World and business leaders gathering this week in New York are being forced to grapple with the increasingly urgent costs of climate change, soaring energy prices and the human toll from this summer's oppressive heat waves, prolific wildfires and catastrophic Nepal flood.
Every year as top government officials come to the United Nations General Assembly and business executives flock to New York City Climate Week sessions, global warming generates lots of talk but little action. This time two new forces — the rise of energy-hungry artificial intelligence and data centers and higher fossil fuel prices from wars in Iran and Ukraine — should change the discussion, experts and activists said. That's on top of the usual climate-driven disasters that reached new levels of destruction, with more than 1,300 killed in sudden flooding caused by a collapsing glacier on the Nepal-China border.
