#climate
Issues, solutions, and case studies for climate
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Issues 6
#00227Climate change creates hotter, drier and longer wildfire seasons
Rising temperatures and shifting precipitation increase dangerous fire weather, lengthen seasons and expose ecosystems and regions whose preparedness was designed for milder historical conditions.
#00163Computing, and AI in particular, is a large and fast-growing source of electricity demand and carbon emissions
data-centers consumed ~415 TWh in 2024 (~1.5% of global electricity), growing ~12%/year, with AI the primary driver. The IEA projects demand more than doubling to ~945 TWh by 2030. Computing is one of the few sectors where emissions are set to grow, straining grids and climate go
#00065Evaporative cooling collapses in humid air — wet-bulb physics caps it to hot-dry climates
Evaporative cooling cannot lower air below its wet-bulb temperature; the achievable drop equals the wet-bulb depression. In humid heat that gap is small, so the cooling nearly vanishes — confining ceramic coolers to hot-dry climates and weakening them where humid heatwaves bite.
#00042Political reversibility: how to make forest-protection institutions and funding survive a change of government
Brazil's lesson: forest-protection gains are reversible on a political timescale. The same laws and satellites saw an 80 percent cut, a 60 percent surge, then a halving, driven by executive choices that defunded the agency and froze the fund. Institutions hollow out fast.
#00040Forest degradation and fire as under-counted drivers of loss, amplified by drought and climate feedback
As clear-cutting slows, fire and degradation (selective logging, edge thinning) are now dominant drivers of forest loss, often the majority in a year. Metrics counting only over 70 percent canopy loss miss them, so a forest can be hollowed out as drought and heat make it burn.
#00005Vulnerable residents are invisible during extreme-weather events
In heatwaves, cold snaps and outages, isolated elderly, mobility-limited, and medically dependent residents are often invisible to neighbors and services — so danger is found only after a missed check-in, while privacy concerns make a naive registry its own hazard.
Solutions 4
#00331Use climate-adapted diverse restoration where recovery needs help
Restore sites that are not recovering with diverse, locally appropriate species and structures suited to plausible future climate and fire regimes.
#00257Adapt forests and landscapes to expected future conditions
Adjust species, structure, management and connectivity to reduce climate-driven mortality and extreme fire while preserving ecological function.
#00256Use future climate scenarios in wildfire planning
Plan land management, staffing, infrastructure and evacuation against plausible future fire weather instead of relying only on historical seasons and maps.
#00255Rapidly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions
Cut global greenhouse-gas emissions rapidly to limit the long-term worsening of extreme fire weather that local adaptation cannot fully offset.