North America – Page 51 – Desdemona Despair

U.S. adult obesity rate by state, 2019. Graphic: Trust for America’s Health

September 19, 2020

U.S. adult obesity rate tops 40 percent, highest ever recorded – Obesity is single highest risk factor in COVID-19 mortality – “That’s extremely alarming in terms of its medical implications”

18 September 2020 (NBC News) – A new report reveals the adult obesity rate in the United States now stands at more than 42 percent, the highest it’s ever been. Twelve states have an obesity rate of more than 35 percent. “That’s extremely alarming in terms of its medical implications,” says John Auerbach, president […]

August 2020 blended land and sea surface temperature percentiles. Graphic: NOAA / NCEI

September 16, 2020

August 2020 was the world’s second-warmest August on record – The year 2020 has more than a 99.9 percent chance to rank among the five warmest years on record

By Jeff Masters, Ph.D. 15 September 2020 (Yale Climate Connections) – August 2020 was the second-warmest August since global record keeping began in 1880, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI, reported September 14. The month was just 0.04 degrees Celsius behind the record set in August 2016. NASA rated the month as the third-warmest August on […]

The Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite captured this extremely think blanket of smoke along the West Coast on 9 September 2020. OMPS measured smoke clouds over the western U.S. with higher aerosol index values than anything Colin Seftor, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says he has ever seen with the instrument. Graphic: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

September 12, 2020

California’s wildfire smoke plumes are unlike anything previously seen – California fire carbon emissions in 2020 exceed previous record by nearly 2 times

By Matthew Cappucci 12 September 2020 (The Washington Post) – More than 3.1 million acres have burned in California this year, part of a record fire season that still has four months to go. A suffocating cloud of smoke has veiled the West Coast for days, extending more than a thousand miles above the Pacific. And the […]

Satellite view of the Northridge Terrace neighborhood in Phoenix, Oregon before and after wildfire, 10 September 2020. Photo: Maxar Technologies

September 12, 2020

Satellite images show Phoenix and Talent, Oregon, have been “substantially destroyed” by wildfire – “This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history”

By Paul P. Murphy 10 September 2020 (CNN) – Swaths of the small southern Oregon cities of Phoenix and Talent now lie in ash, satellite images show, as wildfires wage unprecedented destruction across the US West. A massive burn scar cuts through parts of Talent and Phoenix, home to about 11,000 people combined. The wounded terrain, seen […]

Air temperatures across the United States on 6 September 2020, when much of the Southwest roasted in a dramatic heatwave. The map was derived from the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model and represents temperatures at 2 meters (about 6.5 feet) above the ground. The darkest red areas are where the model shows temperatures surpassing 113°F (45°C). Graphic: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

September 11, 2020

California heatwaves are becoming more frequent and lasting longer – “This has serious consequences for the fire season in Southern California”

By Kasha Patel 11 September 2020 (NASA) – In early September 2020, an intense heatwave broke temperature records in several locations in Southern California. The dry, hot conditions helped fuel new and existing fires, which have consumed tens of thousands of acres of land. According to recently published research, these extremes fit a long-term trend toward longer and more […]

On 9 September 2020, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of thick smoke streaming from a line of intense fires in Oregon and California. Many communities in the region are facing extremely poor and sometimes hazardous air quality. Data: NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Photo: Lauren Dauphin / NASA

September 10, 2020

Autumn could deliver the worst of California’s 2020 fire season – A scorching Labor Day weekend brought an all-time record heat and unprecedented fire spread, but fire risks climb in the fall

By Bob Henson 8 September 2020 (Yale Climate Connections) – Temperatures reached ghastly levels in southern California and wildfire carved a path close to two of the state’s iconic national parks as a historic heat dome gripped the western United States during the traditional end-of-summer Labor Day weekend. The heat had eased somewhat by Tuesday, […]

This GOES-16 GeoColor satellite image taken Wednesday, 26 August 2020, at 2:40 p.m. EDT., and provided by NOAA, shows Hurricane Laura over the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Laura strengthened Wednesday into “an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane," The National Hurricane Center said. Laura is expected to strike Wednesday night into Thursday morning along the Louisiana-Texas border. Photo: NOAA / AP

August 26, 2020

Category 4 Hurricane Laura up to 145 mph, threatens “unsurvivable” 20-foot storm surge – “Some areas, when they wake up Thursday morning, they’re not going to believe what happened”

By Joe Mario Pedersen and Richard Tribou 26 August 2020 (Orlando Sentinel) – Hurricane Laura kept growing into a massive Category 4 storm with 145 mph winds as it’s set to slam into the Gulf Coast on Wednesday night with “catastrophic storm surge, extreme winds and flash flooding,” according to the National Hurricane Center. The […]

Radar images from the Sentinel-1 satellite of the Milne Ice Shelf breakup at the end of July 2020. Photo: Dr. Adrienne White / Canadian Ice Service

August 7, 2020

Canada’s last fully intact Arctic ice shelf collapses – “This was the largest remaining intact ice shelf, and it’s disintegrated, basically”

By Moira Warburton 6 August 2020 (Reuters) – The last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has collapsed, losing more than 40% of its area in just two days at the end of July, researchers said on Thursday. The Milne Ice Shelf is at the fringe of Ellesmere Island, in the sparsely populated […]

August 2, 2020

Honest Government Ad: A message from the White House

30 July 2020 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the U.S. government, with an update on our pandemic response. In the space of a few months, our “Don’t worry, bro, it’s just the flu” policy has gotten a shit-ton of you killed. Some say this tragedy was inevitable, but actually, if we’d simply responded […]

U.S. gross domestic product, 1950-2020. Gross domestic product — the broadest measure of economic activity — shrank at an annual rate of 32.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020 as restaurants and retailers closed their doors in a desperate effort to slow the spread of the virus, which has killed more than 150,000 people in the U.S. The economic shock in April, May, and June was more than three times as sharp as the previous record — 10 percent in 1958 — and nearly four times the worst quarter during the Great Recession. Data: Bureau of Economic Analysis. Graphic: Alyson Hurt / NPR

July 30, 2020

3 months of hell: U.S. economy drops 32.9 percent in worst GDP report ever – “We’re not going to get to the pre-pandemic levels of economic activity until sometime in 2022”

By Scott Horsley 30 July 2020 (NPR) – The coronavirus pandemic triggered the sharpest economic contraction in modern American history, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Gross domestic product — the broadest measure of economic activity — shrank at an annual rate of 32.9% in the second quarter as restaurants and retailers closed their doors in a […]