‘We are thirsty’, say Tunisians as drought creates tensions

TUNIS, 25 September 2016 (Associated Press) – Struggling with extremism and economic woes, Tunisia now faces another menace: persistent drought across several regions that is creating new social tensions and threatening farming, a pillar of the economy. Farmland is too parched to cultivate crops and rural protesters have tried disrupting water supplies to the capital, […]

2016’s hellish summer weather: A told-you-so climate moment?

By Seth Borenstein20 September 2016 WASHINGTON (Associated Press) – This summer’s weather was relentless and hellish, crowded with the type of record-smashing extremes that scientists have long warned about. The season ends Wednesday, and not a moment too soon. Summer featured floods that killed hundreds of people and caused more than $50 billion in losses […]

Bark beetles: How tiny tree killers have worsened California wildfires – ‘It’s gone from critical to catastrophic’

By Max Blau and Paul Vercammen24 August 2016 (CNN) – A decade ago, Ben Ray had hoped to ease into retirement at his two-story wooden house nestled in the heart of the Sequoia National Forest. But the 79-year-old central California general contractor, who built homes for his future neighbors in Sierra Nevada Mountain communities such […]

Plagues devastating forests across the U.S. West – ‘We’re talking millions of trees killed, whole mountain sides dying’

By Oliver Milman and Alan Yuhas19 September 2016 (Guardian) – JB Friday hacked at a rain-sodden tree with a small axe, splitting open a part of the trunk. The wood was riven with dark stripes, signs of a mysterious disease that has ravaged the US’s only rainforests – and just one of the plagues that […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of Siberia wildfires in September 2016

15 September 2016 (NASA) – Wildfires continue to burn, even as summer turns to fall in Siberia. 2016 has been active for fires in the region. This natural-color image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on September 15, 2016. Red outlines show warm land surface temperatures—a sign of […]

Record-breaking warming and extreme drought in the Amazon rainforest during the 2015–2016 El Niño

[Translation by Google.] 8 September 2016 (Asociación RUVID) – A study led by researchers at the Global Change Unit of the University of Valencia (UV) in the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL-PCB) shows the impact on Amazon forests of the 2015/2016 El Niño in the current scenario of climate change. Areas in extreme drought and changes […]

U.S. endures hottest summer nights on record – California, Connecticut, and Rhode Island each had record hot summer

By Bob Henson 8 September 2016 (wunderground.com) – The broiling summer of 2016 placed fifth hottest among the 122 summers since records began in 1895 for the contiguous U.S., according to NOAA analyses released on Thursday. Even more impressive, this past summer (June through August) saw the highest average minimum temperature on record–certainly no surprise […]

The alarming rise of fires in the Brazilian Amazon

By Natália Girão Rodrigues de Mello8 September 2016 (mongabay.com) – From the speeding boat, the jungle was a single block of green, its shades recycled across the riverbank and reflected on the thick, black water. The steam rolling from the trees was as foamy as the tracks we were leaving. Birds cut the clouds with […]

Graph of the Day: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, July 2015-June 2016

[Translation by Bing Translator.] 6 September 2016 (Imazon) – Forest mega-degradation by burning detected in June 2016 by SAD was confirmed with more detailed analyses of satellite images. Degraded area is greater than double the average of deforestation detected by satellite from 2010 to 2015: 15,043 km² of accumulated forest degradation area detected by SAD […]

Deforestation reducing monsoon rainfall in India – ‘That is really alarming’

By Shreya Dasgupta2 September 2016 (mongabay.com) – Around 80 percent of India’s annual rainfall comes from the Indian summer monsoon, spanning from June to September. But deforestation over the past few decades has caused summer monsoon to weaken, resulting in a considerable decline in rainfall, concludes the study published in Scientific Reports. “Monsoon is believed […]

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