By Joe Cochrane30 October 2015 JAKARTA (The New York Times) – A disoriented, pregnant orangutan, her treetop home in Indonesian Borneo reduced to charred wood, is rushed to a rehabilitation centre by conservationists, who dodged walls of fire and toxic smoke. Veterinarians care for 16 abandoned baby orangutans already living at the centre. The babies […]
[The interesting thing about this story is that it never mentions global warming, even though we know that there’s a strong correlation between rising temperatures and wildfires, e.g., Study finds climate change is increasing length of wildfire seasons across globe. –Des] By Bill Theobald6 November 2015 WASHINGTON (USA TODAY) – The damage caused by the […]
By Adam Voiland19 October 2015 (NASA) – Heavy smoke continued to pour from peat fires in Borneo, Indonesia, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image on 19 October 2015. Red outlines indicate hot spots where the sensor detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires. Gray smoke hovers […]
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, 19 October 2015 (AFP) – International efforts to douse raging Indonesia fires will fail and Southeast Asia could face several more weeks of choking smoke until the rainy season starts, Malaysia’s environment minister warned on Monday, October 19. Facing growing pressure, Indonesia earlier this month agreed to accept international help after failing […]
By John R. Platt22 October 2015 (takepart.com) – Indonesia is on fire. Right now, tens of thousands of small forest fires are burning across the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, the only habitats for orangutans and other rare species. Many of the fires appear to have been intentionally set by palm oil companies, which employ […]
By Jonathan Watts30 October 2015 (Rio de Janeiro) – Brazilian rangers, firefighters and indigenous communities are battling against a wildfire that has blazed for two months and devastated some of the last Amazonian forest in the northern state of Maranhão, including part of the territory of an uncontacted tribe. The fire – which has spread […]
By Andrey Kuzmin, with additional reporting by Alister Doyle; Editing by Bruce Wallace and Kevin Liffey29 October 2015 MOSCOW (Reuters) – Wildfires crackled across Siberia this summer, turning skies ochre and sending up enough smoke from burning pines to blot out satellite views of the 400-mile-long Lake Baikal. To many climate scientists, the worsening fires […]
[Long-time Desdemona readers will recall that smoke from peatland fires killed many people in Moscow in 2010. Dense wildfire smog grips Moscow in heatwave, Heat probably killed thousands in Moscow –Des] By Kate Lamb26 October 2015 (Jakarta) – Raging forest fires across Indonesia are thought to be responsible for up to half a million cases […]
By Jim Robbins12 Oct 2015: Report (Yale e360) – The boreal forest wraps around the globe at the top of the Northern Hemisphere in North America and Eurasia. Also known as taiga or snow forest, this landscape is characterized by its long, cold and snowy winters. In North America it extends from the Arctic Circle […]
By Adam Wernick3 October 2015 (PRI) – Scientists are warning that intense wildfires in the northernmost areas of North America are changing the composition of the tundra ecosystem, degrading permafrost and contributing to a northward migration of trees, all of which have serious implications for the future of the climate. Warming air masses resulting from […]
