By Joe Cochrane30 October 2015 JAKARTA (The New York Times) – A disoriented, pregnant orangutan, her treetop home in Indonesian Borneo reduced to charred wood, is rushed to a rehabilitation centre by conservationists, who dodged walls of fire and toxic smoke. Veterinarians care for 16 abandoned baby orangutans already living at the centre. The babies […]
By Adam Voiland19 October 2015 (NASA) – Heavy smoke continued to pour from peat fires in Borneo, Indonesia, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image on 19 October 2015. Red outlines indicate hot spots where the sensor detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires. Gray smoke hovers […]
By John R. Platt22 October 2015 (takepart.com) – Indonesia is on fire. Right now, tens of thousands of small forest fires are burning across the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, the only habitats for orangutans and other rare species. Many of the fires appear to have been intentionally set by palm oil companies, which employ […]
By Jonathan Watts30 October 2015 (Rio de Janeiro) – Brazilian rangers, firefighters and indigenous communities are battling against a wildfire that has blazed for two months and devastated some of the last Amazonian forest in the northern state of Maranhão, including part of the territory of an uncontacted tribe. The fire – which has spread […]
[Long-time Desdemona readers will recall that smoke from peatland fires killed many people in Moscow in 2010. Dense wildfire smog grips Moscow in heatwave, Heat probably killed thousands in Moscow –Des] By Kate Lamb26 October 2015 (Jakarta) – Raging forest fires across Indonesia are thought to be responsible for up to half a million cases […]
By Natasha Geiling 1 October 2015 (ClimateProgress) – On Thursday, ten leaders from some of the world’s biggest food companies urged Congress to support a strong global agreement on climate action, in advance of the U.N. climate talks happening in Paris this December. In a letter published in both the Washington Post and Financial Times, […]
31 January 1988 7 February 2014 By Adam Voiland14 October 2015 (NASA) – White-flowered mangroves—nila in Tagalog—once crowded the shores of the Pasig River, a tidal waterway in the Philippines that connects Laguna de Bay with the South China Sea. The flowers were so numerous that the settlement at the western end of the […]
By Ben Doherty 11 October 2015 (The Guardian) – Two dozen people have already died from hunger and drinking contaminated water in drought-stricken Papua New Guinea, but the looming El Niño crisis could leave more than four million people across the Pacific without enough food or clean water. The El Niño weather pattern – when […]
By Jim Robbins9 October 2015 (The New York Times) – Like California, much of Brazil is gripped by one of the worst droughts in its history. Huge reservoirs are bone dry and water has been rationed in São Paulo, a megacity of 20 million people; in Rio; and in many other places. Drought is usually […]
By Fred Pearce9 October 2015 (The Guardian) – Drought is arguably the biggest single threat from climate change. Its impacts are global. Some say drought triggered the crisis in Syria that sent tens of thousands of refugees heading for Europe this summer. Relief failures and poor drought forecasting caused innumerable deaths in the Horn of […]
