By Sara Reardon 15 August 2012 As the United States’ extended heat wave and drought threaten to raise global food prices, energy production is also feeling the pressure. Across the nation, power plants are becoming overheated and shutting down or running at lower capacity; drilling operations struggle to get the water they need, and crops […]
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy By Thanh Truong, NBC News14 August 2012 WARREN COUNTY, Missouri – There’s a desperate search for water under way throughout Missouri where 95 percent of the state is enduring extreme levels of drought. In the rural area of Truxton, farmer Rusty Lee estimates […]
14 August 2012 (NBC News) – Wildfires raged in several Western states on Tuesday, destroying dozens of homes and threatening hundreds more. In Idaho, one firefighter was killed by a falling tree. A fire in central Washington grew rapidly overnight and destroyed more than 60 homes, spurring the state’s governor to declare an emergency in […]
Rome, 9 August 2012 (FAO) – The FAO Food Price Index climbed 6 percent in July 2012 after three months of decline. The Index, which measures the monthly change in the international prices of a basket of food commodities, averaged 213 points, up 12 points from June. That was still well below the peak of […]
[12,588 hectares = 48.6 square miles. This afternoon, the sky in Seattle is an eerie, hazy yellow from Siberia smoke carried on the jet stream, the incinerated remains of trees and animals. This may be the most under-reported story of 2012.] By Jennifer Zielinski 13 August 2012 It may be forest fire season but the […]
By David Biello, Scientific American27 July 2012 Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into […]
Record drought across the United States in 2012 followed a year of record flooding in the Mid-West in 2011, producing two very different areas of hypoxia, or oxygen deficient water, on the Louisiana continental shelf. The 2012 area of low oxygen, commonly known as the ‘Dead Zone,’ measured 7,480 square kilometers (= 2,889 square miles) […]
MOSCOW, 3 August 2012 (RIA Novosti) – Fires are spreading across vast Siberian forests in a flashback to the summer of 2010, when the worst drought on record sparked fires that killed dozens of Russians. The total area of forests gripped by fire in Russia has increased to 11 million-12 million hectares, Grigory Kuksin, head […]
Caption by Adam Voiland7 August 2012 For more than a decade, scientists have used data from instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites to map the locations of wildfires burning around the globe. Now researchers have a new tool for observing fire. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (S-NPP) carries an instrument so sensitive to […]
By the Editors 6 August 2012 A new analysis of worldwide temperatures over the past 60 years has found more evidence that global warming is already upon us, and is responsible for extreme heat waves — such as the ones in Russia in 2010 and in Texas and Oklahoma last year. Naturally, this refocuses attention […]
