North America – Page 45 – Desdemona Despair

A crane is used to remove sets of human remains, as search and rescue personnel work atop the rubble at the Champlain Towers South condo building, where scores of people remain missing more than a week after it partially collapsed, 2 July 2021, in Surfside, Florida. Rescue efforts resumed Thursday evening after being halted for most of the day over concerns about the stability of the remaining structure. Photo: Mark Humphrey / AP Photo

July 2, 2021

Miami’s climate dystopia gets real – South Florida real estate will get more deadly if we continue to ignore the warning signs of a doomed coastline

By Jeff Goodell 1 July 2021 (Rolling Stone) – Before it fell, Champlain Towers South, the 12-story Florida condo building that collapsed last week in the middle of the night, burying residents in a pile of concrete and chaos, was just another nondescript high-rise on the beach. It had been thrown up quickly during the […]

Wildfires consume the town of Lytton, British Columbia, on 30 June 2021. Photo: Jack Zimmerman / The Guardian

July 1, 2021

Wildfire forces evacuation for British Columbia town that hit a record 121 degrees – “The whole town is on fire”

LYTTON, British Columbia, 1 July 2021 (AP) – A wildfire amid a record heatwave in western Canada has forced authorities to order residents to evacuate a village in British Columbia that smashed the country’s record for hottest temperature three days in a row this week. Mayor Jan Polderman of Lytton issued the evacuation order Wednesday, […]

Surface temperature in the US Pacific Northwest and Canadian West, 29 June 2021. Graphic: Meteo365.com

June 29, 2021

More than 230 dead in British Columbia as heatwave shatters records – “Dubai would be cooler than what we’re seeing now”

By Sarah Moon, Jon Passantino, and Rebekah Riess 29 June 2021 (CNN) – “Since the onset of the heatwave late last week, the BC Coroners Service has experienced a significant increase in deaths reported where it is suspected that extreme heat has been contributory,” Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe said in a statement. The coroner’s service […]

Heat dome strength of 4 sigma over the U.S. Pacific Northwest and Canadian West, 28 June 2021. The sigma is the standard deviation of a normal distribution of expected values. In this case the heat dome sigma max is 4.4, which mean that it's outside of 99.99 percent of expected values or a 1/10,000+ chance per year. Statistically speaking, there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of experiencing this value. So, if you could possibly live in that spot for 10,000 years, you'd likely only experience this kind of heat dome once, if ever. Graphic: By Jeff Berardelli / ECMWF

June 28, 2021

Pacific Northwest bakes under once-in-a-millennium heat dome – Heatwave has intensity never recorded by modern humans – “There is no analog in our past for what we are likely to see this week”

By Jeff Berardelli 28 June 2021 (CBS News) – The heatwave baking the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada, is of an intensity never recorded by modern humans. By one measure it is more rare than a once in a 1,000-year event — which means that if you could live in this particular spot […]

Seasonal honey bee colony loss rates in the United States, 2008-2021. Annual loss estimates (from one 1 April to the next 1 April) combine winter (1 October – 1 April) and summer (1 April – 1 October) losses. The loss rate was calculated as the total number of colonies lost divided by the number of colonies “at risk” during the season. Colonies at risk were composed of viable colonies and new colonies made or acquired, while excluding colonies sold or parted with. Graphic: Bee Informed Partnership

June 25, 2021

U.S. honey bee colonies hit by second-highest annual loss on record in 2021

By Nathalie Steinhauer, Dan Aurell, Selina Bruckner, Mikayla Wilson, Karen Rennich, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, and Geoffrey Williams 23 June 2021 (Bee Informed Partnership) – The Bee Informed Partnership (http://beeinformed.org) is a non-profit organization that works alongside beekeepers to improve honey bee colony health and survivorship across the United States. One of the organization’s longest running programs, […]

Satellite view of Lake Mead in 2000 and 2020. The United States' largest reservoir is draining rapidly. Plagued by extreme, climate change-fueled drought and increasing demand for water, Lake Mead on 16 June 2021 registered its lowest level on record since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s. Photo: LANDSAT / Copernicus / Google Earth

June 21, 2021

The American West is drying out – Lake Mead, largest reservoir in U.S., drops to lowest level on record since it was filled in the 1930s

By Zachary B. Wolf 20 June 2021 (CNN) – The incredible pictures of a depleted Lake Mead, on the Nevada-Arizona border, illustrate the effects of drought brought on by climate change. Later this year, the US government will almost certainly declare the first-ever water shortage along the Colorado River. Maps show more than a quarter of the US […]

Potential heat stress risk in 2060-2099 due to combined climate and population projections. Periods of extremely high heat are projected to double across the lower 48 states by 2100 if the world continues to emit high levels of greenhouse gases. The heat stress will be felt most strongly in areas with growing populations. The Pacific Northwest, central California, and the Great Lakes region could experience as much as a threefold increase compared to the past 40 years. Graphic: Mukherjee, et al., 2021 / Earth’s Future

June 21, 2021

Heat stress in U.S. may double by century’s end

7 June 2021 (NSF) – Periods of extremely high heat are projected to double across the lower 48 states by 2100 if the world continues to emit high levels of greenhouse gases, according to a new study in Earth’s Future, an American Geophysical Union journal. The heat stress will be felt most strongly in areas with growing populations. […]

A home destroyed in the 2020 North Complex Fire sits above Lake Oroville on 23 May 2021, in Oroville, California. At the time of this photo, drought had reduced the reservoir to 39 percent of capacity and 46 percent of its historical average. Photo: Noah Berger / AP Photo

June 20, 2021

Drought saps California reservoirs as hot, dry summer looms – “It makes me feel like our planet is literally drying up,”

By Adam Beam 17 June 2021 OROVILLE, Califorina (AP) – Each year Lake Oroville helps water a quarter of the nation’s crops, sustain endangered salmon beneath its massive earthen dam and anchor the tourism economy of a Northern California county that must rebuild seemingly every year after unrelenting wildfires. But the mighty lake — a […]

Covid data from U.S. states plotted from 8 regions, as defined by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Surge patterns were independently examined for each of the 8 regions; epidemic patterns were similar and could be merged as shown, except a bimodal pattern in the Great Lakes region was distinctive and plotted separately. Negative excess deaths were plotted as zero. Between 1 March 2020, and 2 January 2021, the US experienced 2,801,439 deaths, 22.9% more than expected, representing 522,368 excess deaths. The excess death rate was higher among non-Hispanic Black (208.4 deaths per 100 000) than non-Hispanic White or Hispanic populations (157.0 and 139.8 deaths per 100 000, respectively); these groups accounted for 16.9%, 61.1%, and 16.7% of excess deaths, respectively. The US experienced 4 surge patterns: in New England and the Northeast, excess deaths surged in the spring; in the Southeast and Southwest, in the summer and early winter; in the Plains, Rocky Mountains, and far West, primarily in early winter; and in the Great Lakes, bimodally, in the spring and early winter. Graphic: Woolf, et al., 2021 / JAMA

June 20, 2021

U.S. excess deaths rose a staggering 23 percent in 2020 – “They said they were opening early to rescue the economy. The tragedy is that not only cost more lives but actually hurt their economy by extending the length of the pandemic.”

By Mary Kate Brogan 2 April 2021 (VCU News) – Extended surges in the South and West in the summer and early winter of 2020 resulted in regional increases in excess death rates, both from COVID-19 and from other causes, a 50-state analysis of excess death trends has found. Virginia Commonwealth University researchers’ latest study […]

Cumulative COVID-19 cases by country on 30 January 2020 and 11 March 2020. Graphic: The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response

May 16, 2021

Covid: Serious failures in WHO and global response, report finds – “It is due to a myriad of failures, gaps, and delays in preparedness and response”

12 May (BBC News) – The Covid-19 pandemic was preventable, an independent review panel has said. The panel, set up by the World Health Organization, said the combined response of the WHO and global governments was a “toxic cocktail”. The WHO should have declared a global emergency earlier than it did, its report said, adding […]