CANBERRA, Australia, 5 July 2012 (AP) – Increasingly common experiences with extreme climate-related events such as the Colorado wildfires, a record warm spring and preseason hurricanes have convinced many Americans climate change is a reality, the head of a U.S. scientific agency said Friday. Many Americans had previously seen climate change as a “nebulous concept” […]
By Brandon Keim6 July 2012 The vast wildfires of this summer and last represent a new normal for the western United States. They may signal a radical landscape transformation, one that will make the 21st century West an ecological frontier. “These transitions could be massive. They represent the convergence of several different forces,” said Donald […]
By Mark Lubell6 July 2012 Last week, my parents had to pack their belongings and flee as the Waldo Canyon fire barreled toward their house in Colorado Springs. They were among 32,000 people forced from their houses by the fire, which has destroyed nearly 350 homes. My parents were lucky. Despite the trauma and fear […]
By Robert Krier3 July 2012 The fires that are burning throughout the country offer a window into what we can expect in the future as the climate heats up. That grim assessment comes from Steve Running, a wildfire expert, ecologist and forestry professor at the University of Montana. Running was among the scores of scientists […]
By Patrick Evans 6 July 2012 Chernobyl, Ukraine (BBC) – Much of the 30km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant is pine forest, and some of it so badly contaminated that a forest fire could create a devastating radioactive smoke cloud. Heading north from Kiev in Ukraine, you can see old ladies and their […]
By Laura Betz, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center11 June 2012 Fires burning in Siberia recently sent smoke across the Pacific Ocean and into the U.S. and Canada. Images of data taken by the nation’s newest Earth-observing satellite tracked aerosols from the fires taking six days to reach America’s shores. Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite’s […]
By SETH BORENSTEIN, Associated Press3 July 2012 WASHINGTON (AP) — If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks. Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho. These […]
Caption by Adam Voiland29 June 2012 Up to 90 taiga wildfires burned in the Far East of Russia on June 29, 2012. According to the ITAR-TASS news agency, the fires had burned more than 2,000 hectares (8 square mile) over the course of a day. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite […]
[Particularly doomy at 7:20.] By Steve Moraco – http://facebook.com/SMPhot29 June 2012 Please watch in full screen and in HD if at all possible! This is intended to be viewed full screen on monitors and screens with a 16:10 aspect ratio. You can find the Vimeo version here: http://vimeo.com/stevemoraco/waldocanyon My photography page: Facebook.com/SMPhot My website: SteveMoraco.com […]
[Click for podcast.] By David Biello1 July 2012 Another fire season is under way in the hot, dry western U.S. Wildfires are wreaking havoc in New Mexico and Colorado, where more than 32,000 people have been evacuated. And who knows where other fires will break out before summer ends. This is exactly the kind of […]
