures hitting 100F (38C) or higher in many places, officials and local media outlets issued warnings that the heat posed “a significant threat to property or life”. Excessive heat warnings were in place across the region, bringing with it warnings about elevated wildfire risk, the potential for sweeping power outages in California and a rising toll of heat-related deaths, a particularly deadly risk for unhoused people and the elderly. Continue reading...

US public sector workers’ retirement savings invested in projects that pump out a billion tonnes of emissions a year Private equity firms are using US public sector workers’ retirement savings to fund fossil fuel projects pumping more than a billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere every year, according to an analysis. They have ploughed more than $1tn (£750bn) into the energy sector since 2010, often buying into old and new fossil fuel projects and, thanks to exemptions from many financial disclosures, operating them outside the public eye, the researchers say. Continue reading...