Numlock News: May 28, 2024 • Earth, Water, Airlines

May 28, 2024

By Rachael Dottle

Today’s guest writer is Rachael Dottle, a phenomenal visual journalist who can be found at Bloomberg. You can see her award-winning work at her website and on Bloomberg.

In Hot Water

Waters in the tropical portion of the Atlantic Ocean, around the Caribbean, are hotter than they have been for any other late May on record. The area is averaging around 84.7 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature the waters usually don't hit until August and September after a summer of warming up. This is bad for a lot of reasons, including the future of coral reefs, which are already experiencing a fourth global bleaching event this year, according to NOAA. The previous record-breaking May for sea temperatures in the area was in 2005, a notorious year that brought one of the most destructive and active hurricane seasons ever for the U.S.

Michael Lowry, Yale Climate Connections

Big News for Gardeners

The USDA recently released a new plant hardiness zone map as an update to its 2012 version, and as you can imagine, much of the country has on average gotten warmer. While NYC didn’t change zones, the new 30-year minimum temperature average was 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the previous average. The map classifies the U.S. into zones based on an area’s average annual minimum temperature and is most useful for knowing which perennial outdoor plants will possibly not die in your area if you keep them outside. You can and will definitely still kill your plants even if you plant according to the map, since it does not factor in how wet, dry or volatile your area’s climate is. It also won’t tell you if your plants can actually survive the extreme heat of summer. Good luck!

Daniel Wood, Connie Hanzhang Jin, Brent Jones and Jeff Brady, NPR

Solar Storm Surge

The solar storm from a couple weeks ago was the largest geomagnetic storm since 2003, and as expected, it caused irregularities across the U.S. electrical grid. Data from smart home sensors tracked the disturbances across the U.S. which affected more than 50 million people. Current sunspot activity – which are visual indications of the sun’s magnetic disturbances – began in 2019 and is expected to peak next year. There are 13 sunspot regions visible from Earth right now, and it is likely more gas and plasma will burst out. The sunspot cluster that caused the most recent surge is around 200,000 kilometers wide and about 15 to 16 times larger than the Earth.

Hayley Warren, Denise Lu and Naureen S. Malik, Bloomberg

Panorama of Parties

The major political players are the same, but this year, more candidates from more political parties than ever before are vying for a seat in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, as Indians across the country head to the polls. The country has over 744 different political parties fielding as many as 4,440 candidates this year, with 3,920 more candidates running as independents. While the three major parties are the only ones to contest seats across the country, small, regional parties representative of the religious and social diversity do pick up seats here and there and can have a big influence when the larger political parties fall short of a majority.

Vijdan Mohammad Kawoosa, Reuters

Jet Shortages

Do you need more reasons not to fly this summer? Airlines are cutting back on routes across the U.S. even as consumer demand grows, citing plane shortages, recalls and the lack of financial viability for some low-cost carriers like Spirit and Frontier Airlines. Cities like Atlanta and Orlando saw some of the biggest cuts in the number of seats available — about 860,000 fewer seats are available on routes flying out of Atlanta in the coming summer months. Delta, with the most reduction of all the carriers, cut about 2.3 million total seats from its plans for the summer.

Andre Tartar, Mary Schlangenstein, Marie Patino and Jason Kao, Bloomberg

The Good Old Days

What you consider the peak of culture, music and fashion really does depend on what you thought was cool in middle school. Analysis of a YouGov survey that asked respondents which decade had the best and worst music, economy, movies, etc., shows that for most respondents, regardless of when they grew up, the best economy, movies and television happened when they were around 12 to 15 years old. The best fashion, sports and music period comes a little later, around age 16 to 19. Overall, Republicans were also bigger haters of the present than Democrats. Mostly, what the YouGov poll was documenting was declinism, or the feeling that everything is always getting worse because memory is bad and you only remember the good stuff.

Andrew Van Dam, The Washington Post

Dam-ed

Dams along the 4,900-kilometer-long Mekong River — which snakes through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam — are threatening the health of the river and the communities that rely on it. The river basin is dotted with over 190 dams that stop the normal flow of the river and the life cycle of fish and wildlife. While the effects of one dam are easy to monitor, hundreds of dams disrupt flows with cumulative effects on communities that rely on the river. As the demand for low-emissions energy continues, tensions build among countries who claim rights to the waters.

Tan Hui Yee and Lim Min Zhang, The Straits Times

Follow Rachael on Twitter, her website and Bloomberg.

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