By Ben Doherty 11 October 2015 (The Guardian) – Two dozen people have already died from hunger and drinking contaminated water in drought-stricken Papua New Guinea, but the looming El Niño crisis could leave more than four million people across the Pacific without enough food or clean water. The El Niño weather pattern – when […]
30 September 2015 (ABC10 News) – A video posted on Facebook shows the dramatic water level drop at Folsom Lake. “I’ve been collecting and assembling these since March of 2015 through August 2015 showing the effects of the drought in California is having on our reservoirs,” Sacramento resident Ryan Griffith said in his Facebook post. […]
By Kate Baklitskaya10 October 2015 (The Siberian Times) – Is it a freak heat wave or an indisputable sign of global warming? The experts will argue about this but a range of balmy temperatures in October in Siberia certainly begs a few questions: 27C in Altai, 24C in Barnaul, 21C in Novosibirsk, 21C in Tomsk, […]
By Jim Robbins9 October 2015 (The New York Times) – Like California, much of Brazil is gripped by one of the worst droughts in its history. Huge reservoirs are bone dry and water has been rationed in São Paulo, a megacity of 20 million people; in Rio; and in many other places. Drought is usually […]
By Fred Pearce9 October 2015 (The Guardian) – Drought is arguably the biggest single threat from climate change. Its impacts are global. Some say drought triggered the crisis in Syria that sent tens of thousands of refugees heading for Europe this summer. Relief failures and poor drought forecasting caused innumerable deaths in the Horn of […]
[UPDATE: Des was suspicious of this number and emailed BLM. Turns out it’s a typo. The actual number is 9,276,416 acres burned year-to-date]. 10 October 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Just last week, the NIFC site computed the year-to-date acres burned for 2015 to be neck-and-neck with the most recent record year, 2006, at slightly above […]
9 October 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – 2015 is likely to be among the worst years for forest fires on record. A lot of this destruction is caused by fires that are intentionally set to clear forests for agriculture. In Sumatra and southern Borneo, rainforest and peatlands are burned to make room for palm oil plantations. […]
By Damian Carrington 7 October 2015 (The Guardian) – Fires raging across the forests and peatlands of Indonesia are on track to pump out more carbon emissions than the UK’s entire annual output, Greenpeace has warned. As well as fuelling global warming, the thick smoke choking cities in the region is likely to cause the […]
TULARE COUNTY, 29 September 2015 (CBS) – California’s four year drought has the whole state in a water crisis, but no area has been harder hit than the state’s Central Valley, where the wells have run dry. In the small town of Okieville, in Tulare County, residents are struggling to stay in their homes. At […]
By Oliver Milman30 September 2015 (The Guardian) – At least 10 million of the world’s poorest people are set to go hungry this year because of failing crops caused by one of the strongest El Niño climatic events on record, Oxfam has warned. The charity said several countries were already facing a “major emergency”, such […]
