“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.

‘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.

Despite prepping’s reputation as a form of doomerism, many left-wing preppers say they are not devoid of hope.
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Shonkwiler believes there will be an opportunity to create something new in the aftermath of a crisis. “It begins with preparedness and it ends with a better world,” he said.

Some also say there’s less tension between left- and right-wing preppers than people might expect. Bounds, the sociology professor, said very conservative preppers she met during her research contacted her during the Covid-19 pandemic to offer help.
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There is a natural human solidarity that emerges amid disaster, Killjoy said. She recalls a cashier giving her a deep discount on supplies she was buying to take to Asheville post-Helene. “I have every reason to believe that that man is right-wing, and I do think that there is a transcending of political differences that happens in times of crisis,” she said.

As terrifying events pile up, from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to deadly extreme weather, it’s hard to escape the sense we live in a time of rolling existential crises often a hair’s breadth from global disaster.

People are increasingly beginning to wonder whether their views on preppers have been misconceived, Mills said. “There is a bigger question floating in the air, which is: Are preppers crazy, or is everyone else?”
Killjoy has seen a huge change over the last five years in people’s openness to prepping. Those who used to make fun of her for her “go bag” are now asking for advice.

It’s not necessarily the start of a prepping boom, she said. “I think it is about more and more people adopting preparedness and prepper things into a normal life.”

Evidence already points this way. Americans stockpiled goods in advance of Trump’s tariffs and online sales of contraceptives skyrocketed in the wake of his election, amid concerns he would reduce access. Shows like “The Walking Dead,” meanwhile, have thrust the idea of prepping into popular culture and big box stores now sell prepping equipment and meal kits.

People are hungry to learn about preparedness, said Shonkwiler. “They have the understanding that the world as we knew it, and counted on it, is beginning to cease to be. … What we need to be doing now is figuring out how we can survive in the world that we’ve created.”

This company says its technology can help save the world. It’s now cutting 20% of its staff as Trump slashes climate funding
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Two huge plants in Iceland operate like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking in air and stripping out planet-heating carbon pollution. This much-hyped climate technology is called direct air capture, and the company behind these plants, Switzerland-based Climeworks, is perhaps its most high-profile proponent.

But a year after opening a huge new facility, Climeworks is straining against strong headwinds. The company announced this month it would lay off around 20% of its workforce, blaming economic uncertainties and shifting climate policy priorities.
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“We’ve always known this journey would be demanding. Today, we find ourselves navigating a challenging time,” Climeworks’ CEOs Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher said in a statement.

This is particularly true of its US ambitions. A new direct air capture plant planned for Louisiana, which received $50 million in funding from the Biden administration, hangs in the balance as President Donald Trump slashes climate funding.

Climeworks also faces mounting criticism for operating at only a fraction of its maximum capacity, and for failing to remove more climate pollution than it emits.

The company says these are teething pains inherent in setting up a new industry from scratch and that it has entered a new phase of global scale up. “The overall trajectory will be positive as we continue to define the technology,” said a Climeworks spokesperson.

For critics, however, these headwinds are evidence direct air capture is an expensive, shiny distraction from effective climate action.

These preppers have ‘go bags,’ guns and a fear of global disaster. They’re also left-wing
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The day after President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Eric Shonkwiler looked at his hiking bag to figure out what supplies he had. “I began to look at that as a resource for escape, should that need to happen,” he said.

He didn’t have the terminology for it at the time, but this backpack was his “bug-out bag” essential supplies for short-term survival. It marked the start of his journey into prepping. In his Ohio home, which he shares with his wife and a Pomeranian dog, Rosemary, he now has a six-month supply of food and water, a couple of firearms and a brood of chickens. “Resources to bridge the gap across a disaster,” he said.
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Margaret Killjoy’s entry point was a bleak warning in 2016 from a scientist friend, who told her climate change was pushing the global food system closer than ever to collapse. Killjoy started collecting food, water and generators. She bought a gun and learned how to use it. She started a prepping podcast, Live Like the World is Dying, and grew a community.

Prepping has long been dominated by those on the political right. The classic stereotype, albeit not always accurate, is of the lone wolf with a basement full of Spam, a wall full of guns, and a mind full of conspiracy theories.

Shonkwiler and Killjoy belong to a much smaller part of the subculture: They are left-wing preppers. This group is also preparing for a doom-filled future, and many also have guns, but they say their prepping emphasizes community and mutual aid over bunkers and isolationism.

In an era of barreling crises from wars to climate change some say prepping is becoming increasingly appealing to those on the left.
The roots of modern-day prepping in the United States go back to the 1950s, when fears of nuclear war reached a fever pitch.

The 1970s saw the emergence of the survivalist movement, which dwindled in the 1990s as it became increasingly associated with an extreme-right subculture steeped in racist ideology.

A third wave followed in the early 2000s, when the term “prepper” began to be adopted more widely, said Michael Mills, a social scientist at Anglia Ruskin University, who specializes in survivalism and doomsday prepping cultures. Numbers swelled following big disasters such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2008 financial crisis.

A watershed moment for right-wing preppers was the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Mills said. For those on the left, it was Trump’s 2016 election.

Preppers of all political stripes are usually motivated by a “foggy cloud of fear” rather than a belief in one specific doomsday scenario playing out, Mills said. Broad anxieties tend to swirl around the possibility of economic crises, pandemics, natural disasters, war and terrorism.

“We’ve hit every one of those” since the start of this century, said Anna Maria Bounds, a sociology professor at Queens College, who has written a book about New York’s prepper subculture. These events have solidified many preppers’ fears that, in times of crisis, the government would be “overwhelmed, under-prepared and unwilling to help,” she said.

‘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.

“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.

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Study reveals how much energy AI uses to answer your questions
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Whether it’s answering work emails or drafting wedding vows, generative artificial intelligence tools have become a trusty copilot in many people’s lives. But a growing body of research shows that for every problem AI solves, hidden environmental costs are racking up.

Each word in an AI prompt is broken down into clusters of numbers called “token IDs” and sent to massive data centers some larger than football fields powered by coal or natural gas plants. There, stacks of large computers generate responses through dozens of rapid calculations.

The whole process can take up to 10 times more energy to complete than a regular Google search, according to a frequently cited estimation by the Electric Power Research Institute.
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So, for each prompt you give AI, what’s the damage? To find out, researchers in Germany tested 14 large language model (LLM) AI systems by asking them both free-response and multiple-choice questions. Complex questions produced up to six times more carbon dioxide emissions than questions with concise answers.

In addition, “smarter” LLMs with more reasoning abilities produced up to 50 times more carbon emissions than simpler systems to answer the same question, the study reported.

“This shows us the tradeoff between energy consumption and the accuracy of model performance,” said Maximilian Dauner, a doctoral student at Hochschule Munchen University of Applied Sciences and first author of the Frontiers in Communication study published Wednesday.

Typically, these smarter, more energy intensive LLMs have tens of billions more parameters the biases used for processing token IDs than smaller, more concise models.

“You can think of it like a neural network in the brain. The more neuron connections, the more thinking you can do to answer a question,” Dauner said.
What you can do to reduce your carbon footprint
Complex questions require more energy in part because of the lengthy explanations many AI models are trained to provide, Dauner said. If you ask an AI chatbot to solve an algebra question for you, it may take you through the steps it took to find the answer, he said.

Beirut, Lebanon
CNN

A deadly Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut on Friday has left over a dozen people dead, including a high-ranking Hezbollah commander, sharply escalating the conflict between the two sides and raising fears of all-out war.
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Senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, part of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, was assassinated along with “about 10” other commanders, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari said, accusing them of planning to raid and occupy communities in Galilee in northern Israel.

Hezbollah confirmed Aqil’s death on Friday, saying he was killed “following a treacherous Israeli assassination operation on 09/20/2024 in the southern suburbs of Beirut.”

According to Hagari, the targeted commanders were “underground underneath a residential building in the heart of the Dahiyeh neighborhood, using civilians as a human shield” at the time of the attack.

Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 14 people were killed and 66 others injured in the airstrike, which leveled a multistory building in a densely populated neighborhood.

Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head from the United States for his suspected involvement in the 1983 strike on the US Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, as well as the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, which killed 241 US personnel later that year.

A CNN team on the ground in Beirut saw a frantic effort to rescue people from underneath the rubble and rush the wounded to hospital. Witnesses said nearby buildings shook for nearly half an hour after the strike, which the IDF said it had carried out at around 4 p.m. local time.


A week of surprise attacks
Friday’s strike marked the fourth consecutive day of surprise attacks on Beirut and other sites across the country, even as Israeli forces continued deadly strikes and operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

The first major attack against Hezbollah this week came Tuesday afternoon when pagers belonging to the militant groups’ members exploded near-simultaneously. The pagers had been used by Hezbollah to communicate after the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, encouraged members to switch to low-tech devices to prevent more of them from being assassinated.

Almost exactly 24 hours later, Lebanon was rocked by a second wave of explosions, after Hezbollah walkie-talkies detonated in Beirut and the south of the country on Wednesday.

At least 37 people were killed, including some children, and more than 3,000 were injured in the twin attacks.

In a United Nations Security Council meeting on Friday, UN human rights chief Volker Turk on Friday warned that the detonation of communication devices could violate international human rights law.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon clashed at the heated meeting, with Bou Habib calling on the council to condemn Israel’s actions and Danon slamming the Lebanese envoy for not mentioning Hezbollah.