Global warming isn’t the only reason the West is burning. The growing number of people in the woods has increased the likelihood of human-caused ignitions, while more than a century of aggressive fire suppression has contributed to the fires’ severity. In addition, unchecked development in fire-prone areas has resulted in greater loss of life and property.

Yet, it’s impossible to deny the role a warming planet plays in today’s blazes. “Something’s happening to the plumbing of the world,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said.

You only have to step outside for a moment and feel the scorching heat, witness the dwindling streams, and choke on the omnipresent smoke to know that something’s way off-kilter, climate-wise.

1. Lewistown, Montana, (70 degrees Fahrenheit) and Klamath Falls, Oregon, (65 degrees) set high-temperature records for the month of February.

2. California had its driest February on record.

3. In April, parts of southern Arizona and California saw the mercury climb past 100 degrees Fahrenheit for multiple days in a row, shattering records.

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“Innovation” is a fraught concept in climate politics. For years, it was used as a kind of fig leaf to cover for delaying tactics, as though climate progress must wait on some kind of technological breakthrough or miracle. That left climate advocates with an enduring suspicion toward the notion, and hostility toward those championing it.

Lately, though, that has changed. Among people serious about the climate crisis, it is now widely acknowledged that hitting the world’s ambitious emissions targets will require decreasing resource consumption, aggressively deploying existing technologies, and an equally aggressive push to improve those technologies and develop nascent ones.

There is legitimate disagreement about the ratio — about how far and how fast existing, mature technologies can go — but there is virtually no analyst who thinks the current energy innovation system in the US is adequate to decarbonize the country by midcentury. It needs reform.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) concludes that “roughly half of the reductions that the world needs to swiftly achieve net-zero emissions in the coming decades must come from technologies that have not yet reached the market today.” There are reasons to think this might be an overly gloomy assessment, but whether it’s 20 percent or 50 percent, aggressive innovation will be required to pull it off.

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Imagine a green future for a hot second. The United States and the rest of the world have taken substantive action to slow (and even reverse) climate change. Crisis averted. You’re probably envisioning a lot of the following: snazzy yet affordable electric cars, smog-free city skylines, and an electrical grid powered by sweet, sweet, renewable energy.

Well, you likely already realize that the nation is nowhere near approaching that eco-friendly dreamscape.

In fact, the U.S. is currently on a path away from that green dream. Emissions have been on the rise again after years of incremental dips — slowed this year only because of a deadly pandemic. And the nation’s most vulnerable communities are routinely forced to reckon with environmental contaminants, extreme weather, and industrial pollution.

If a couple of intrepid aliens dropped by to observe a Congressional hearing on climate change, knowing that humanity’s survival hinged on finding a solution to rising temperatures, they would hurry back to their home planet under the impression that Earth was doomed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. That green dream could be a reality — and for the most part, we know what we need to do to bring it to life.

Below, you’ll learn about eight tools lawmakers could leverage to make America great on climate change. These are interventions that already exist, and concern everything from your home to your local transportation system.

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These new fiction releases are oddly compatible tales of gritty heroines on long-haul journeys in a natural world on the brink of destruction. Where these bleak stories diverge is on the matter of redemption.

Each book places the relationship between humans and earth at its center, with different takes on just how screwed we are—in one, healthy wilderness is the last safe place to live; in another, we’ve almost totally destroyed it; in the third, it’s just becoming clear that nature is in danger.

You won’t find a totally happy ending in the bunch, but rather three different messages about how we let the destruction of the environment get this bad, the sacrifices required to turn things around, and the consequences of not doing enough.

Each story brings a naturalist’s eye to the Anthropocene; all together they provide a compelling, apocalyptic, and occasionally hopeful reflection on everything we stand to lose.

‘The New Wilderness,’ by Diane Cook

In this novel, Cook’s first, things are looking pretty bad in civilization—though we never see it, we just hear about its polluted and overpopulated state from people who have been allowed to escape. The novel is told from the perspectives of former home designer Bea and her young daughter, Agnes, who are among the few selected to live an experimentally nomadic life in one of the world’s last natural places, known as the Wilderness State.

‘Ruthie Fear,’ by Maxim Loskutoff

This novel sometimes veers into the realm of magical realism: Ruthie has a vision of a flying, skeleton-like creature while out hunting with her dad, while Rutherford tells his daughter stories of elk the size of school buses. “You hunt them with rocket launchers,” he says. “If you miss, they’ll skewer you on their antlers and toss you out into space.”

‘Migrations,’ by Charlotte McConaghy

The heroine, Franny Stone, lives in a world that seems just like our own. Except in this novel, it’s almost all of the animals—monkeys, apes, big cats, bears, and wolves—that are becoming extinct. Franny talks her way onto the ship Saghani and heads south, along with a colorful crew and a troubled captain, both parties in search of their own rare animal.

Complete reviews here…

On New Year’s Day in 2018, Paul Kehmeier and his father drove up Grand Mesa until they got to the county line, 10,000 feet above sea level. Instead of the three to five feet of snow that should have been on the ground, there wasn’t enough of a dusting to even cover the grass.

The men marveled at the sight, and Kehmeier snapped a photo of his dad, “standing on the bare pavement, next to bare ground.”

Here, on Colorado’s Western Slope, no snow means no snowpack. And no snowpack means no water in an area that’s so dry it’s lucky to get 10 inches of rain a year. A few months after taking the photo, Kehmeier stared across the land his family had tilled for four generations and made a harsh calculation: He could make more money selling his ranch’s water than working his land.

“In all my years of farming in the area, going back to about 1950, 2018 was the toughest, driest year I can remember,” said Paul’s father, Norman, who still does a fair share of the farm’s tractor work at 94.

This cluster of counties on Colorado’s Western Slope — along with three counties just across the border in eastern Utah — has warmed more than 2 degrees Celsius, double the global average. Spanning more than 30,000 square miles, it is the largest 2C hot spot in the Lower 48.

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Homes have been evacuated in Courmayeur in Italy’s Aosta valley, after a renewed warning that a huge portion of a Mont Blanc glacier is at risk of collapse.

The measures were introduced after experts from the Fondazione Montagne Sicura (Safe Mountains Foundation) said 500,000 cubic metres of ice was in danger of sliding off the Planpincieux glacier on the Grandes Jorasses park.

Glaciologists monitoring Planpincieux say a new section of ice is at risk of collapse. Homes were also evacuated in September last year following a warning that 250,000 cubic meters of ice could fall. The movement of the glacial mass was due to “anomalous temperature trends”, the experts said… scientific speak for climate change.

The glacier has been closely monitored since 2013 to detect the speed at which the ice is melting.

In August 2018, a heavy storm unleashed a debris flow, killing an elderly couple when their car was swept from the road that is currently closed.

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After 11 months of stakeholder engagement and collaborative work, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality has submitted the N.C. Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan to Gov. Roy Cooper.

The plan was required by Cooper’s Executive Order 80 and is the state’s most comprehensive effort to date. Based on science and stakeholder input, it aims to address North Carolina’s vulnerability to climate change.

“Climate change impacts the health, safety and financial stability of North Carolinians, and we must take it head-on. A resilient North Carolina is a stronger and more competitive North Carolina,” said Cooper.

This plan is a framework to guide state action, engage policy-makers and stakeholders, facilitate collaboration across the state, focus the state’s attention on climate resilience actions and address underlying stressors such as the changing climate, aging infrastructure, socio-economic disparities and competing development priorities.

The plan includes information on projected change in the climate, climate justice impacts, state infrastructure, assets, programs and services that are vulnerable to climate and non-climate stressors, current actions and recommendations for nature-based solutions to enhance ecosystem resiliency and sequester carbon.

The plan is available at www.deq.nc.gov/ncresilienceplan.

Photosynthesis and Antarctica. It may not be the most intuitive combination, but the icy continent — famous for sculptural icebergs and marching penguins — is also home to communities of blooming algae, mosses, lichens, and even one species of grass.

They’re rare, of course: Less than one percent of the entire continent is permanently ice-free to begin with. And what terrestrial vegetation does exist must rely largely on melting snow and ice for its water supply.

It’s all part of a fragile ecosystem that scientists are eager to understand as global temperatures rise, affecting not only large sheets of Antarctic ice but also the delicate balance of life there.

A team of U.K. scientists recently created the first-ever large-scale map and estimate of the extent of green algae on the Antarctic Peninsula — a mountainous extension that stretches more than 800 miles toward South America and has experienced one of the most rapid rates of warming in the world.

The study results show that the “green snow” is a significant carbon sink for the continent, absorbing approximately 479 tons of carbon a year through photosynthesis.

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Federal courts have delivered a string of rebukes to the Trump administration over what they found were failures to protect the environment and address climate change as it promotes fossil fuel interests and the extraction of natural resources from public lands.

Judges have ruled administration officials ignored or downplayed potential environmental damage in lawsuits over oil and gas leases, coal mining and pipelines to transport fuels across the U.S., according to an Associated Press review of more than a dozen major environmental cases.

The latest ruling against the administration came last week when an appeals court refused to revive a permitting program for oil and gas pipelines that a lower court had cancelled.

Actions taken by the courts have ranged from orders for more environmental analysis to the unprecedented cancellation of oil and gas leases across hundreds of thousands of acres in Western states.

Many of the decisions the Trump administration has been making are arguably illegal and in some cases blatantly so.

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Pedestrians have taken over city streets, people have almost entirely stopped flying, skies are blue for the first time in decades, and global CO2 emissions are on-track to drop by … about 5.5 percent.

Wait, what? Even with the global economy at a near-standstill, the best analysis suggests that the world is still on track to release 95 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted in a typical year, continuing to heat up the planet and driving climate change even as we’re stuck at home.

A 5.5-percent drop in carbon dioxide emissions would still be the largest yearly change on record, beating out the financial crisis of 2008 and World War II. But it’s worth wondering: Where do all of those emissions come from? And if stopping most travel and transport isn’t enough to slow down climate change, what will be?

Transportation makes up a little over 20 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. Electricity and heating combined account for over 40 percent of global emissions. Many people around the world rely on wood, coal, and natural gas to keep their homes warm and cook their food — and in most places, electricity still isn’t particularly green. Even with a bigger proportion of the world working from home, people still need the grid to keep the lights on and connect to the internet.

Manufacturing, construction, and other types of industry account for approximately 20 percent of CO2 emissions. Certain industrial processes like steel production and aluminum smelting use huge amounts of fossil fuels.

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