Climate Point: Biden talks climate crisis while Super Bowl fans gather in a warming city
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment.
I'm Dinah Voyles Pulver, a national climate and environment writer for Paste BN.
The world's warming climate got a nod on a couple of high profile stages this week and will be on a third Sunday, whether football fans realize it or not.
President Joe Biden was just about 26 minutes into his State of the Union on Tuesday when he first brought up climate change.
"Let’s face reality," Biden said. "The climate crisis doesn’t care if your state is red or blue. It is an existential threat."
The president called the Inflation Reduction Act the "most significant investment ever to tackle the climate crisis." He spent roughly two minutes of his 73-minute speech on climate change and conservation.
In opening remarks to the United Nations general assembly on Monday, Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres called for a year of more urgent action on climate change and other global problems. "We must end the merciless, relentless and senseless war on nature," Gutteres said. "Our ocean is choked by pollution, plastic and chemicals and vampiric overconsumption is draining the lifeblood of our planet — water."
And speaking of water, Paste BN writers Elizabeth Weise and Trevor Hughes took a look at the latest news in the 101-year-old fight over water in the critically low Colorado River. The seven Western states that share the flow from the river basin were unable to come to an agreement on how to deal with drought-lowered levels and higher population and demand.
The Department of the Interior gave the states a Jan. 31 deadline to come to an agreement. They didn't, with California making its own proposal that no one else liked. Now the ball is back in Interior's court.
With no water from the Colorado River, some Arizona farmers drill wells, while others sit with dry fields, writes Clara Migoya with the Arizona Republic.
Carbon dioxide is ubiquitous in conversations about global warming, but what is it really? Weise explained how something so simple and so necessary to life can also be harmful.
The Super Bowl kicks off between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadephia Eagles on Sunday in one of the cities that's seen the greatest impacts from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Average temperatures have warmed more in Phoenix than in any other city that has hosted the game, reports Joan Meiners, also with the Arizona Republic.
Recent average temperatures in Arizona's capital city are 5.1 degrees warmer than when the Chiefs played in the very first Super Bowl in January 1967. Given the increase in heat-related sports injuries, sports physiologists worry climate change could affect the future of football and other sports.
Scenic New England isn't escaping the warmer temperatures, with seven states turning in a record warm January. But all that quickly changed when an Arctic blast arrived in February.
In other news, Indiana is seeing a big step on solar and North Carolina researchers won grant to search for resilient sea grass. A coalition of nearly 150 groups vowed this week to put more urgent action toward Biden's challenge for states to help conserve 30% of the nation's lands and waters by 2030, while expanding efforts at inclusion.
See below for more.
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