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Northern Canada, in other words, dried out a lot sooner than usual in 2023, and then—as land temperatures began to soar—it caught on fire. Caught on fire in ways we’ve never seen before: vast fires were raging in every province before long. By the time snow finally put them out in late autumn, those fires had produced several times more carbon than all the cooking and heating and cooling and driving and flying done by all the people in Canada, which is what we call a feedback
For instance, warm air holds more water vapor than cold, which is my nominee for basic physical fact of the century. That means more evaporation—and hence more drought and fire—in dry places. But once that water is up in the atmosphere, it’s going to come down, increasingly in buckets.
At the moment, 40 percent of all ship traffic on earth consists solely of shipping coal and oil and gas back and forth around the world to burn.
the air is too moist to absorb sweat, a person’s internal body temperature will continue to rise. The heart pumps faster and blood vessels expand to move more blood closer to the skin, in order to cool off. At the same time, the brain sends a signal to send less blood to the kidneys to stop losing liquid through urine, which deprives the kidneys of oxygen.
If the ice sheet could melt at a time when global temperatures never got much higher than they are now, it was a worrying harbinger of what ongoing human-caused warming might bring.
According to the Brazilian Earth system scientist Carlos Nobre, if deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent of the original area, the flying rivers will weaken enough that a rainforest simply will not be able to survive in most of the Amazon Basin. Instead it will collapse into scrubby savanna, possibly in a matter of decades.
An electric car requires six times the amount of mineral resources as a gas-powered car, according to the IEA; an onshore wind turbine outstrips a natural gas–fired power plant in mineral inputs by a factor of nine.
More than half of the world’s lithium reserves are concentrated in South America’s “Lithium Triangle”—Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina—and
At seventy-two, Friedland speaks with the meandering cadence of an old hippie, which his biography suggests that he is. In the 1970s, he left Bowdoin College after he and two others were caught with 24,000 tablets of LSD in what was then, according to the New York Times, the “largest ever” seizure of the drug in New England. Later, he ran an apple orchard where Steve Jobs took psychedelics (the experience helped inspire the name “Apple”).
He pointed to the Southern Ute Tribe of southwestern Colorado, which sits atop a rich formation of coal-bed methane. The tribe used these resources to build a three-billion-dollar organization.
Maui was formed by two shield volcanoes about two million years ago, becoming the second-largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, the most remote chain of inhabited islands on earth. Lahaina, which means “cruel sun,” sits on the leeward side of Maui, below the western mountains, Mauna Kaha¯la¯wai, which roughly translates to “house of water.” The highest peak is one of the wettest places in the world, historically receiving about three hundred and sixty-six inches of rain per year.
