By Gloria Oladipo 28 February 2024 (The Guardian) – A historic wildfire in Texas continued to rage on Wednesday morning as firefighters work to contain the flames and survey damage. The Smokehouse Creek fire, the second largest wildfire in Texas to date, has consumed more than 500,000 acres in Texas’s Panhandle area since it ignited on Monday. […]
LONDON, 23 January 2024 (Aon) – Aon plc, a leading global professional services firm, today published its 2024 Climate and Catastrophe Insight report, which identifies global natural disaster and climate trends to help make better decisions to manage volatility and enhance global resilience. The report reveals that the 398 global natural disaster events caused a $380 billion (2022: $355 billion) […]
LOS ANGELES, 6 February 2024 (AP) – The slow-moving atmospheric river still battering California on Tuesday unleashed record rainfall, triple-digit winds and hundreds of mudslides. Here is the historic storm by the numbers: Downtown Los Angeles In just three days, downtown Los Angeles got soaked by more than 8 inches (20.3 cm) of rain — more than half […]
By Gabrielle Canon 4 January 2024 (The Guardian) – In the first snow survey of the season, California came up short – just 25% of the historical average – despite a spate of strong storms that caused flooding and landslides along the coast in late December. On Tuesday, officials measured a depth of just 7.5in at a […]
By Lauren Girgis 4 January 2024 (Seattle Times) – If you like the snow, this unusually warm winter likely isn’t for you. Snow levels this season have been “marginal, to say the least,” said Rune Harkestad, president of Kittitas County’s Kongsberger Ski Club, based east of Snoqualmie Pass. December did bring a fair share of […]
By Victor Maus and Tim T. Werner 3 January 2024 (Nature) – Mining is a crucial industry — from iron and copper to gravel and sand, we depend on it for the basic building blocks of the modern world. It is a fast changing sector, as the clean energy transition and digitalization boost demand for […]
By Melanie Evans 1 January 2024 (The Wall Street Journal) – For Minnesotan Tara Young, the perfect beach conditions are when the water is, well, extra stimulating. She prefers the middle of winter, when most mornings she treks off to soak in a nearby frigid lake. The 38-year-old enjoys her chilly pastime so much she […]
By John O’sullivan 1 January 2024 (Irish Star) – Several parts of The United States could be underwater by the year 2050, according to a frightening map produced by Climate Central. The map shows what could happen if the sea levels, driven by climate change, continue to rise at rates of 2 mm and 4 mm […]
By Molly Bohannon and Ana Faguy 25 December 2023 (Forbes) – The United States has faced 649 mass shootings so far this year, making it the second-worst year for shootings in the nine years since the Gun Violence Archive began recording data—after a set of brutal mass shootings in Maine, California, Texas and Tennessee took […]
By Sara Jean Green and Lauren Girgis 29 December 2023 (The Seattle Times) – King County has seen over 1,000 fatal fentanyl overdoses in 2023, surpassing a record set last year by an astounding 47%. Over 1,050 of the county’s nearly 1,300 fatal overdoses this year involved fentanyl, sounding yet another alarm about the potency of the […]