climate change – Page 62 – Desdemona Despair

Time series of climate-related responses to anthropogenic drivers, 1990-2020. Out of the 31 tracked planetary vital signs, 18 were at new all-time record lows or highs in 2020. Data obtained before and after the publication of Ripple and colleagues (2020) are shown in gray and red respectively. For variables with relatively high variability, local regression trend lines are shown in black. The variables were measured at various frequencies (e.g., annual, monthly, weekly). The labels on the x-axis correspond to midpoints of years. Sources and additional details about each variable are provided in the supplemental material. Graphic: Ripple, et al., 2021 / BioScience

July 31, 2021

World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2021 – Humans face untold suffering from “the consequences of unrelenting business as usual”

28 July 2021 (BioScience) – In 2019, Ripple and colleagues (2020) warned of untold suffering and declared a climate emergency together with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries. They presented graphs of planetary vital signs indicating very troubling trends, along with little progress by humanity to address climate change. On the basis of […]

Map showing rainfall anomalies (percentage) for seasons of 2020 in the UK. This was the fifth wettest year for UK in a series from 1862, and the wettest year since 2000. It was a particularly wet year across parts of north-west England and south-west Scotland which received more than 125% of average fairly widely, and some locations recorded more than 135% of average. Winter refers to the period December 2019 to February 2020. Note that winter 2021 (December 2020 to February 2021) will appear in State of the UK Climate 2021. Graphic: Met Office

July 31, 2021

Climate change continued across the UK in 2020 – 2020 was the first year that rainfall, temperature, and sunshine values all were in the top ten in the same year

By Karen Graham 29 July 2021 (Digital Journal) – The United Kingdom’s climate has continued to warm, with the decade 2011–2020 providing a 10-year “snapshot” of the most recent of the UK’s climate events and how this compares to historical records. According to the Met Office, The Royal Meteorological Society’s latest analysis of the UK climate – […]

Indian National Disaster Response Force personnel rescue people from areas inundated with floodwaters on 26 July 2021 in Maharashtra state, India. Photo: National Disaster Response Force / EPA-EFE

July 26, 2021

India begins landslide, flood clean-up as deadly monsoon rains ease – “We’ve seen floods before in 1965 and 2005, but this was worse than before”

26 July 2021 (AFP) – Rescuers waded through waist-deep mud in western India Monday to reach injured residents and start a massive clean-up after heavy monsoon rains triggered landslides and floods that killed 159 people. India’s western coast was hit by severe rainstorms over several days, with a quarter of a million people evacuated from […]

A firefighter works on the Dixie Fire in California, 22 July 2021. Photo: InciWeb

July 25, 2021

Evacuations ordered after two California wildfires converge into one

By Maria Caspani 25 July 2021 (Reuters) – Crews and officials battling a large fire that has incinerated more than 190,000 acres (77,000 hectares) in northern California braced for the possibility on Sunday that smoke columns could spawn lightning storms capable of igniting more blazes. The swarming Dixie fire in Butte County, north of Sacramento, […]

Firefighters work at the scene of forest fire near Andreyevsky village outside Tyumen, western Siberia, Russia, on 16 June 2021. Wildfires in Siberia are releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases, scientists say, contributing to global warming. Photo: Maksim Slutsky / AP Photo

July 25, 2021

Siberia hit by unprecedented wildfires – 1.5 million hectares burn after driest weather in 150 years – “Everything is on fire”

By Andrew Roth 20 July 2021 MOSCOW (The Guardian) – Every morning and evening for the last few days, shifts of young villagers have headed out into the taiga forest around Teryut with a seemingly impossible task: to quell the raging fires that have burned closer and closer for a month, shrouding this remote eastern […]

Black carbon mass density over North America from GEOS-5, 21 July 2021. Smoke from wildfires in the U.S. West poured into the eastern U.S. on 20-21 July 2021. In New York City, levels of fine particulate pollution rose above 170 on the air quality index, a level considered harmful even for healthy people. Data: GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC. Graphic: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

July 25, 2021

Skies turn hazy from Pittsburgh to Washington to Boston, as smoke from fires in Canada pour into the U.S. Northeast

By Adam Voiland 23 July 2021 (NASA) – While plumes of wildfire smoke from western North America have passed over the northeastern U.S. and Canada multiple times each summer in recent years, they often go unnoticed. That is because smoke that spreads far from its source typically moves at a fairly high altitude—between 5 and 10 kilometers—as […]

Forecast NWS NDFD Max temperatures (F) and departure from climatology (fill) in the United States, 25 July 2021 - 28 July 2021. Graphic: NOAA / NWS

July 25, 2021

Next 2021 heatwave to cover huge swath of U.S., bringing high temperatures to millions

By Jeanine Santucci 24 July 2021 (USA TODAY) – Most of the nation can expect above average temperatures in coming days as a giant heat wave is expected to spread across much of the continental U.S. beginning next week. The heat wave will bring temperatures that are at least 5 to 10 degrees higher than average to much of the country, according […]

Aerial view of vehicles stranded in floodwater on 20 July 2021 after record rainfall in Zhengzhou, Henan Province of China. Photo: Jiao Xiaoxiang / VCG / Getty Images

July 21, 2021

Rescue efforts launched after record floods in central China displace 1.2 million – “Worst rain in a thousand years” in Henan province, “worst in Zhengzhou history” with a year’s worth of rain falling in a single day

By Alicia Chen, Lyric Li, and Eva Dou 21 July 2021 (The Washington Post) – Wang Peng rushed to join flood rescue efforts in Zhengzhou on Wednesday, as the central Chinese city was inundated with record rain. But his group of volunteers found themselves overwhelmed, with streets turned into rivers. “Once I got to the […]

A woman collects water from a puddle in the dried Manambovo river bed in Tsihombe, Madagascar, 2 May 2021. Photo: Viviane Rakotoarivony / UN / REUTERS

July 20, 2021

UN says 400,000 are approaching starvation in Madagascar amid back-to-back droughts – “This is not because of war or conflict, this is because of climate change”

UNITED NATIONS, 26 June 2021 (AP) – The U.N. World Food Program says southern Madagascar is in the throes of back-to-back droughts that are pushing 400,000 people toward starvation, and have already caused deaths from severe hunger. Lola Castro, WFP’s regional director in southern Africa, told a news conference Friday that she witnessed “a very dramatic […]

Satellite view of the Great Salt Lake on 24 September 2011 and 9 July 2021. Photo: ESA / Sentinel 2 / NASA Worldview / LANDSAT 5

July 19, 2021

Great Salt Lake is shrinking fast – Scientists demand action before it becomes a toxic dustbin – “We’re on the doorstep of a catastrophe”

By Lucy Kafanov, Leslie Perrot, and Eliott C. McLaughlin 17 July 2021 Great Salt Lake, Utah (CNN) – Great Salt Lake is also known as America’s Dead Sea — owing to a likeness to its much smaller Middle Eastern counterpart — but scientists worry the moniker could soon take new meaning. Human water consumption and […]