Global warming has doubled Western U.S. forest fire area – ‘No matter how hard we try, the fires are going to keep getting bigger’

10 October 2016 (University of Idaho) – Human-caused climate change has nearly doubled the amount of land burned in western U.S. forest fires over the past three decades, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Idaho and Columbia University. The researchers estimate that human-caused climate change caused an additional 16,000 square […]

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 […]

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 […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of California’s Blue Cut fire at night

By Pola Lem18 August 2016 (NASA) – California’s Blue Cut fire has burned homes, caused power outages, and prompted more than 82,000 evacuations in San Bernardino County. The extent of the damage, however, remains unclear. Firefighters have been focused on containing the fire’s perimeter, The Los Angeles Times reported. The image above shows the Blue […]

Global warming to increase health risks from wildfires in U.S. West – ‘Smoke waves are likely to be longer, more intense, and more frequent under climate change’

By Kevin Dennehy15 August 2016 (Yale News) – A surge in major wildfire events in the western United States as a consequence of climate change will expose tens of millions of Americans to high levels of air pollution in the coming decades, according to a new Yale-led study conducted with collaborators from Harvard. The researchers […]

Video: An eye-opening flight over California’s dying forests

  By Kurtis Alexander6 August 2016 McCLELLAN PARK, Sacramento County (San Francisco Chronicle) – Even before the plane left the runway, it was clear the crew of researchers examining the fallout from California’s historic drought would not return with good news. A column of gray smoke from a smoldering brush fire was visible from McClellan […]

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