Hundreds of fires burned across western Russia on August 2, 2010, but it is the smoke that conveys the magnitude of the disaster in this true-color image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Dense gray-brown smoke extends across the width of this image, a distance of about 1,700 kilometers (1,000 […]
By Wanjiru MachariaPosted Tuesday, July 20 2010 at 21:00 Settlers evicted from South Western Mau are still in makeshift camps one year later even as the government plans to move to the next phase of evictions. While some left the camps after realising that nothing was forthcoming, more than 1,000 families are still languishing at […]
By Simon Shuster / MoscowMonday, Aug. 02, 2010 Russians are not used to heat waves. When the high temperatures that have overwhelmed Russia over the past six weeks first arrived in June, some 1,200 Russians drowned at the country’s beaches. “The majority of those who drowned were drunk,” the Emergencies Ministry concluded in mid-July, citing […]
By TERENCE ROTH in London and WILLIAM MAULDIN in MoscowAUGUST 3, 2010, 9:12 A.M. ET The scorching temperatures and dry skies threatening Russia’s wheat harvests have also been beating down on Western Europe, which is forecasting lower output of crops from French wheat to Italian tomatoes. Russia’s Agriculture Ministry Tuesday cut its forecast for the […]
By STEVEN LEE MYERSAugust 1, 2010 BAGHDAD — Ikbal Ali, a bureaucrat in a beaded head scarf, accompanied by a phalanx of police officers, quickly found what she was out looking for in the summer swelter: electricity thieves. Six black cables stretched from a power pole to a row of auto-repair shops, siphoning what few […]
This map shows trends in snow water equivalent in the western United States and part of Canada. Negative trends are shown by red circles and positive trends by blue. • From 1950 to 2000, April snow water equivalent declined at most of the measurement sites (see Figure 1), with some relative losses exceeding 75 percent. […]
The Macquarie Marshes – a vast, tangled sprawl of creeks and swamps between Nyngan and Walgett in the state’s northwest – has declined by about half since the 1960s because of the drought and the diversion of water for irrigation. … ”About 50 per cent of the wetland area is gone and more has been […]
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKYPublished: August 2, 2010 MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev on Monday declared a state of emergency in seven regions as forest and peat bog fires raged across Russia, killing dozens and leaving thousands homeless in a heat wave that has badly hurt Moscow and many other parts of the country. Moscow was […]
By CARL HARTMAN, For The Associated Press Mon Aug 2, 6:53 am ET The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes From a Climate-Changed Planet (Harper, $25.99), by Heidi Cullen: Climatologist Heidi Cullen was taken aback at her lecture on the prospects for global warming when a member of the audience […]
Smoke from the fires has swept as far as Moscow, cloaking the city in a veil of smog, 30 July 2010. BBC In pictures: Russia fires A burnt-out car sits in front of a destroyed house in the village of Mokhovoye, some 130 kilometers from Moscow on July 31, 2010. Hundreds of thousands of firefighters, […]
