What country faces the worst climate change?

By Jeremy Hsu, InnovationNewsDaily Senior Writer, LiveScience.com 14 August 2012 Rising seas threaten to drown island countries such as the Maldives and Kiribati in the era of global warming — a dire scenario that has forced leaders to plan for floating cities or consider moving their entire populations to neighboring countries. Most countries won’t need […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of smoke from Russia wildfires approaching North America

11 August 2012 (NASA) – The fires that have been plaguing Russia for months are causing smoke to drift across the Pacific Ocean towards North America. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image on August 8, 2012 at 21:50 UTC. In this image a broad band of gray […]

Water shortages hit U.S. power supply

By Sara Reardon 15 August 2012 As the United States’ extended heat wave and drought threaten to raise global food prices, energy production is also feeling the pressure. Across the nation, power plants are becoming overheated and shutting down or running at lower capacity; drilling operations struggle to get the water they need, and crops […]

Emergency well drilling brings relief to U.S. farmers stricken by drought

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy By Thanh Truong, NBC News14 August 2012 WARREN COUNTY, Missouri – There’s a desperate search for water under way throughout Missouri where 95 percent of the state is enduring extreme levels of drought.  In the rural area of Truxton, farmer Rusty Lee estimates […]

Firefighter killed as wildfires rage across the U.S. West

14 August 2012 (NBC News) – Wildfires raged in several Western states on Tuesday, destroying dozens of homes and threatening hundreds more. In Idaho, one firefighter was killed by a falling tree. A fire in central Washington grew rapidly overnight and destroyed more than 60 homes, spurring the state’s governor to declare an emergency in […]

FAO Food Price Index up 6 percent – ‘Severe deterioration of U.S. maize crop’

Rome, 9 August 2012 (FAO) – The FAO Food Price Index climbed 6 percent in July 2012 after three months of decline. The Index, which measures  the monthly change in the international prices of a basket of food commodities, averaged 213 points, up 12 points from June. That was still well below the peak of […]

Okanagan Valley smoked out by Siberia forest fires – 94 forest fires rage on 12,588 hectares

[12,588 hectares = 48.6 square miles. This afternoon, the sky in Seattle is an eerie, hazy yellow from Siberia smoke carried on the jet stream, the incinerated remains of trees and animals.  This may be the most under-reported story of 2012.] By Jennifer Zielinski 13 August 2012 It may be forest fire season but the […]

Deny this: Himalaya glaciers really are melting, and doing so at a rapid pace – Kind of like climate change

By David Biello, Scientific American27 July 2012 Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into […]

Siberia forest fires leave ‘green deserts’ – Cities blanketed in smoke

MOSCOW, 3 August 2012 (RIA Novosti) – Fires are spreading across vast Siberian forests in a flashback to the summer of 2010, when the worst drought on record sparked fires that killed dozens of Russians. The total area of forests gripped by fire in Russia has increased to 11 million-12 million hectares, Grigory Kuksin, head […]

Image of the Day: Nighttime satellite view of Siberia forest fires, 3 August 2012

Caption by Adam Voiland7 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 burning around the globe. Now researchers have a new tool for observing fire. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (S-NPP) carries an instrument so sensitive to […]

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