By Tammy Webber 4 March 2024 PRICHARD, Alabama (AP) – Water bubbles up in streets, pooling in neighborhoods for weeks or months. Homes burn to the ground if firefighters can’t draw enough water from hydrants. Utility crews struggle to fix broken pipes while water flows through shut-off valves that don’t work. For generations, the water […]
By Seth Borenstein, Mary Katherine Wildeman, and Anita Snow 31 May 2024 (AP) – David Hom suffered from diabetes and felt nauseated before he went out to hang his laundry in 108-degree weather, another day in Arizona’s record-smashing, unrelenting July heat wave. His family found the 73-year-old lying on the ground, his lower body burned. Hom […]
By Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme, and Jessica Gallagher 23 May 2024 (The New York Times) – People in Baltimore have been dying of overdoses at a rate never before seen in a major American city. In the past six years, nearly 6,000 lives have been lost. The death rate from 2018 to 2022 was nearly […]
By John Seewer 28 May 2024 (AP News) – Strong storms with damaging winds and hail pummeled north Texas on Tuesday morning as much of the U.S. recovered from severe weather, including tornadoes, that killed at least 23 people during the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Widespread power outages were reported in the region, which includes […]
22 May 2024 (PNAS Nexus) – Extreme heat can harm human health, but so can extreme temperature swings. Large daily temperature variation (DTV) has been associated with elevated mortality in studies around the world. Trees and other vegetation can lower DTV, as trees reduce temperature through transpiration during the day and also trap long-wave radiation […]
By Jake Bittle 16 May 2024 (Grist) – The rising cost of homeowner’s insurance is now one of the most prominent symptoms of climate change in the United States. Major carriers like State Farm and Allstate have pulled back from offering fire insurance in California, dropping thousands of homeowners from their books, and dozens of small […]
By Seth Borenstein, Suman Naishadham, Sibi Arasu, and Fabiano Maisonnave 7 May 2024 (AP News) – In sweltering Brazil, flooding killed dozens of people and paralyzed a city of about 4 million people. Voters and politicians in India, amid national elections, are fainting in heat that hit as high as 115 degrees (46.3 degrees Celsius). […]
By Dharna Noor 1 May 2024 (The Guardian) – The fossil fuel industry spent decades sowing doubt about the dangers of burning oil and gas, experts and Democratic lawmakers testified on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The Senate budget committee held a hearing to review a report published on Tuesday with the House oversight and accountability […]
9 January 2024 (Munich Re) – Worldwide, natural disasters in 2023 resulted in losses of around US$ 250bn (previous year US$ 250bn), with insured losses of US$ 95bn (previous year US$ 125bn). Overall losses tally with the five-year average, while insured losses were slightly below the average figure of US$ 105bn. Unlike in previous years, […]
By Ian James 23 April 2024 (Los Angeles Times) – Southern California’s rivers and creeks once teemed with large, silvery fish that arrived from the ocean and swam upstream to spawn. But today, these fish are seldom seen. Southern California steelhead trout have been pushed to the brink of extinction as their river habitats have […]
![Effect of political contributions from oil and gas companies on U.S. legislators that vote against the environment. Coefficients and 95 percent CIs for tests of investment (Left) and influence (Right) hypotheses and their corresponding metaanalytic effects for the years 1992 to 2018. In 13 out of 14 analyses, lower LCV scores (i.e., more antienvironmental votes) in one election cycle predicted significantly increased contributions in the following election cycle. For example, the strongest result was observed for the 2016 election: For every additional 10 percent of congressional votes against the environment in 2014, a legislator would receive an additional $5,400 in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies in 2016 (b = −0.54, SE = 0.12; P < 0.001; 95 percent CI [−0.77, −0.31]). This is an especially strong relationship considering that many elected officials vote against environmental policies nearly 100 percent of the time, thereby compounding the cycle of antienvironmentalism and increasing rewards in the form of contributions. Graphic: Goldberg, et al., 2020 / PNAS](https://desdemonadespair.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-8.png)
