Members of the Balch Springs Fire Department bring a family of four by boat to higher ground after rescuing them from their home along Forest Glen Lane in Balch Springs, Texas, on Monday, Aug. 22, 2022. This scene represents many neighborhoods of people affected by the 15 inch rains in Texas.
“You should have come before all this and seen how nice my house was,” said Garcia, 34, who owns a remodeling business. The mud line was 2 feet off the ground, nearly even with a rotting stack of stuffed animals, carpet and clothing on the driveway. A pair of creeks meet nearby and Garcia knew his family lived in a floodplain. But until Aug. 22, the worst the house had endured in a half-century was 4 inches of seepage.
“The climate’s changed,” Garcia said, idly scratching his back with the hammer he’d been using for demolition. “My grandpa said every 100 years it rains a lot. I don’t know if that’s true anymore. The weather is never going to be the same.”
That’s pretty much what climate scientists say. Extreme weather is coming more often and with greater intensity, and it wouldn’t be this way if not for Climate Change.
But some Texas politicians don’t buy it, to the dismay of those feeling the brunt — like those in Balch Springs, where floods came just a month after a rare suburban wildfire that caught national attention.
Researchers Hit With Lawsuits, Records Requests for Fact-Checking Climate Claims
You might think scientists who are trying to save our planet from Climate Change face only one enemy, Climate Deniers, in their quest to extend and improve life on Earth. But you would be wrong. They now face another aggressive fight from a number of adversaries.
“Researchers say the demands, some from groups with fossil fuel ties, attempt to muzzle their voices. A loose coalition of conspiracy theorists, libertarians and conservative groups—some with fossil-fuel ties—have gone after those who have provided fact-checks used to counter misleading claims circulating on sites such as Facebook and TikTok”.
The climate effects of the Inflation Reduction Act
Under the Biden Administration and the help of Congress, America is taking its biggest step in combating Climate Change. What will this bill do for climate and where does it fit into global efforts?
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is the most aggressive climate investment Congress has ever made. According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the bill is projected to cut the social costs of climate change by up to $1.9 trillion by 2050. The social cost is the estimation of economic costs associated with carbon pollution. The IRA puts America on track to decrease greenhouse gas emissions about 40 percent below 2005 levels in 2030. The bill also aims to tackle environmental justice issues by improving climate resilience, making clean energy more accessible especially in low-income and native communities, and improving and expanding clean transit options.
Building off its predecessor, the Earth4All model, researchers explore what it would take to increase the wellbeing of humanity the rest of this century.
Back in 1972, 50 years ago, MIT scientists studied and predicted the effects of “growth consumption”. Now cross-discipline researches are revisiting this Earth4All model in hopes to improve humanities efforts to improve Climate Change. “Tackling inequality is key to securing the public support needed to overhaul the global economy and reverse climate change, an update to the landmark 50-year-old computer simulation of environmental stress has found. Based on modelling by MIT scientists of a world destabilised by growing consumption.