Climate crisis

e360: I’m intrigued that, in talking about such matters, you don’t generally speak about “restoring nature.” You speak instead of something you call “regenerative design.” What’s the difference?

Orff: Restoring nature is trying to bring back nature for nature’s sake. As much as I, too, am guilty of that desire at times, this is simply not possible because our water quality has changed, and our air and water temperatures have changed. What I’m trying to do is rebuild natural systems in a strategic way that reduces climate risk for communities.

If wet bulb temperatures exceed 31°C (88°F), people cannot consistently perform physical labor without endangering their lives; in temperatures that exceed 35°C (95°F), a healthy human can die within a few hours without access to water or shelter. The authors of the PNAS study analyzed "wet-bulb temperature thresholds across a range of air temperatures and relative humidities" using bias-corrected climate change models. Their conclusions were sobering.

"Some of the most populated regions, typically lower-middle income countries in the moist tropics and subtropics, violate this threshold well before 3°C of [global] warming," the authors write.

“We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past,” states the journal article, “Robust weakening of the Gulf Stream during the past four decades observed in the Florida Straits,” published in Geophysical Research Letters. The Florida Straits, located between the Florida Keys, Cuba, and The Bahamas, has been the site of many ocean observation campaigns dating to the 1980s and earlier. “This significant trend has emerged from the dataset only over the past ten years, the first unequivocal evidence for a recent multidecadal decline in this climate-relevant component of ocean circulation.”