By Hannah Ellis-Petersen 8 February 2021 DELHI, India (The Guardian) – Twenty six bodies have been recovered in the Indian Himalayas and scores more people are still missing after a second day of rescue efforts after a glacier break that caused an avalanche of water and debris to engulf a river valley and demolish two […]
ZURICH, 6 January 2021 (PERILS) – PERILS, the independent Zurich-based organisation providing industry-wide catastrophe insurance data, has today disclosed its fourth and final industry loss estimate for the Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. The final estimate of the insurance market loss is AUD 1,866m. This compares to the third loss estimate of AUD 1,861 million which […]
By James Temple 1 January 2021 (Technology Review) – There’s a case to be made that 2020, for all the sacrifices it demanded and tragedies it inflicted, could at least mark a turning point on climate change. It’s now possible that global oil demand and greenhouse-gas emissions may have already peaked in 2019, since the pandemic could slow economic […]
7 January 2021 (Munich Re) – Global losses from natural disasters in 2020 came to US$ 210bn, of which some US$ 82bn was insured. Both overall losses and insured losses were significantly higher than in the previous year (2019: US$ 166bn and US$ 57bn respectively). The US share of losses was rather high: Natural disasters in the […]
By Grahame Madge 8 January 2021 (Met Office) – In 2021, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach levels 50% higher than before the industrial revolution, due to human-caused emissions, says a Met Office forecast. The Met Office predicts that annual average CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, will be 2.29 ± 0.55 parts per million (ppm) […]
By Damian Carrington 8 January 2021 (The Guardian) – The climate crisis continued unabated in 2020, with the joint highest global temperatures on record, alarming heat and record wildfires in the Arctic, and a record 29 tropical storms in the Atlantic. Despite a 7% fall in fossil fuel burning due to coronavirus lockdowns, heat-trapping carbon dioxide continued to build […]
By Christopher Flavelle 1 January 2021 (The New York Times) – The National Climate Assessment, America’s premier contribution to climate knowledge, stands out for many reasons: Hundreds of scientists across the federal government and academia join forces to compile the best insights available on climate change. The results, released just twice a decade or so, […]
By Gwladys Fouche 1 January 2021 OSLO (Reuters) – Rescuers found one body on Friday, two days after a landslide in southern Norway swept away at least nine buildings, police said, with nine people still missing. Another 10 people were injured after Wednesday’s landslide in the residential area in the Gjerdrum municipality, about 30 km […]
By Lynda V. Mapes 1 January 2021 (The Seattle Times) – They are as Seattle as the Space Needle. But Lake Washington sockeye, once the largest run of sockeye in the Lower 48, are failing. The smallest run on record returned to the Cedar River in 2020, a bottoming out after years of declines. There […]
By Michael Benson 28 December 2020 (The New York Times) – I have a pastime, one that used to give me considerable pleasure, but lately it has morphed into a source of anxiety, even horror: earth-watching. Let me explain. The earth from space is an incomparably lovely sight. I mean the whole planet, pole to […]
