Indonesia plans to move its capital out of Jakarta, a city that’s sinking – “By 2050, about 95 percent of North Jakarta will be submerged”

By Merrit Kennedy 29 April 2019 (NPR) – Indonesia has announced plans to build a new capital city as its current capital, Jakarta, struggles with pollution, traffic gridlock — and the fact that the city is sinking. After a Cabinet meeting on Monday, planning minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said President Joko Widodo has decided to move […]

UN agency reports Mozambique flooding “worse than thought” after Cyclone Kenneth, with more heavy rain expected – “We expect the rainfall to be twice as much as that which accompanied Cyclone Idai”

28 April 2019 (BBC News) – The situation in northern Mozambique is worse than thought, a UN spokesman says, days after Cyclone Kenneth ravaged the country. The system struck the Africa nation on Thursday with winds of 220km/h (140mph) which flattened whole villages. Around 700,000 people are now thought to be at risk in the […]

Greenland ice sheet melting six times faster than in the 1980s – “It is a bit scary to see how fast it is changing”

By Rafi Letzter 23 April 2019 (Live Science) – Greenland’s ice sheet is melting six times faster than it was in the 1980s. And all that meltwater is directly raising sea levels. That’s all according to a new study, published yesterday (22 April 2019) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that […]

Vietnam just observed its highest temperature ever recorded: 110 degrees, in April – “It is unbreathable outside in this heat”

Vietnam just observed its highest temperature ever recorded: 110 degrees, in April – “It is unbreathable outside in this heat”

By Matthew Cappucci 22 April 2019 (The Washington Post) – Vietnam broke its national high temperature record Saturday, the latest in a mounting list of records to fall as the world continues to warm. The scorcher set the mercury thermometer soaring to 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.4 Celsius) in the community of Huong Khe, a rural district in […]

We’re losing the war on climate change – “The scale of the outrage in no way matches the magnitude of this disaster”

By John D. Sutter22 April 2019 (CNN) – For years now, people like environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben have been screaming from the treetops that we need a World War II-scale mobilization to fight the scourge of climate change. They’re right, of course. And on Earth Day — that 24-hour sliver of the calendar when we […]

Psychologists release results of survey of “Maria generation” kids – “More than seven percent of youth reported clinically significant symptoms of PTSD”

By Helen Adams 26 April 2019 (MUSC) – Psychologists from the Medical University of South Carolina have just published one of the largest post-disaster screening projects in U.S. history. The report, available online through JAMA Network Open, measured the magnitude of Hurricane Maria’s impact on the mental health of children in Puerto Rico. Rosaura Orengo-Aguayo, an assistant […]

Blue-green algae causing health crisis Southwest Florida – “It is not alarmist to say that the people of Florida are being slowly poisoned by the water”

By Howard Simon 23 April 2019 (Miami Herald) – Hats off to Southwest Florida Congressman Francis Rooney for pressing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies to tell the public what it knows about the threat of toxic blue-green algae. Finally, a public official is focusing attention on our public-health crisis, […]

“Catastrophic” breeding failure at one of world’s largest emperor penguin colonies after three consecutive years of sea-ice collapse – “Such a complete failure to breed successfully is unprecedented at this site”

25 April 2019 (BAS) – Emperor penguins at the Halley Bay colony in the Weddell Sea have failed to raise chicks for the last three years, scientists have discovered. Researchers from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) studied very high resolution satellite imagery to reveal the unusual findings, published today (25 April 2019) in the journal Antarctic […]

The world lost a Belgium-sized area of primary rainforests in 2018

By Mikaela Weisse and Liz Goldman 25 April 2019 (Global Forest Watch) – The tropics lost 12 million hectares of tree cover in 2018, the fourth-highest annual loss since record-keeping began in 2001. Of greatest concern is the disappearance of 3.6 million hectares of primary rainforest, an area the size of Belgium. The figures come […]

Category 4 Cyclone Kenneth crashes ashore in Mozambique – Thousands evacuated as Mozambique is hit with the strongest storm in its history

By Bob Henson 25 April 2019 (Weather Underground) – Tropical Cyclone Kenneth slammed onto the coast of far northern Mozambique around 4 pm Thursday afternoon local time (10:15 am EDT) as a potentially catastrophic Category 4 storm. Just before landfall, at 12Z (8 am EDT), Kenneth’s top sustained winds were pegged at 120 knots (140 mph)—solidly […]

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