Potential heat stress risk in 2060-2099 due to combined climate and population projections. Periods of extremely high heat are projected to double across the lower 48 states by 2100 if the world continues to emit high levels of greenhouse gases. The heat stress will be felt most strongly in areas with growing populations. The Pacific Northwest, central California, and the Great Lakes region could experience as much as a threefold increase compared to the past 40 years. Graphic: Mukherjee, et al., 2021 / Earth’s Future

Heat stress in U.S. may double by century’s end

7 June 2021 (NSF) – Periods of extremely high heat are projected to double across the lower 48 states by 2100 if the world continues to emit high levels of greenhouse gases, according to a new study in Earth’s Future, an American Geophysical Union journal. The heat stress will be felt most strongly in areas with growing populations. […]

A home destroyed in the 2020 North Complex Fire sits above Lake Oroville on 23 May 2021, in Oroville, California. At the time of this photo, drought had reduced the reservoir to 39 percent of capacity and 46 percent of its historical average. Photo: Noah Berger / AP Photo

Drought saps California reservoirs as hot, dry summer looms – “It makes me feel like our planet is literally drying up,”

By Adam Beam 17 June 2021 OROVILLE, Califorina (AP) – Each year Lake Oroville helps water a quarter of the nation’s crops, sustain endangered salmon beneath its massive earthen dam and anchor the tourism economy of a Northern California county that must rebuild seemingly every year after unrelenting wildfires. But the mighty lake — a […]

Anti‐Asian hate crime incidents reported to police in select U.S. cities, 2019‐2020. Graphic: CSUSB Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150 percent in 2020, mostly in N.Y. and L.A. – “What Trump did is that he weaponized it”

By Kimmy Yam 9 March 2021 (NBC News) – An analysis of police department statistics has revealed that the United States experienced a significant hike in anti-Asian hate crimes last year across major cities. The analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, this month examined hate […]

Western Monarch butterfly abundance at 149 overwintering sites in California, 2017-2021. These critically low numbers follow two years with fewer than 30,000 butterflies—the previous record lows, indicating that the western monarch butterfly migration is nearing collapse. Sites were visited during both the Thanksgiving and New Year’s Counts during the 2020–2021 count season. Graphic: Xerces Society

Western Monarch butterfly population closer to extinction – No Endangered Species Act protection in sight – “In only a few decades, a migration of millions has been reduced to less than two thousand butterflies”

PORTLAND, Oregon, 19 January 2021 – The Xerces Society today announced that only 1,914 monarch butterflies were recorded overwintering on the California coast this year. This critically low number follows two years with fewer than 30,000 butterflies—the previous record lows—indicating that the western monarch butterfly migration is nearing collapse. The final results from the 24th annual Western […]

Construction crews work on a section of Highway 1 which collapsed into the Pacific Ocean near Big Sur, California on 31 January 2021. Heavy rains caused debris flows of trees, boulders, and mud that washed out a 150-foot section of the road. Photo: Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images

Floods after wildfires are washing California’s Pacific Coast Highway into the ocean – “It was great while it lasted”

By Joel Shannon and Doyle Rice 2 March 2021 (USA TODAY) – Soaring mountains on one side of the road and the Pacific Ocean on the other: It was 1956 and Gary Griggs was experiencing California State Route 1 for the first time. He was a child, but in the following decades he would drive […]

Infographic showing costs of natural disasters in 2020. Global losses from natural disasters in 2020 came to US$210 billion. The hurricane season in the North Atlantic was hyperactive, with a record-setting 30 storms, 13 of which reached hurricane status. Graphic: Munich Re

Global natural disaster figures for 2020 – “The hurricane season in the North Atlantic was hyperactive”

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 […]

Satellite view of wildfires on the U.S. West Coast between 12 September 2020 and 16 September 2020. Video: Michael Benson / CIRA / NOAA

Watching Earth burn – “The war has started. We’re losing.”

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 […]

National Risk Index (NRI) map of the United States. Graphic: FEMA

New FEMA index shows riskiest spot for rising seas is 50 miles from the ocean

By Thomas Frank 25 November 2020 (E&E News) – The county most at risk for coastal flooding is not in Florida, North Carolina or New Jersey, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It’s not even on a coast. It’s Cowlitz County, Washington, population 102,000, about 50 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean on the […]

August 2020 blended land and sea surface temperature percentiles. Graphic: NOAA / NCEI

August 2020 was the world’s second-warmest August on record – The year 2020 has more than a 99.9 percent chance to rank among the five warmest years on record

By Jeff Masters, Ph.D. 15 September 2020 (Yale Climate Connections) – August 2020 was the second-warmest August since global record keeping began in 1880, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI, reported September 14. The month was just 0.04 degrees Celsius behind the record set in August 2016. NASA rated the month as the third-warmest August on […]

The Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite captured this extremely think blanket of smoke along the West Coast on 9 September 2020. OMPS measured smoke clouds over the western U.S. with higher aerosol index values than anything Colin Seftor, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says he has ever seen with the instrument. Graphic: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

California’s wildfire smoke plumes are unlike anything previously seen – California fire carbon emissions in 2020 exceed previous record by nearly 2 times

By Matthew Cappucci 12 September 2020 (The Washington Post) – More than 3.1 million acres have burned in California this year, part of a record fire season that still has four months to go. A suffocating cloud of smoke has veiled the West Coast for days, extending more than a thousand miles above the Pacific. And the […]

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