Climate Headlines | November 21st
‘Maybe It Will Destroy Everything’: Pakistan’s Melting Glaciers Cause Alarm
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‘Maybe It Will Destroy Everything’: Pakistan’s Melting Glaciers Cause Alarm
Diaa Hadid, NPR (Tweet)
For generations, farmers in the Harchi Valley in Pakistan's highlands enjoyed a close relationship with their glacier that snakes between two mountain peaks. It watered their fields, orchards and grazing lands.
Following local tradition, it has a name — Ultar — and a gender — male, because it is black, owing to the debris that covers it (female glaciers are white, residents say).
Now, their relationship is unraveling as pollution and global warming cause the Ultar glacier to melt and form unstable lakes that could burst their icy banks at any moment. Already this summer, much of Harchi's lands were destroyed in glacial floods.
A Wet Year Causes Farm Woes Far Beyond the Floodplains
By John Schwartz, New York Times (Tweet)
It was the wettest year on record for the lower 48 states, with the kind of extreme rainfall events that are increasingly associated with climate change. And then fall came in with unseasonably heavy rains and snow. That was the case for Aaron Heley Lehman, a farmer in central Iowa and president of the Iowa Farmer’s Union. “This has definitely been a bad year for almost all farmers in Iowa, even if you weren’t on river bottom ground and having your grain bins explode and your land underwater for weeks and weeks at a time,” he said. “It was still a very rough year.”
Climate change gets a single question at the fifth Democratic debate
Zoya Teirstein, Grist (Tweet)
Moderators from MSNBC and the Washington Post opened the night with a question about impeachment. Healthcare and the economy also dominated the conversation (no surprise there). About halfway through the night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked the debate’s only question about rising temperatures. Many viewers care deeply about climate change, she said, then Maddow offered up a question from a viewer in Minnesota: What do candidates plan to do about it, and how do they aim to drum up bipartisan support for their plan?
The question went to a frontrunner, naturally. Just kidding. Representative Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii got first dibs.
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