By Thomas Erdbrink18 December 2015 POUZE KHOON, Iran (The New York Times) – The early-morning sun meagerly brightened the gloom of this sad township, a collection of empty, crumbling houses along a highway through the dusty desert landscape in southeastern Iran. Until a decade or so ago, Amin Shoul would come here every year to […]
By Chris Mooney21 December 2015 (Washington Post) – In a troubling new study just out in Nature Climate Change, a group of researchers says that a warming climate could trigger a “massive” dieoff of coniferous trees, such as junipers and piñon pines, in the U.S. southwest sometime this century. The study is based on both […]
By Chris Arsenault 30 October 2015 TORONTO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – New satellite data shows Brazil’s drought is worse than previously thought, with the southeast losing 56 trillion liters of water in each of the past three years – more than enough to fill Lake Tahoe, a NASA scientist said on Friday. The country’s most […]
By Karen Graham 7 November 2015 (Digital Journal) – The Pacific Flyway is a major north-south flyway for migrating birds, extending from Alaska down to Patagonia. California is part of the flight path, and the state’s extended drought in now threatening the health of these travelers. In the northern part of California’s Central Valley is […]
19 November 2015 (IRIN) – Alarm bells are ringing for a food emergency in Ethiopia. The UN says 15 million people will need help over the coming months. The government, wary of stigma and therefore hesitant to ask for help, has nevertheless said more than eight million Ethiopians need food assistance. Extra imports to stem […]
By Monte Morin28 November 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – A fog of suffocating smoke settles over the Indonesian countryside, sickening hundreds of thousands of people and triggering an environmental crisis. In Peru, officials abandon plans to host the lucrative Dakar Rally and prepare instead for torrential rains and devastating floods. And in Ethiopia, crops perish […]
26 November 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Because 2015 is certain to be the hottest year on record globally, it’s reasonable to expect that it will also be the worst year for wildfires. In the U.S., this has turned out to be the case: wildfires in 2015 have exceeded the record of 9.8 million acres (3.9 […]
23 November 2015 – A new report issued today by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) shows that over the last 20 years, 90 per cent of major disasters have been caused by 6,457 recorded floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts and other weather-related events. The report, titled The Human Cost of Weather Related […]
By Damian Carrington20 November 2015 (The Guardian) – More than half the myriad tree species in the Amazon could be heading for extinction, according to a study that makes the first comprehensive estimate of threatened species in the world’s largest rainforest. Among the species expected to suffer significant falls in numbers are the Brazil nut, […]
By Rong-Gong Lin II and Rosanna Xia17 November 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – Temperatures in a key location of the Pacific Ocean are now hotter than they ever were in the record 1997 El Niño. Some scientists say the readings show that this year’s El Niño could be among the most powerful on record — […]
