By Fernanda Santos1 August 2015 WALLA WALLA, Washington (The New York Times) – Another summer of record-breaking drought and heat has seized the West, setting off costly and destructive wildfires from Southern California, where a single blaze burned more than 30,000 acres of national forest east of Los Angeles, to Montana, where a fast-moving fire […]
By Doyle Rice1 August 2015 (USA Today) – Freakishly hot, dry weather in the Pacific Northwest is killing millions of fish in the overheated waters of the region’s rivers and streams. “We’ve lost about 1.5 million juvenile fish this year due to drought conditions at our hatcheries,” Ron Warren of Washington State’s Department of Fish […]
By Adam Voiland1 August 2015 (NASA) – In mid-July, Alaska seemed to be headed toward its worst wildfire year on record. But then a period of cool, wet weather arrived later in the month and calmed several large fires. Government officials also trimmed tens of thousands of acres from earlier estimates of burned area after […]
By Jeff Chiu and Haven Daley1 August 2015 LOWER LAKE, California (Associated Press) – Blazes raging in forests and woodlands across California have taken the life of a firefighter and forced hundreds of people to flee their homes as an army of firefighters continue to battle them from the air and the ground. Twenty-three large […]
29 July 2015 (Tuoi Tre News) – The Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s biggest granary, home to a widespread network of rivers and canals, has been threatened by the rising level of salt water flowing into rice fields and farms. There have been warnings about such a situation for years, but authorities in Vietnam have failed to […]
By Adam Voiland28 July 2015 (NASA) – A new analysis of 35 years of meteorological data confirms fire seasons have become longer. Fire season, which varies in timing and duration based on location, is defined as the time of year when wildfires are most likely to ignite, spread, and affect resources. In the map above, […]
By Laura Geggel 25 July 2015 (LiveScience) – The mighty megafauna of the last ice age, including the wooly mammoths, short-faced bears and cave lions, largely went extinct because of rapid climate-warming events, a new study finds. During the unstable climate of the Late Pleistocene, about 60,000 to 12,000 years ago, abrupt climate spikes, called […]
BANG PLA MA, Thailand, 9 July 2015 (AFP) – Ms Ranong Rachasing would normally be in her fields at this time of the year, toiling in ankle-deep water to make her rice paddies bloom through knowledge honed by years of cultivating Thailand’s most celebrated export. Now the wizened 57-year-old’s fields lie fallow, baking under a […]
By Jeff Masters 24 July 2015 (Weather Underground) – Record warm sea surface temperatures in Hawaii’s waters threaten to bring a second consecutive year of record coral bleaching to their precious coral reefs this summer. According to NOAA, ocean temperatures in the waters near and to the south of the Hawaiian Islands were 1 – […]
By Chris Mooney 26 July 2015 FAIRBANKS, Alaska (Washington Post) – Hundreds of wildfires are continually whipping across this state this summer, leaving in their wake millions of acres of charred trees and blackened earth. At the Fairbanks compound of the state’s Division of Forestry recently, workers were busy washing a mountain of soot-covered fire […]
