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The world’s largest museum complex is struggling to fend for itself against the effects of climate change – a warning to even the best experts and organizations with deep pockets of the challenge of adapting to warming.
In a document released this fall, the Smithsonian Institution warned that increased flooding on the two-mile-long National Mall in the heart of Washington, home to many of its museums, threatens to outpace the Smithsonian’s ability to defend those museums and theirs. priceless content
The Smithsonian executives decided to take me and Erin Schaff, a New York Times photographer, on a tour beneath the National Museum of American History, its most flooded building. We saw a warehouse full of centuries-old porcelain, with a tarp and trash can placed in the corner to catch the water coming from the ceiling. Rainwater also comes from first-floor windows, air ducts, and even sprays upwards from the floor.
Museum workers are experimenting with a number of defenses, including flood barriers outside windows and under doors, electronic water alarms throughout the building, and buckets filled with an absorbent cat litter that can be hastily sent to a flood area. Longer-term solutions, such as flood covers around the building and moving items to a new storage facility in suburban Maryland, are years away. You can do read my article here.
quotation: “We’re tracking the rain in a way you wouldn’t believe,” said Nancy Bechtol, Smithsonian’s facility manager. “We’re constantly monitoring these weather forecasts to know if we have any upcoming weather.”
Trying to fix abuses in the electric car industry
The mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are booming. The country produces about two-thirds of the world’s cobalt, and cobalt is vital for batteries in electric vehicles.
But Congo also has a problem: its reputation for tolerating dangerous, makeshift mining operations in which unskilled and poorly equipped workers, including children, are exploited, injured and killed.
Some leaders in Congo want to clean up the industry. However, according to Congolese and American officials, the man who took responsibility for the effort, Albert Yuma Mulimbi, head of the state mining enterprise, is a problem. They accuse him of abusing his position to enrich his friends, family members and political allies. Mr. Yuma denies any wrongdoing and is conducting elaborate lobbying campaigns to clear his name in Washington and the Congo capital, Kinshasa.
Will Mr. Yuma help the country take the global green wave into a new era of prosperity, or will it help doom it to more strife and turmoil? You can do read our investigation This is the third in a series of articles I’ve written with my Times colleague Eric Lipton on Mr. Yuma’s relationships. And please check the first two installments:
Episode 1 How Congo’s vast cobalt reserves a central role in the electric vehicle revolution.
part 2 Despite decades of US diplomatic efforts, China dominates cobalt mining in Congo.
A Home Office report is mostly silent on climate
A Department of the Interior report recommended that the federal government increase the fees oil and gas companies pay for drilling on public land.
But the report was almost silent on the climate impacts from drilling on public lands. The United States Geological Survey estimates that drilling on public lands and federal waters is responsible for nearly a quarter of the planet-warming greenhouse gases produced by the United States.
Aspect I reported with NYT climate team colleague Lisa FriedmanThe silence has angered some environmentalists, who want the federal government to consider the climate impacts of drilling when considering new lease applications. This would be a step towards ending new oil and gas drilling on public lands, as President Biden promised during his campaign.
Back story: If royalty rates for drilling rise, it will be the first increase since 1920.
Also important this week:
And finally:
Some very monogamous couples feel the heat
It may take many years for albatross to find one. But once they do, it almost always holds up. Giant seabirds are among the most monogamous creatures on the planet.
Typically, albatross pairs break up only if they are unable to successfully raise a chick. (For bleak men who rarely break up, breakups often portend a lifetime of celibacy.) But now, researchers say some albatross breakups may be linked to climate change.
According to a 15-year study of 15,500 pairs of black-browed albatrosses in the Falkland Islands, the separation rate among birds increases from an average of 4 percent to 8 percent during the warmest years of the sea. .
Francesco Ventura, a Ph.D. Conservation biology student at the University of Lisbon and lead author of a recent paper on the survey told me in an interview: my article for this week albatross divorce Researchers already knew that reproductive failures were more common in years when the water was warmer. Still, that alone doesn’t fully explain the increase in breakups. “We’re still seeing something unexplainable happen,” he said.
One possible explanation may be that females stressed out by an unusually warm environment misunderstand their unlucky male partner as the source of the stress and decide they would be better off without them.
For now, the Falkland albatross population in the study is thriving. While divisions are more common than before, the birds’ overall reproductive abilities seem mostly unhindered. But Ventura said the results show us how little we know about the potential for climate change to wreak havoc in unexpected places.
“We thought very arrogantly that we could measure anything, we understand everything, we know everything,” he said. “Actually, that’s not true.”
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