By Lee Ying Shan 18 April 2023 (CNBC) – From China to the U.S. to the European Union, rice production is falling and driving up prices for more than 3.5 billion people across the globe, particularly in Asia-Pacific – which consumes 90% of the world’s rice. The global rice market is set to log its largest […]
By Richard Burkard 17 April 2023 (Knewz) – It sounds like a B-grade movie title: The approach of the 10-million pound blob. Yet it’s real, and it’s forcing swimmers and owners of beachfront property in Florida to take action. Knewz noted in late March that a giant mass of sargassum seaweed was spotted from space. It […]
By Dan Stillman 17 April 2023 (The Washington Post) – Numerous heat records have been broken across Southeast Asia, China and other parts of the continent in recent days as the region remains in the grip of a dangerously scorching heat wave, with Thailand in particular experiencing unusually extreme conditions. Weather historian Maximiliano Herrera is describing […]
By Sid Perkins 14 April 2023 (Science News) – A two-week-long heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in 2021 helped make that summer a record breaker for the region (SN: 7/7/21). Now, tree ring data from the area’s forests reveal that the summer of 2021 was also the region’s hottest of the last millennium. The average temperature […]
By Mark Waghorn 12 April 2023 (SWNS) – Droughts are destroying Earth’s biggest carbon sink on land, according to new research. Soil stores more greenhouse gas than plants and the atmosphere combined – thanks to the microbes that live in it. Moisture plays a key role in the process. Lack of rainfall is disrupting this […]
By Dinah Voyles Pulver 12 April 2023 (USA TODAY) – The avian influenza stalking wild and domestic bird flocks across the country has killed at least six endangered California condors since March and is suspected of killing another dozen. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Wednesday it’s now attributing all condor deaths in the […]
By Arjun V.K. Sharma 12 April 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – Last month, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change charted global temperatures to be 1.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and on a destructive trajectory to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the early 2030s. This intersects surprisingly with another piece of news: the […]
By Jeremy Ney 12 April 2023 (TIME) – The average U.S. life expectancy has hit its worst decline in 100 years and America’s standing is dismal among peer nations. But the average obscures a more complex story. The United States is facing the greatest divide in life expectancy across regions in the last 40 years. Research from American […]
By Jim Waymer 12 April 2023 (Florida Today) – We’re already in the weeds. All that stringy stuff that washed up on Brevard County beaches this past week is just the beginning of what scientists predict will grow into the largest-ever bloom of Sargassum seaweed ever recorded. Sargassum, which the Caribbean Sea delivers seasonally to the Gulf Stream […]
By Matthew Cappucci 7 April 2023 (The Washington Post) – March 2023 will go down in the books as tying for the second warmest March on record. That’s according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union. Temperatures globally were several degrees above average in most places outside the western U.S., where a […]