Climate Change

Every year, VoLo Foundation’s Climate Correction Conference gets somewhat glitzier, its speakers a bit more prestigious, the event a little better attended. One day of main events has become three. Longer presentations have been tightened to fit everyone onto the schedule. More chairs and more tables are brought out because the conference has grown from 200 people last year to 250 this year. The theme this year centered around the notion that the environment has already engineered answers to the climate challenges facing the planet.

A Senate committee on 5-3 party-line vote approved a Republican measure Tuesday that would severely restrict cities and other local governments from adopting policies to fight climate change, over the objections of Democrats and environmentalists.

Several dozen people were arrested Saturday at the Everglades detention facility in Miami-Dade County. Members of the Sunrise Movement organization, which promotes action on climate change issues, were protesting at the detention center on Saturday afternoon.

The Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation and Players Circle Theater are once again teaming up to bring Southwest Florida into a world-wide festival of short plays called Climate Change Theatre Action. The festival, which coincides with the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference, aims to use theater as a tool to translate the climate crisis into personal, emotional and collective stories. We take deeper dive into the initiative in a conversation with Players Circle Theater’s Carrie Lund Cacioppo and Jenny Evans and Matt DePaolis with the SCCF.

The resiliency being discussed all week is measured by the preparedness of Florida’s communities to face the environmental calamities that come with climate change

Hurricane tracking has been around for roughly 100 years. But is there a way to check the weather patterns in Florida from thousands of years ago.

When it comes to the ways global climate change impacts the world’s oceans things like melting ice caps and glaciers, and what’s called thermal expansion — that’s when water takes up more volume as its temperature goes up — are probably what first come to mind. Or how increased water temperatures impact sea life, like recent, widespread coral bleaching events off Florida’s coast and around the world. Or even how changes in temperature and salinity can alter ocean currents, which are crucial for regulating global climate and weather patterns. But, an overlooked aspect of this story is how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the acidity — or the pH level — of the world’s oceans.

A severe storm swept across the central U.S. overnight on May 16, bringing tornadoes to a region that has already been ravaged by them this spring. At least 27 people in Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia have died, dozens more have been injured, and thousands of buildings have been damaged or destroyed.It’s one of the most devastating storms to hit the region this tornado season, and more are likely to come. But as summer — which tends to be disaster season — approaches, meteorologists are raising the alarm over a growing crisis: It’s getting harder to predict the weather, and the reasons are largely political.

It’s a surge in dryness throughout the area. All of Southwest Florida is under serious drought conditions, while three counties have entered severe warning.

Manatees in the Indian River Lagoon and other places around Florida are starving to death due to pollution killing seagrass meadows