U.S. in July 2022 sets new record for overnight warmth

People spend time at the park at dusk during a summer heat wave, 21 July 2022, in Hoboken, N.J. The continental United States in July 2022 set a record for overnight warmth, providing little relief from the day’s sizzling heat for people, animals, plants and the electric grid, meteorologists said. Photo: Andres Kudacki / AP Photo

August 14, 2022

U.S. in July 2022 sets new record for overnight warmth

By Seth Borenstein 13 August 2022 (AP) – Talk about hot nights, America got some for the history books last month. The continental United States in July set a record for overnight warmth, providing little relief from the day’s sizzling heat for people, animals, plants, and the electric grid, meteorologists said. The average low temperature for the […]

Workers pull up ornamental grass in Southern Nevada. Photo: CBS News

August 8, 2022

Due to climate change, Nevada says goodbye to grass – “I’d like to think we can all band together and solve problems without killing ourselves”

By John D’Amelio 7 August 2022 (CBS News) – In Las Vegas, Nevada, it’s come to this: climate change has helped make water ever more scarce, so under a new Nevada law, the grass has got to go. “When we look at outdoor water use in Southern Nevada, landscaping far and away is the largest water […]

Satellite view of Lake Mead on 6 July 2000 and 3 July 2022. Data: Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo: Lauren Dauphin / NASA Earth Observatory

July 22, 2022

Image of the Day: Satellite view of Lake Mead in 2000 and 2022 – “Declining water levels due to climate change and 20 years of ongoing drought have reshaped the park’s shorelines”

By Michael Carlowicz 20 July 2022 (NASA Earth Observatory) – Continuing a 22-year downward trend, water levels in Lake Mead stand at their lowest since April 1937, when the reservoir was still being filled for the first time. As of July 18, 2022, Lake Mead was filled to just 27 percent of capacity. The largest reservoir in the […]

Aerial view of a structure burning during a wildfire in Palo Pinto County, Texas on Monday, 18 July 2022. The 110-degree heat wave caused a record 24 wildfires in Texas this week. Two Texas wildfires consumed at least 21 homes amid the record heat wave. Photo: KDFW FOX 4 / AP

July 21, 2022

U.S. Central states, Texas break power use records again in heat wave – Texas Gov. Abbott’s inaction leads to huge electricity bills

20 July 2022 (Reuters) – Power use in Texas and other central states hit all-time highs Tuesday and could break that record again in Texas on Wednesday as homes and businesses crank up air conditioners to escape a brutal heat wave blanketing most of the country. Electric grid operators across the country said they have […]

Esther Elaar, a pregnant mother living in Loima, Turkana County, Northern Kenya, fetches and carries 20 litres of water for her family to use every day. Photo: BBC Media Action

June 26, 2022

Is the world running out of freshwater? “A lot of women have miscarried in this area while going to look for water”

By Simge Eva Dogan 1 June 2022 (Wellcome) – More than half of the world’s population faces water scarcity for at least one month a year. Safe water is a basic human right and essential for our health, whether we use it for drinking, food production or hygiene. But it’s also a finite resource. Only […]

Distance women must travel to receive abortion services after anti-abortion trigger laws go into effect, 24 June 2022. At the start of June 2022, nearly all women in America lived within a few hours’ drive of an abortion clinic. But with Roe v. Wade overturned, and the constitutional right to an abortion ended, clinics are quickly closing in huge swaths of the country. a quarter of U.S. women of reproductive age could have to travel more than 200 miles to obtain a legal abortion. Under the farthest-reaching scenarios, that number could rise to nearly half. Graphic: The New York Times

June 25, 2022

Digital surveillance in a nation of criminalized healthcare – Here’s a list of online healthcare resources as access to abortion in U.S. plummets

25 June 2022 (Desdemona Despair) – In the new era of criminalized health care, law enforcement agencies that are investigating abortion-related cases can use an American’s location data, messages, and search histories as evidence against them. Anybody who comes in contact with a pregnant woman in the U.S. potentially faces prosecution if an abortion-related case […]

Life expectancies across congressional districts in the United States, 2010-2015. Graphic: Takai, et al., 2022 / Social Science and Medicine

June 16, 2022

Graph of the Day: Life expectancy by U.S. congressional district, 2010–2015

25 March 2022 (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) – Researchers at the Harvard Geographic Insights Lab have launched the first-ever dashboard that tracks life expectancy on the U.S. congressional district level. The dashboard was released in conjunction with a 12 March 2022 paper in the journal Social Science & Medicine. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health co-authors of […]

Lake Mead water levels, 2017-2022. Graphic: Water-Data.com

June 7, 2022

Drought-stricken U.S. warned of looming “dead pool” – “It’s like watching this slow-motion catastrophe kind of unfold”

By Regan Morris and Sophie Long 4 June 2022 LOS ANGELES (BBC News) – A once-in-a-lifetime drought in the western part of the US is turning up dead bodies – but that’s the least of people’s worries. Sitting on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, Lake Mead – formed by the creation of the Hoover […]

Map showing spatial extent of heavy labor losses due to humid heat. Per capita heavy labor lost (a)–(c) and population-weighted heavy labor lost (d)–(f) for the Lancet Countdown method ('LCHCC', (a), (d)) and the laboratory exposure response to heat ('Laboratory', (b), (e)). Panels on right show the zonal median (c) and zonal sums (f) of heavy labor losses. Maps in the top row show mean h person−1 yr−1 lost due to background heat and humidity combined with internal heat generation in individuals conducting heavy labor. Maps in the bottom row display 'population-weighted' labor loss, which is defined as the product of the mean per-capita hours lost overlaid and the ILO heavy labor sector proportion of the working-age population (ages 15+) for 163 countries for which the data are available. Shading around zonal median (top right) and zonal sum (bottom right) lines outlines the range of zonal values for individual years. Graphic: Parsons, et al., 2022 / Environmental Research Letters

May 30, 2022

India’s savage heat exacts heaviest toll on outdoor workers – Humid heat causes 650 billion hours of annual lost labor globally, up at least 9 percent over four decades – “This is not just exhaustion or discomfort. It is actually killing people.”

By Anjana Pasricha 23 May 2022 NEW DELHI (VOA News) – Pradeep Kumar can earn nearly eight dollars a day selling the traditional Indian drink with cumin and lemon that he makes at his cart in a popular market in New Delhi — supposed to cool the body, the beverage has been much in demand […]

Pierce County drug poisoning deaths, January 2018–April 2021. Many of Pierce county's recent drug poisoning deaths included more than one drug. In 2019, Pierce County drug poisoning deaths were flattening along with state and were trending downward. However, drug poisoning deaths have risen dramatically in 2020 and 2021 despite increased harm reduction efforts, relaxed drug charges and relaxed Medications for Opioid Use disorder (MOUD) prescribing practices. Pierce County’s heroin deaths outpaced the State (comparison not shown). The number of heroin-involved deaths may be higher, since the body might metabolize heroin before labs detect it. Whites and males had the most poisoning deaths. Groups experiencing structural racism and inequitable health outcomes had the highest rates of poisoning deaths. These groups include American Indian/Alaska Natives, Hispanic/Latinx, and Black/African Americans. Deaths involving illicit fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, continued to surge into 2021. Locally, illicit drug makers and distributors add fentanyl to counterfeit prescription pills, tar heroin, and powders like methamphetamine without users’ knowledge. As a result, fentanyl is cheaper, easier to obtain, gets users hooked more quickly and keeps them coming back for larger doses. Both Pierce County and the State have experienced dramatic increases in poisoning deaths involving methamphetamine and other stimulants in 2020 and 2021, to which Naloxone (an emergency opioid blocker) doesn’t respond. Graphic: TPCHD

May 29, 2022

“Deaths Of Despair” on the rise in Pierce County, WA – “COVID-19 has been hard on everyone”

By Charles Woodman27 May 2022 TACOMA, WA (Patch) – The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department is reminding everyone: help is available if you need it. In an update Friday, the health department reported that deaths from suicide, alcohol or drug misuse had climbed from 351 in 2019 to 423 in 2020, and these “deaths of despair” […]