By Larry Elliott, www.guardian.co.uk2 September 2012 The last decade saw the end of cheap oil, the magic growth ingredient for the global economy after the second world war. This summer’s increase in maize, wheat and soya bean prices – the third spike in the past five years – suggests the era of cheap food is […]
By P.J. Huffstutter; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz2 September 2012 CHICAGO (Reuters) – For more than half a century, the Shew family has harvested mountains of popcorn kernels to be buttered, salted and munched by movie fans. But as a crippling Midwestern drought sends commodity soybean and grain prices soaring, the family’s farmland in west-central Indiana […]
By Larry Elliott, www.guardian.co.uk30 August 2012 The World Bank issued a global hunger warning last night after severe droughts in the US and eastern Europe sent food prices to a record high. Damage to crop harvests from exceptionally dry weather this year raised sharply the Bank’s food price index taking it above its peak in […]
By Neela Banerjee, Los Angeles Times 31 August 2012 MARIETTA, Georgia – The August afternoon was a merciful one. The sky above Marietta High School was overcast, and by 3:30 p.m., temperatures hovered in the low 80s as football practice began. Still, like high school football coaches all over Georgia, Marietta’s coaches were leaving little […]
BURLINGTON, Kansas, 28 August 2012 (AP) – Drought conditions are draining a reservoir used to cool the Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant, but officials of the eastern Kansas plant say there are no worries about safety or the ability to provide electricity to customers. Hot, dry conditions across the state have lowered water levels at […]
On 28 August 2012, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this natural-color satellite image of several wildfires burning in the Khabarovsk region of eastern Russia. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires. Large fires have burned across Siberia throughout the summer. Wildfires […]
20 August 2012 (SINA) – In Suizhou City of Hubei Province, where maximum temperatures have been as high as 35 degree centigrade, since July, insufficient rainfall over the past 25 months is endangering the drinking water supply for more than 520,000 local residents and 160,000 livestock. In Langhe Village, worst hit in Suizhou, nearly one […]
Frequency of occurrence (y-axis) of local temperature anomalies divided by local standard deviation (x-axis) obtained by binning all local results for the indicated region and 11-year period into 0.05 frequency intervals. Area under each curve is unity. Standard deviations are for the 1951-1980 period. ABSTRACT: “Climate dice,” describing the chance of unusually warm or cool […]
Caption by Adam Voiland20 August 2012 For more than a decade, scientists have used data from instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites to map the locations of wildfires. Now researchers have another tool for observing fires around the world. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (S-NPP) carries an instrument so sensitive to low light […]
Wildfires in California, Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada sent smoke over large stretches of the United States in mid-August 2012. Particularly thick smoke collected over Wyoming on August 14, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image. Smoke filled the skies over most of the state; over the south-central […]
