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 […]
[UPDATE: Des was suspicious of this number and emailed BLM. Turns out it’s a typo. The actual number is 9,276,416 acres burned year-to-date]. 10 October 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Just last week, the NIFC site computed the year-to-date acres burned for 2015 to be neck-and-neck with the most recent record year, 2006, at slightly above […]
By Joseph Serna10 October 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – A heat wave gripped Southern California on Friday, with one Ventura County community hitting the highest temperature reading since record-keeping began. A weather station near Camarillo Airport recorded 108 degrees, breaking the all-time high of 103 recorded on 23 September 1978. Elsewhere, triple-digit readings were recorded […]
TULARE COUNTY, 29 September 2015 (CBS) – California’s four year drought has the whole state in a water crisis, but no area has been harder hit than the state’s Central Valley, where the wells have run dry. In the small town of Okieville, in Tulare County, residents are struggling to stay in their homes. At […]
24 September 2015 (University of California, Davis) – Roughly a quarter of the fish sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia contained human-made debris — plastic or fibrous material — in their guts, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, and Hasanuddin University in Indonesia. The study, published today in the […]
By Michael Casey 29 September 2015 (CBS News) – Federal officials are trying to understand what is behind a sharp rise in the stranding and deaths of threatened fur seals, with dozens washing up along the California coast this year. Designating it an Unusual Mortality Event, NOAA Fisheries said that as many as 80 Guadalupe […]
By Doyle Rice25 September 2015 (USA TODAY) – The amount of land burned by wildfires in the U.S. this year has surpassed 9 million acres, according to data released Thursday by the National Interagency Fire Center. This is only the fourth time on record the country has reached the 9 million-acre mark, center spokesman Randall […]
By Kelly Ryan24 September 2015 FOLSOM LAKE (CBS13) – A Northern California reservoir ran dry overnight, killing thousands of fish and leaving residents looking for answers. While a $3.5 million drought safety net at Folsom Lake finishes, a lake in another part of the state is left high and dry. Thousands of fish lay dead […]
By Sarah Kaplan 25 September 2015 (The Guardian) – Vast swathes of forest are so brittle and bone-dry that they burn up in an instant. A vicious wildfire, whipped up by hot, arid winds and moving faster than anything in recent memory, consumed tens of thousands of hectares in a matter of hours. Hundreds of […]
By Nicholas St. Fleur14 September 2015 (The New York Times) – The snow that blanketed the Sierra Nevada in California last winter, and that was supposed to serve as an essential source of fresh water for the drought-stricken state, was at its lowest levels in the last 500 years, according to a new study. The […]
