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“We’re asking everyone to take it slow, avoid driving through standing water, and use alternate routes when possible,” Rosenlund urged.
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Rainfall in Grand Island began Wednesday afternoon but the intensity picked up quickly after dark, falling at more than an inch per hour at times.
A total of 6.41 inches of rain fell by midnight, which made it the rainiest June day and the second rainiest day of any month in the city’s 130-year history of weather records.
The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency — the most severe form of flood warning — at 11:45 p.m. CDT Wednesday for Grand Island that continued for several hours into Thursday morning, continuously warning of “extensive flash flooding.”
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Multiple rounds of heavy storms tracked over the area late Wednesday into early Thursday morning and ultimately dumped record amounts of rainfall. A level 2-of-4 risk of flooding rainfall was in place for Grand Island at the time, according to the Weather Prediction Center.
More than a month’s worth of rain – nearly 4.5 inches – fell in only three hours between 10 p.m. CDT Wednesday and 1 a.m. CDT Thursday. Rainfall of this intensity would only be expected around once in 100 years, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.
Climate change is making heavy rainfall events heavier. As the world warms due to fossil fuel pollution, a warmer atmosphere is able to soak up more moisture like a sponge, only to wring it out in heavier bursts of rain.
Hourly rainfall rates have intensified in nearly 90% of large US cities since 1970, a recent study found.
“Generally, if people were more informed about the average
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(environmental) cost of generating a response, people would maybe start thinking, ‘Is it really necessary to turn myself into an action figure just because I’m bored?’ Or ‘do I have to tell ChatGPT jokes because I have nothing to do?’” Dauner said.
Additionally, as more companies push to add generative AI tools to their systems, people may not have much choice how or when they use the technology, Luccioni said.
“We don’t need generative AI in web search. Nobody asked for AI chatbots in (messaging apps) or on social media,” Luccioni said. “This race to stuff them into every single existing technology is truly infuriating, since it comes with real consequences to our planet.”
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With less available information about AI’s resource usage, consumers have less choice, Ren said, adding that regulatory pressures for more transparency are unlikely to the United States anytime soon. Instead, the best hope for more energy-efficient AI may lie in the cost efficacy of using less energy.
“Overall, I’m still positive about (the future). There are many software engineers working hard to improve resource efficiency,” Ren said. “Other industries consume a lot of energy too, but it’s not a reason to suggest AI’s environmental impact is not a problem. We should definitely pay attention.”
Sign up for CNN’s Life, But Greener newsletter. Our limited newsletter series guides you on how to minimize your personal role in the climate crisis — and reduce your eco-anxiety.
‘Extraordinary rainstorm’ floods Nebraska city, triggers water rescues
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An entire June’s worth of rain fell in just a few hours over Grand Island, Nebraska, Wednesday night, triggering life-threatening flash flooding that inundated neighborhoods, stranded motorists and forced water rescues.
Crews have responded to dozens of calls to assist motorists stuck in flooded roads since torrential rain began Wednesday night, according to Spencer Schubert, the city’s communications manager. The flooding has also displaced an unspecified number of residents from their homes.
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“At this time we have no injuries to report,” Schubert said early Thursday morning, noting some rescues were ongoing.
Torrential rain caused sewers to back up into several homes and sent floodwater running into basements, according to a Thursday news release from the city. Some affected residents took shelter at local hotels or with friends and family.
“This was an extraordinary rainstorm and is very similar to the historic rains seen in the 2005 floods,” Jon Rosenlund, the city’s emergency director said. “We will be actively monitoring rivers, creeks and other drainage areas over the next few days for future flooding issues.”
Flooding in 2005 turned streets into rivers in Grand Island. At one point, the city tore up a major road to open up a channel to drain flooding away from homes, CNN affiliate KHGI reported.
The central Nebraskan city is home to around 53,000 people and is about 130 miles southwest of Omaha. The rain came to an end around sunrise Thursday, but the danger remains, with a flood warning in effect until 7 p.m. CDT.
‘Like wildfires underwater’: Worst summer on record for Great Barrier Reef as coral die-off sweeps planet
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Great Barrier Reef, Australia
CNN
—
As the early-morning sun rises over the Great Barrier Reef, its light pierces the turquoise waters of a shallow lagoon, bringing more than a dozen turtles to life.
These waters that surround Lady Elliot Island, off the eastern coast of Australia, provide some of the most spectacular snorkeling in the world — but they are also on the front line of the climate crisis, as one of the first places to suffer a mass coral bleaching event that has now spread across the world.
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The Great Barrier Reef just experienced its worst summer on record, and the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced last month that the world is undergoing a rare global mass coral bleaching event — the fourth since the late 1990s — impacting at least 53 countries.
The corals are casualties of surging global temperatures which have smashed historical records in the past year — caused mainly by fossil fuels driving up carbon emissions and accelerated by the El Nino weather pattern, which heats ocean temperatures in this part of the world.
CNN witnessed bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in mid-February, on five different reefs spanning the northern and southern parts of the 2,300-kilometer (1,400-mile) ecosystem.
“What is happening now in our oceans is like wildfires underwater,” said Kate Quigley, principal research scientist at Australia’s Minderoo Foundation. “We’re going to have so much warming that we’re going to get to a tipping point, and we won’t be able to come back from that.”
Coral bleached white from high water temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. CNN
Bleaching occurs when marine heatwaves put corals under stress, causing them to expel algae from their tissue, draining their color. Corals can recover from bleaching if the temperatures return to normal, but they will perish if the water stays warmer than usual.
“It’s a die-off,” said Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a climate scientist at the University of Queensland in Australia and chief scientist at The Great Barrier Reef Foundation. “The temperatures got so warm, they’re off the charts … they never occurred before at this sort of level.”
The destruction of marine ecosystems would deliver an effective death sentence for around a quarter of all species that depend on reefs for survival — and threaten an estimated billion people who rely on reef fish for their food and livelihoods. Reefs also provide vital protection for coastlines, reducing the impact of floods, cyclones and sea level rise.
“Humanity is being threatened at a rate by which I’m not sure we really understand,” Hoegh-Guldberg said.
“AI expends a lot of energy being polite, especially if the user is polite, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’”
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Dauner explained. “But this just makes their responses even longer, expending more energy to generate each word.”
For this reason, Dauner suggests users be more straightforward when communicating with AI models. Specify the length of the answer you want and limit it to one or two sentences, or say you don’t need an explanation at all.
Most important, Dauner’s study highlights that not all AI models are created equally, said Sasha Luccioni, the climate lead at AI company Hugging Face, in an email. Users looking to reduce their carbon footprint can be more intentional about which model they chose for which task.
“Task-specific models are often much smaller and more efficient, and just as good at any context-specific task,” Luccioni explained.
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If you are a software engineer who solves complex coding problems every day, an AI model suited for coding may be necessary. But for the average high school student who wants help with homework, relying on powerful AI tools is like using a nuclear-powered digital calculator.
Even within the same AI company, different model offerings can vary in their reasoning power, so research what capabilities best suit your needs, Dauner said.
When possible, Luccioni recommends going back to basic sources — online encyclopedias and phone calculators — to accomplish simple tasks.
Why it’s hard to measure AI’s environmental impact
Putting a number on the environmental impact of AI has proved challenging.
The study noted that energy consumption can vary based on the user’s proximity to local energy grids and the hardware used to run AI models.
That’s partly why the researchers chose to represent carbon emissions within a range, Dauner said.
Furthermore, many AI companies don’t share information about their energy consumption — or details like server size or optimization techniques that could help researchers estimate energy consumption, said Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside who studies AI’s water consumption.
“You can’t really say AI consumes this much energy or water on average — that’s just not meaningful. We need to look at each individual model and then (examine what it uses) for each task,” Ren said.
One way AI companies could be more transparent is by disclosing the amount of carbon emissions associated with each prompt, Dauner suggested.
“It’s true that both plants are not yet operating at the capacity we originally targeted,” said the Climeworks spokesperson.
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“Like all transformative innovations, progress is iterative, and some steps may take longer than anticipated,” they said.
The company’s prospective third plant in Louisiana aims to remove 1 million tons of carbon a year by 2030, but it’s uncertain whether construction will proceed under the Trump administration.
A Department of Energy spokesperson said a department-wide review was underway “to ensure all activities follow the law, comply with applicable court orders and align with the Trump administration’s priorities.” The government has a mandate “to unleash ‘American Energy Dominance’,” they added.
Direct air capture’s success will also depend on companies’ willingness to buy carbon credits.
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Currently companies are pretty free to “use the atmosphere as a waste dump,” said Holly Buck, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. “This lack of regulation means there is not yet a strong business case for cleaning this waste up,” she told CNN.
Another criticism leveled at Climeworks is its failure to offset its own climate pollution. The carbon produced by its corporate activities, such as office space and travel, outweighs the carbon removed by its plants.
The company says its plants already remove more carbon than they produce and corporate emissions “will become irrelevant as the size of our plants scales up.”
Some, however, believe the challenges Climeworks face tell a broader story about direct air capture.
This should be a “wake-up call,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law. Climeworks’ problems are not “outliers,” she told CNN, “but reflect persistent technical and economic hurdles faced by the direct air capture industry worldwide.”
“The climate crisis demands real action, not speculative tech that overpromises and underdelivers.” she added.
Some of the Climeworks’ problems are “related to normal first-of-a-kind scaling challenges with emerging complex engineering projects,” Buck said.
But the technology has a steep path to becoming cheaper and more efficient, especially with US slashing funding for climate policies, she added. “This kind of policy instability and backtracking on contracts will be terrible for a range of technologies and innovations, not just direct air capture.”
Direct air capture is definitely feasible but its hard, said MIT’s Buck. Whether it succeeds will depend on a slew of factors including technological improvements and creating markets for carbon removals, he said.
“At this point in time, no one really knows how large a role direct air capture will play in the future.”