gshc2020.com

Those acute hazards, which hang over 79% of capacity, include severe climate-induced events such as flooding, extreme winds and wildfires that can disrupt operations, increase downtime and drive insurance and repair costs, according to the report by First Street, a climate risk analytics firm.

First Street looked at 97 global data center markets in the report.

"Most underwriting for real assets still uses historical data, but the climate is no longer behaving the way the historical record would predict," First Street CEO Matthew Eby said in a release. "As heat, drought, and water stress increase, outdated models simply don't offer a complete view of risk anymore."

The study also found that just over half of all data centers globally are in markets exposed to chronic climate stress, such as extreme heat and drought, that hit energy efficiency and increase costs.

While risk can be heightened by exposure to singular climate-driven events, such as strong hurricanes, it is the chronic effects of climate change that can cause the most damage, both physically and financially.

Jeremy Porter, chief economist at First Street, said the backward-looking models are not correcting for climate and for all the sources of risk.

"Ultimately, it's just something that we're underestimating," he said.

Porter pointed to government models that he says are outdated because they look at past levels of precipitation and do not factor in the effects of climate change. As the Earth warms, clouds hold more moisture and rainfall becomes heavier.

The danger, according to the study's findings, is that investors may be looking at traditional metrics when developing data centers and not taking into account that climate could impact long-term operating conditions. Data centers are typically expected to be in operation for 20 to 30 years.

"Investors who incorporate these factors into underwriting and capital allocation decisions will be better positioned to identify resilient markets and avoid mispriced risk," Eby said in a release.

Get Property Play directly to your inbox

CNBC's Property Play with Diana Olick covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, delivered weekly to your inbox.

Subscribe here to get access today.

Some developers and operators are, however, taking climate into account as they design data centers.

Digital Realty, for instance, is working to make sure it has enough water to cool its centers.

"Almost all of our data centers today, 300 around the world, the global portfolio, are either a waterless system or closed loop water," said Andrew Power, CEO of Digital Realty on the Property Play podcast earlier this year. "So think of it as there's no evaporation. We make the investments and elect to do that."

While developers can implement resilient measures for building envelopes — the physical barrier between a building's interior and the outside — to protect structures from severe weather events, it's the actual systems that connect to the data centers that are most important in terms of understanding both internal and external vulnerabilities to climate risk, according to Porter.

He said developers need to look beyond building and parcel-specific risk to a systems-level thinking. That means understanding infrastructure and community demographics.

"Acute climate risk can be mitigated with building adaptation, so that, that's not a huge issue. Then you start to think about the system, though, you start to think about the infrastructure, the egress, the access to the site, power access. There is a building mitigation process, but then there's a community mitigation process," he said.

Some areas are more prone to climate risk than others, the study found.

The Asia-Pacific region has 89% of its data center capacity at risk, the highest percentage of any geographic area, according to First Street. That compares with 50% exposure in the Americas and 46% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Some of the industry's fastest-growing markets are also the most exposed, the study found. That includes Northern Virginia in the U.S., as well as Johor in Malaysia and Marseille, France. Nordic markets had the lowest climate risk.

"The top 10 markets with acute climate risk across the globe, most of them are in the U.S. Most of them have wind and flood risk," said Porter, adding that the U.S. does not see as much chronic climate risk as the rest of the world.

watch now

Stonehenge is also aligned to the summer solstice, and the wooden monument may have been an early prototype of this. It is one of the earliest examples of a monument aligned to an astronomical phenomenon in the British Isles.

“What we have now, for the first time, is actual proof that these people were capable of capturing the movement of the sun,” said Phil Harding at Wessex Archaeology, who led the excavations, at a press conference announcing the discovery.

Stonehenge is a monument built during the Neolithic, the very end of the Stone Age. Situated on Salisbury Plain in the UK, it consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen stones topped by horizontal lintels, a smaller inner ring of vertical bluestones and several other stones. These are surrounded by an earth bank and a ditch. This is the oldest part, built around 3100 BC, with the stones being placed over the centuries up to 1600 BC.

Some of the standing stones seem to have been carefully aligned to point to the spot on the horizon where the sun rises on the summer solstice, and to the opposing spot where the sun sets on the winter solstice. The relevant stones were erected about 2500 BC.

Harding and his colleagues have found the remains of a nearby monument that is 500 years older. About 5 kilometres north-east of Stonehenge, there is a village called Bulford, where the UK’s Ministry of Defence wanted to house about 5000 army personnel. Before construction began, Wessex Archaeology excavated Bulford from 2015 to 2017.

The team found a cluster of pits containing grooved ware pottery, which was made by late Neolithic peoples. Radiocarbon dating suggested the pottery was from about 2950 BC. The researchers obtained 40 dates, all tightly clustered in time. “This site was being occupied for a relatively short period of time,” said Harding. “It could be something like a decade.”

“It’s a really important Middle Neolithic settlement,” says Susan Greaney at the University of Exeter, UK, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Two of the Bulford pits were a different shape to the others. Instead of having vertical sides, they tapered towards the bottom, going from about 1.2 metres across to just 0.5 metres. They also didn’t contain pottery, but were filled with chalk rubble. Harding and his colleagues concluded that they were postholes: they had once housed timbers a few metres tall, which were held upright by the rubble. In line with this, one of the postholes contained charcoal from an ash tree.

The two postholes are about 120 metres apart. Harding realised that a line drawn through them would point roughly north-east, at 48.1 degrees: about the direction of the midsummer sunrise. “I got really, really excited about that,” said Harding.

Wessex Archaeology recruited Fabio Silva, a skyscape archaeologist at consultancy Stone x Sky, to study the alignment of the postholes more carefully. Using a 3D reconstruction of the landscape with modern buildings removed, plus data on the sun’s shifting path across the sky, Silva determined that the postholes were neatly aligned with the past summer solstice sunrise.

Strictly, the alignment was about 1 degree out, but Silva said this makes sense once you realise that the wooden posts could have been up to 50 centimetres across. “You have to take that width into account,” he said at the press conference, in which case the alignment is “bang on”. “The odds of this being by chance are less than 0.5 per cent,” he said.

“Probably a rough orientation is good enough for the ritual that you are supposed to carry out in these sites,” says A. César González-García at the Spanish National Research Council in Santiago de Compostela, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It looks like there is a broad understanding and interest in the sky.”

Older sites in the area also show evidence of people tracking the sun, albeit with less precision. “From the earliest times that we have Neolithic people present in that landscape, they are incorporating the sun into their ceremonial architecture,” said Matt Leivers, also at Wessex Archaeology.

“We’ve got loads of timber monuments that have those kind of alignments,” says Greaney. The Bulford monument “is adding another one to that, potentially, but much earlier”.

For instance, at nearby Larkhill, there is a Neolithic enclosure from around 3700 BC, well before Bulford and Stonehenge. Its entrance faces roughly north-east. If you stand in that entrance and look at Sidbury Hill (the highest point on the horizon) on midsummer morning, “you see the sun rise dead ahead of you over Sidbury Hill”, said Leivers. %!s()

“The results are stunning,” says Peter Sasieni at Queen Mary University of London. “It’s an awful thing when somebody dies very young from cervical cancer. This is a real triumph for vaccination, a real triumph for science and a real triumph for public health to get that vaccine out there with very high uptake very rapidly.”

HPV is spread by several kinds of sexual activity, and many strains genetically modify cells in a way that is extremely likely to cause cancer. Women can get cervical cancer in their twenties because of the virus, and around the world many are still dying because of it.

The first HPV vaccine became available in 2006. In the UK, it has been offered to girls aged 12 or 13 since 2008. It’s been offered to boys since 2019, both to protect them from other HPV-triggered cancers – like those affecting the mouth, anus, throat and penis – and to prevent them from infecting others.

The study is the first evidence that the HPV vaccine prevents cervical-cancer-related deaths, in addition to dramatically reducing HPV infections and the incidence of cervical cancers. It may seem obvious that it prevents deaths, but we know that the women who are least likely to get vaccinated are also the least likely to go for screening, says Sasieni. So, there was a worry that the vaccine has mainly been preventing cancers that would have been detected early by screening and successfully treated, but not preventing those that would get missed by screening and therefore be more likely to kill women.

Fortunately, this doesn’t appear to be the case. Sasieni and his colleague Milena Falcaro, also at Queen Mary, have been monitoring cervical-cancer rates and deaths in England, and noticed that between 2020 and 2024 – the most recent data available – there were no deaths among women aged 20 to 24. Based on historical rates, around 23 deaths would be expected. “As far back as I’ve seen data, there’s never been a year with none, and so five years in a row with no deaths is really quite something,” says Sasieni.

The dramatic drop is almost certainly due to the HPV vaccine – around 90 per cent of women in England aged 20 to 24 were vaccinated when they were 12 or 13. “This hugely encouraging news shows the life-saving impact of the HPV vaccine, and it’s incredibly exciting to be able to say to this whole generation: cervical cancer and some other cancers shouldn’t be a risk for you,” says Caroline Temmink, director of vaccination for the National Health Service (NHS) in England.

While this study looked only at cervical cancer, the benefits of this vaccine also apply to other HPV-related cancers. It should also protect against warts on the skin and genital and anal areas in both sexes.

Sasieni and Falcaro note that there were some deaths among women aged 25 to 29, but far fewer than would be expected. Altogether, they estimate around 200 lives have already been saved, and this is just the start. “The 200 which we’ve estimated in the paper is really just the tip of the iceberg, because it looks like there’s long-term protection against infection,” says Sasieni. “In the future, 18,000 deaths might be a rough estimate of what we’re preventing so far.”

Worldwide, however, uptake of the HPV vaccine is low and the rate of cervical cancer is still rising. Death rates may also rise in the UK because fewer teenagers are getting vaccinated. “The bad news is that the vaccine uptake has fallen quite dramatically since covid,” says Sasieni.

“Alongside cervical screening, HPV vaccination is central to the NHS ambition to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040,” says Temmink. “It’s a safe and effective vaccine and we urge everyone eligible to take up the offer when invited.” %!s()

Researchers have spent decades investigating ways to chill people’s brains after they have a stroke to try to limit the damage. The idea is to freeze brain cells in a hibernation-like state so they don’t need as much oxygen and glucose when a stroke cuts off their blood supply. If brain cells can be kept alive until blood flow is restored, for example, by removing a clot, a patient may be spared from extensive brain damage and related speech and movement problems.

Unfortunately, the physical cooling strategies that have been looked at so far – including cooling blankets, ice packs and helmets – haven’t worked well. This is because they cause intense discomfort and uncontrollable shivering, says Kirsten Coupland at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Shivering is one method the body uses to “fight the induction of hypothermia”, making it hard to get body temperature down low enough, she says. “It’s great to see different cooling therapies being tested out for stroke because we know that physical cooling is just not feasible,” says Coupland.

Shuaili Xu at Capital Medical University in Beijing, China, and his colleagues administered the two drugs, promethazine and chlorpromazine, which have been known to reduce body temperature since the 1950s, to mice and rhesus monkeys following induced strokes.

In both animals, the drug combination led to drops in core body temperature, suppressed glucose metabolism in cells and lessened the amount of brain damage caused by the stroke. The reduced brain damage also meant the treated monkeys displayed better use of their limbs.

Next, the team conducted a clinical trial involving 32 people who had just had a stroke. Upon hospital admission, the subjects were given the promethazine and chlorpromazine combination or a placebo, in addition to standard clot-removal therapy.

The promethazine and chlorpromazine treatment only reduced the patients’ body temperature by 0.3°C (about 0.5°F) and did not reduce stroke damage. However, Xu thinks this is because the infusions were done over 12 hours, which was too slow to bring down core body temperature by a meaningful amount. “It might have led to a low blood drug concentration per unit of time,” he says.

His team is now launching another trial to see whether faster infusions over an hour produce stronger cooling effects and therapeutic benefits. “The fact that they’ve proven that it’s safe and these drugs are already used in humans for other indications means I think that it’s reasonable to proceed with further clinical trials,” says Coupland.

Promethazine and chlorpromazine are known to be relatively safe because they have been used for decades. Promethazine is a sedating antihistamine that can ease hay fever and assist sleep, while chlorpromazine is an antipsychotic drug used in the management of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They both act on the central nervous system to reduce core body temperature, without translating into shivering or subjective feelings of coldness. %!s()

It's unclear precisely why Trump delayed Clayton's confirmation hearing, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. The president rolled through a list of grievances in a social media post where — hours before the hearing's start time — he said it would be canceled. Included were concerns that the president's pick for acting DNI, Bill Pulte, wouldn't get to serve in the job, and that Clayton's successor in SDNY has not been confirmed.

"Regarding the approval of our Great Patriot, Jay Clayton, we are cancelling the Senate Hearing RE: DNI today, and will not be going forward until Jamie McDonald is approved to be U.S. Attorney," Trump said in an early morning Truth Social post, referring to his pick to replace Clayton. "In the meantime, Bill Pulte will remain as the Acting Director of National Intelligence."

Senate Intelligence Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., hours after the president's comments on Truth Social, confirmed the hearing was scuttled.

"It's regrettable that the president has directed Jay Clayton not to appear at his confirmation hearing today. Mr. Clayton is a patriot and a highly qualified nominee, as the president has said repeatedly," Cotton said in an X post. "While today's hearing is now unfortunately postponed, I look forward to proceeding with his confirmation in the near future."

A source familiar with McDonald's nomination told MS NOW the White House has not yet sent it to the Senate, indicating it could take a considerable amount of time for him to be confirmed.

Any delay in Clayton's confirmation could imperil the reauthorization of a critical intelligence authority, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The authority expired last week, meaning there is a lapse in authority for warrantless surveillance of communications that may involve national security threats.

Democrats have vowed to not reapprove the authority unless Pulte is removed from the DNI post. Critics view Pulte as a partisan attack dog with no intelligence experience who used his role atop a federal housing agency to gin up prosecutions of Trump's enemies.

Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) (L), and Jay Clayton, US attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY).

Getty Images | Reuters

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, in a statement called Trump's about-face an "extraordinary display of dysfunction."

"The president's latest intervention only underscores a simple reality: the biggest obstacle to resolving these issues has not been Senate Democrats or Senate Republicans," he said. "It has been the chaos and confusion coming from the White House itself."

Warner, in a press conference later Wednesday, suggested that Trump could withdraw Clayton's nomination despite his likely receiving bipartisan support.

"I wonder whether Jay Clayton knows whether he has been postponed or withdrawn," Warner said.

Republicans, some of whom have also expressed concerns about Pulte, are racing to get Clayton confirmed so they can pass FISA.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the Senate will now "have to take it a day at a time til we get more clarity on kind of what the White House position is."

Trump also asked for the controversial voter-ID bill known as the SAVE America Act to be attached to FISA reauthorization in exchange for his signature.

"Therefore, to add a slight bit of intrigue but, for the Good of the Nation, and the People of our Country, I will not approve FISA without THE SAVE AMERICA ACT going along with it," he said in his post.

Democrats have said they will not support the legislation to change voting access.

The president also accused Democrats of breaking their deal to vote for FISA if Pulte is gone.

"[T]he Republicans moved so fast with the hearings of the Great Jay Clayton, current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, that Pulte would be gone before the Dumocrats would vote on FISA," he said. "Now, the Dumocrats are saying they will vote against FISA — So, the Republicans wound up having fulfilled their commitment, but Dumocrats broke the Deal."

Some Republicans, however, vented frustration over how the president has handled the situation.

"Frankly, I was disappointed again that while Sen. Thune has very meticulously and skillfully managed a process that ends up with another Trump victory gets upended by an impulsive post of some sort," Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., a Trump ally, said. "It's frustrating, but it's also not that abnormal these days."

— CNBC's Emily Wilkins, Karen James Sloan and Irit Skulnik contributed to this report. %!s()