By Roosa Tikkanen and Katharine Fields 25 February 2021 (The Commonwealth Fund) – International comparisons of health care systems offer valuable tools to health ministers, policymakers, and academics wishing to evaluate the performance of their country’s system. In this chartbook [ppt, pdf], we use data collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) […]
By David Malmquist 24 January 2021 (VIMS) – Sea level “report cards” issued annually by researchers at William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science add further evidence of an accelerating rate of sea-level rise during 2020 at nearly all tidal stations along the U.S. coastline. The team’s web-based report cards project sea level to […]
By Sabrina Tavernise and Abby Goodnough 18 February 2021 (The New York Times) – Life expectancy in the United States fell by a full year in the first six months of 2020, the federal government reported on Thursday, the largest drop since World War II and a grim measure of the deadly consequences of the coronavirus […]
By Ari Kahan 3 February 2021 (EIA) – The United States will likely take years to return to 2019 levels of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions following the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. economy and global energy sector, according to projections in the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook 2021 (AEO2021). […]
ZURICH, 6 January 2021 (PERILS) – PERILS, the independent Zurich-based organisation providing industry-wide catastrophe insurance data, has today disclosed its fourth and final industry loss estimate for the Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. The final estimate of the insurance market loss is AUD 1,866m. This compares to the third loss estimate of AUD 1,861 million which […]
LONDON, 6 January 2021 (Reuters) – England and Wales recorded the most deaths in 2020 of any year in more than a century, with the COVID-19 pandemic leading to a rise in the number of excess deaths, a senior statistician said on Wednesday. About 604,000 deaths were registered in the two countries in the last […]
By Grahame Madge 8 January 2021 (Met Office) – In 2021, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach levels 50% higher than before the industrial revolution, due to human-caused emissions, says a Met Office forecast. The Met Office predicts that annual average CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, will be 2.29 ± 0.55 parts per million (ppm) […]
By Damian Carrington 8 January 2021 (The Guardian) – The climate crisis continued unabated in 2020, with the joint highest global temperatures on record, alarming heat and record wildfires in the Arctic, and a record 29 tropical storms in the Atlantic. Despite a 7% fall in fossil fuel burning due to coronavirus lockdowns, heat-trapping carbon dioxide continued to build […]
By Lynda V. Mapes 1 January 2021 (The Seattle Times) – They are as Seattle as the Space Needle. But Lake Washington sockeye, once the largest run of sockeye in the Lower 48, are failing. The smallest run on record returned to the Cedar River in 2020, a bottoming out after years of declines. There […]
By Vivian Wang 21 December 2020 (The New York Times) – In the city of Yiwu in eastern China, the authorities turned off streetlights for several days and ordered factories to open only part-time. In coastal Wenzhou, the government ordered some companies not to heat their offices unless temperatures are close to freezing. In southern […]
