Climate change

NY Times -   After enduring a weeklong heat wave with no air-conditioning and little ventilation, the principal said her elementary school had come to feel like a “pressure cooker.”

The temperatures inside the 19th century school building in Paris rose above 86 degrees Fahrenheit, or 30 degrees Celsius. A sports day was canceled. Some staff reported headaches. Kids seemed irritable. In the second-grade class, two children fell asleep at their desks at 1:30 p.m...

...Until relatively recently many of Europe’s schools — unlike hospitals or nursing homes — had been somewhat insulated from the risks of extreme temperatures, if only because school was out by the time the summer heat arrived. But because of climate change, that is no longer necessarily the case; it’s getting hot sooner in the year.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures rising by about 1 degree Fahrenheit per decade since the 1990s. This is in part because of changing weather patterns, as well as its proximity to the Arctic, where melting snow and ice lead to more dark surfaces that absorb heat.

Traditionally in Europe, schools were built to withstand cold, not heat, and air-conditioning was rarely necessary. But now the temperature extremes once associated with summer vacation are pushing into the academic year, creating stifling conditions and leading to criticism that Europe’s schools have been slow to contend with the shifting patterns of climate change.

Inside Climate News -   The shoreline of Louisiana has never been still or fixed, though recent generations have treated it as such.  Since the last ice age roughly 20,000 years ago, around when people arrived in what is now the United States, sea levels have repeatedly reshaped aspects of the Gulf Coast. But today, human-caused warming is accelerating that ancient process, pushing Louisiana’s dynamic shoreline into conflict with cities, roads, ports and levees built to contain and stabilize nature.

A new study in Nature Sustainability argues that this history is a guide to what comes next. Coastal Louisiana, the authors write, is ground zero for coastal climate adaptation: a place where rising seas and sinking land are already reshaping where people live, and where planning for movement could offer more agency than crisis-driven displacement.