Blogging the End of the World™
By Zhu Ningzhu27 August 2013 CHANGCHUN (Xinhua) – Floods and heavy rains have caused the death of at least 20 people and adversely affected more than 2.2 million in northeast China’s Jilin Province, local authorities said. Persistent rain has brought chaos to 56 county-level regions of the province, forcing 239,000 people to be evacuated, according […]
By Holli Riebeek26 August 2013 (NASA) – The winter of 2013 was among the driest on record for California, setting the stage for an active fire season. By August 26, the Rim Fire had made its way into the record books. At just 15 percent contained, the fire is now the 13th largest in California […]
By Jeff Barnard, with additional writing by Matthew Daly in Washington21 August 2013 GRANTS PASS, Oregon (AP) – Running out of money to fight wildfires at the peak of the season, the U.S. Forest Service is diverting $600 million from timber, recreation, and other areas to fill the gap. The nation’s top wildfire-fighting agency was […]
By Richard Ingham 25 August 2013 (AFP) – A leaden cloak of responsibility lies on the shoulders of UN scientists as they put the final touches to the first volume of a massive report that will give the world the most detailed picture yet of climate change. Due to be unveiled in Stockholm on September […]
By Julian Ryall, Tokyo26 August 2013 TOKYO (Telegraph) – Toshimitsu Motegi, the minister of trade and industry visited the plant on Monday to determine progress to date on decommissioning the three damaged reactors at the plant. Speaking after being shown around the site, Mr Motegi said, “The urgency of the situation is very high. From […]
By Dan Elliott, with contributions from Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, N.M., and Bob Christie in Phoenix27 August 2013 MANITOU SPRINGS, Colorado (AP) – Drenching rain in the wildfire-blackened hills below Colorado’s Pikes Peak sent a torrent of rock and mud into the tourist town of Manitou Springs this month, killing a 53-year-old man and […]
By Ilya Arkhipov and Marina Sysoyeva17 August 2013 (Bloomberg) – Five regions in Russia’s Far East declared a state of emergency amid flooding assessed by the national weather center as the worst in the country’s history. Floods were heaviest in the Amur region, Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov said today on a videoconference. Conditions are set […]
By Mark Tran 23 August 2013 (The Guardian) – Forty-eight people have been killed and more than 500,000 affected by the worst floods in Sudan in quarter of a century. The region around the capital, Khartoum, was particularly badly hit, with at least 15,000 homes destroyed and thousands of others damaged. Across Sudan, at least […]
From Nick Valencia, Catherine E. Shoichet, and Phil Gast25 August 2013 Yosemite National Park, California (CNN) – Susan Loesch and Curtis Evans just started settling into their second home in California’s Sierra foothills a few months ago. Now, they’re worried it could go up in smoke as a massive wildfire spreads. “This is kind of […]
8 August 2013 (CalEPA) – Since 1906, the fraction of annual unimpaired runoff into the Sacramento River that occurs from April through July (represented as a percentage of total water year runoff) from the accumulated winter precipitation in the Sierra Nevada, has decreased by about 9 percent. The Sacramento River system is the sum of […]
