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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]