By Matthew Cappucci 8 May 2023 (The Washington Post) – A historic heat wave is bringing largely unprecedented temperatures to Southeast Asia, delivering a dangerous heat stress that could pose grave threats to vulnerable populations and smashing all-time records. Both Vietnam and Laos have recorded their hottest temperatures ever observed, in some places topping 110 […]
By Nia Williams 5 May 2023 (Reuters) – A week of record hot weather in western Canada has forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes, as wildfires rage in parts of Alberta and rapid snow melt triggers flooding across interior British Columbia. By Friday, more than 13,000 people were under evacuation orders in Alberta, […]
By Rachel Chason and Chloe Sharrock 27 April 2023 KAGBANI, Guinea (The Washington Post) – One of the poorest countries on Earth has become a crucial player in the world’s green-energy transition. Guinea, a West African nation of more than 13 million people, is home to the world’s biggest reserves of bauxite — a reddish-brown […]
By Jess Thomson 5 May 2023 (Newsweek) – The long-dried basin of Lake Tulare in California has rapidly refilled in the wake of intense rainfall and snowmelt. The speed and scale of the southern San Joaquin Valley lake’s return can be seen in images taken from space by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on NASA‘s Landsat […]
By Raymond Zhong 27 April 2023 (The New York Times) – Two and a half years of meager rain have shriveled crops, killed livestock and brought the Horn of Africa, one of the world’s poorest regions, to famine’s brink. Millions of people have faced food and water shortages. Hundreds of thousands have fled their homes, seeking relief. […]
Geneva, 21 April 2023 (WMO) – From mountain peaks to ocean depths, climate change continued its advance in 2022, according to the annual report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Droughts, floods, and heatwaves affected communities on every continent and cost many billions of dollars. Antarctic sea ice fell to its lowest extent on record […]
By Lee Ying Shan 18 April 2023 (CNBC) – From China to the U.S. to the European Union, rice production is falling and driving up prices for more than 3.5 billion people across the globe, particularly in Asia-Pacific – which consumes 90% of the world’s rice. The global rice market is set to log its largest […]
By Richard Burkard 17 April 2023 (Knewz) – It sounds like a B-grade movie title: The approach of the 10-million pound blob. Yet it’s real, and it’s forcing swimmers and owners of beachfront property in Florida to take action. Knewz noted in late March that a giant mass of sargassum seaweed was spotted from space. It […]
By Dan Stillman 17 April 2023 (The Washington Post) – Numerous heat records have been broken across Southeast Asia, China and other parts of the continent in recent days as the region remains in the grip of a dangerously scorching heat wave, with Thailand in particular experiencing unusually extreme conditions. Weather historian Maximiliano Herrera is describing […]
By Sid Perkins 14 April 2023 (Science News) – A two-week-long heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in 2021 helped make that summer a record breaker for the region (SN: 7/7/21). Now, tree ring data from the area’s forests reveal that the summer of 2021 was also the region’s hottest of the last millennium. The average temperature […]
