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Heat
Wave Death Toll Rises to 2,000 in Pakistan’s Financial Hub
A
heat wave in Pakistan’s financial hub of Karachi and surrounding
areas has killed about 2,000 people in the past two weeks, the most
in recent memory.
Temperatures
reaching 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) have claimed
about 1,500 lives in Karachi and 500 in other parts of southern Sindh
province, according to Anwaar Kazmi, a spokesman for rescue agency
Edhi Foundation. Most of the victims have been elderly, he said.
“There
is no space left in the government hospitals to keep the dead
bodies,” Kazmi, who runs the largest private ambulance service in
Karachi, said by phone on Wednesday. He said the death toll was a
record from a heat wave.
An update from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on the el-Nino
Current
state of the Pacific and Indian Ocean
El
Niño consolidates
The
2015 El Niño continues to strengthen. Central and eastern tropical
Pacific Ocean sea surface temperature indices are more than 1 °C
above average for the sixth consecutive week. International climate
models surveyed by the Bureau of Meteorology indicate further
consolidation is likely.
El
Niño events typically strengthen during the second half of the year,
reaching full strength during late spring or early summer. It is not
possible at this stage to determine how strong this El Niño will be.
El
Niño is typically associated with below-average winter and spring
rainfall over eastern Australia and above-average daytime
temperatures over the southern half of the country during the second
half of the year. The strength of an El Niño does not always
determine the strength of its effects on Australia's climate. There
are examples of weak El Niño events resulting in widespread drought
and strong El Niño events with little impact on rainfall.
The
Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is currently neutral. Of the five
international models that provide IOD outlooks, three suggest a
positive IOD is likely during the southern spring. A positive IOD is
typically associated with reduced winter and spring rainfall over
parts of southern and central Australia.
Meanwhile here is an update from the beginning of June from New
Zealand's NIWA .
The
worst drought in five years is creeping across the Caribbean,
prompting officials around the region to brace for a bone dry summer.
From
Puerto Rico to Cuba to the eastern Caribbean island of St. Lucia,
crops are withering, reservoirs are drying up and cattle are dying
while forecasters worry that the situation could only grow worse in
the coming months.
Thanks
to El Nino, a warming of the tropical Pacific that affects global
weather, forecasters expect the hurricane season that began in June
to be quieter than normal, with a shorter period of rains. That means
less water to help refill Puerto Rico's thirsty Carraizo and La Plata
reservoirs as well as the La Plata river in the central island
community of Naranjito. A tropical disturbance that hit the U.S.
territory on Monday did not fill up those reservoirs as officials had
anticipated.
Kujira
formed on Saturday morning, EDT, or Saturday evening local time, in
the South China Sea. Kujira has since moved to the north and made a
first landfall on Hainan Island Monday night, local time, then a
second landfall just south of Hanoi on Wednesday.
Kujira
continues to unleash flooding rain and gusty wind across southern
China, and these threats will continue into Wednesday. Conditions
will deteriorate across northern Vietnam.
The
last 50 years of gains in development and global health could be
undone by the "medical emergency" that is the threat of
climate change to human health, scientists said today.
However,
the report by a new global commission, published in major medical
journal The Lancet, showed comprehensive evidence that tackling
climate change through ways like reducing air pollution and improving
diet could be one of the greatest chances to improve global health
this century.
According
to present projections, the mean temperature in New Zealand could be
2C higher by the end of the century - and even between 3C and 4C
higher if no action is taken to curb the world's carbon emissions.
Within
the same period, sea level is expected to rise between 50cm and
120cm, leaving populations to adapt by either abandoning coasts and
islands, changing infrastructure and coastal zones, or protecting
areas with barriers or dykes.
Unnatural Disaster: How Global Warming Helped Cause India’s Catastrophic Flood
The
flood that swept through the Indian state of Uttarakhand two years
ago killed thousands of people and was one of the worst disasters in
the nation’s recent history. Now researchers are saying that
melting glaciers and shifting storm tracks played a major role in the
catastrophe and should be a warning about how global warming could
lead to more damaging floods in the future.
In this article Israel is suffering from drought although (by being omitted), Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Iran are not (sic). South America is also omitted
Need
proof that we’re having the hottest year on record? Scorching heat
is searing parts of the world, sparking wildfires and claiming lives
due to heat stroke and dehydration.
Death toll from Pakistan heat wave reaches 474
Now
700
A
brutal heat wave kicking in later this week may shatter June or even
a few all-time records in parts of the Great Basin and Northwest.
Furthermore, it may last into the first days of July.
The
National Weather Service in Portland, Oregon, has already issued an
excessive heat watch for parts of northwest Oregon and southwest
Washington, including the Willamette Valley cities of Portland, Salem
and Eugene.
June
has already been a hot month in parts of the West.
Earlier
in the month, Yakima, Washington, tied its all-time June high of 105
degrees. This occurred 15 days earlier on the calendar than the
previous June 105-degree high. Medford, Oregon, is pacing for their
hottest June on record, dating to 1911. Portland, Oregon, has already
tallied 4 days of 90-degree-plus heat this month through Tuesday,
just 2 days shy of the June record set in 2003.
Toronto storm floods streets and shuts down trains as lightning licks at buildings
A
powerful band of storms rattled southern Ontario, flooding roads and
shutting down trains early Tuesday.
Tornado
warnings were issued because of the storms, and although there were
no confirmed strikes, at least one possible twister was spotted by a
storm chaser in Goderich on the Lake Huron shoreline. Environment
Canada said it was looking into the report.
This is the country with all the water
The voracious insects are migrating dozens of kilometers every day, consuming crops as they go. Parts of the region have been put on high emergency alert.
This is the country with all the water
Idled
dams, reduced harvest and curtailed salmon fishing some of the
fallout if hot, dry weather continues
Plague of Astrakhan: Locust swarm blots out the sun in Russian region
Near-Biblical
scenes are emerging from the Astrakhan region in southern Russia,
which has been invaded by giant swarms of locusts. Local authorities
have scrambled vehicles and aircraft to combat the infestation.
The voracious insects are migrating dozens of kilometers every day, consuming crops as they go. Parts of the region have been put on high emergency alert.
The
Prime Minister is reluctant to blame climate change for a spate of
flooding events throughout the country.
Parts
of the lower North Island have been inundated, only weeks after
flooding in Dunedin, and before that, Wellington.
John
Key reports it's hard to pinpoint the cause of severe weather.
"Certainly
the advice we get from the scientific community is that the
likelihood of climate change effects occurring are firming up, and
certainly some people would associate it with this, but I'm just not
sure you can make that call."
It’s
illegal to knowingly ignore the dangers of global warming.
That
was essentially the ruling Wednesday from a Dutch court, which
ordered the government to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent
compared to 1990 levels by 2020 in order to preserve the low-lying
Netherlands and protect its people from the dangers of global
warming.
The
Hague District Court agreed with the more than 900 plaintiffs,
organized by the sustainability advocacy group Urgenda, that the
Dutch government has taken “insufficient action against climate
change.” The plaintiffs had asked the court to prompt the Dutch
government to lower emissions 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by
2020, so the court’s decision comes down on the low end of that
request.
Environmental
advocates lauded the decision, saying that more rulings could be
expected in other countries.
Human-forced
warming of the global climate system is pushing sea surface
temperatures in some areas to a maximum of 33 C. Extreme ocean
warming that is increasing the amount of latent heat the atmosphere
can deliver to human bodies during heatwaves. And near a 33 C sea
surface hot zone, the past few days have witnessed extreme heat and
related tragic mass casualties in Sindh, Pakistan.
Human-forced
warming of the global climate system is pushing sea surface
temperatures in some areas to a maximum of 33 C. Extreme ocean
warming that is increasing the amount of latent heat the atmosphere
can deliver to human bodies during heatwaves. And near a 33 C sea
surface hot zone, the past few days have witnessed extreme heat and
related tragic mass casualties in Sindh, Pakistan.
The
world ocean is now a region of expanding oxygen-deprived dead zones.
It’s
an upshot of a human-warmed ocean system filled with high nutrient
run-off from mass, industrialized farming, rising atmospheric
nitrogen levels, and increasing dust from wildfires, dust storms, and
industrial aerosol emissions. Warming seas hold less oxygen in
solution. And the nutrient seeding feeds giant algae blooms that,
when they die and decompose, further rob ocean waters of oxygen.
Combined, the two are an extreme hazard to ocean health — symptoms
of a dangerous
transition to stratified, or worse, Canfield Ocean states.
In
total, more than 405 dead zones now occupy mostly coastal waters
worldwide.
Covering an area of 95,000 square miles and expanding, these anoxic
regions threaten marine species directly through suffocation or
indirectly through the growth of toxin-producing bacteria which
thrive in low-oxygen environment.
Now, according
to new research published in Biogeosciences [pdf],
it appears that some of these dead zones have gone mobile.
The
report finds zones of very low oxygen covering swirls of surface
water 100-150 kilometers in diameter and stretching to about 100
meters in depth. The zones churn like whirlpools or eddies.
Encapsulated in their own current of water with oxygen levels low
enough to induce fish kills, these ‘dead pools’ have been
discovered swirling off the coast of Africa in recent satellite
photos. [more]
Fighting
over water is a tradition in California, but nowhere are the lines of
dispute more sharply drawn than here in the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta, a 720,000-acre network of islands and canals that is the hub
of the state’s water system.
Giant
pumps pull in water flowing to the delta from the mountainous north
of the state, where the majority of precipitation falls, and send it
to farms, towns and cities in the Central Valley and Southern
California, where the demand for water is greatest.
“We
can confidently conclude that modern extinction rates are
exceptionally high, that they are increasing, and that they suggest a
mass extinction under way—the sixth of its kind in Earth’s 4.5
billion years of history.”
If
water curtailments go into effect, which states are most vulnerable,
and why?
Record
rain across much of the West in May has provided Lake Mead with a
much-needed boost – alleviating concerns about possible cutbacks in
water deliveries from the nation's largest reservoir. But a month of
rain does not solve Mead's falling water levels. For nearly two
decades, the reservoir, which straddles the Arizona-Nevada border,
has been shrinking due to prolonged drought and over-allocation. Mead
hasn’t been full since 1998 at 1,221 feet above sea level and in
the past 15 years alone, it has dropped 135 feet. Now it’s 37
percent full and just six inches away from reaching the 1,075-foot
threshold that triggers cutbacks in deliveries for the three lower
basin states – Arizona, Nevada and California – all of which
depend heavily on Colorado River water stored in Lake Mead. (The
trigger point doesn’t apply to the Upper Basin states of Wyoming,
Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.)
But
as long as the surface level is at least 1,075 feet above sea level
when crucial measurements are taken in January 2016, those cutbacks
will be avoided. If not, the Secretary of the Interior will declare a
shortage in Lake Mead and the curtailed deliveries, along with other
water rationing measures, will go into effect early next year.
Hot weather impacting people working
Wildfires Burn as Infernos Engulf Western States
Powerful
thunderstorms packing heavy rain and high winds lashed the U.S.
Middle Atlantic region late on Tuesday, killing one person, snarling
travel and cutting off power to hundreds of thousands of customers.
The fast-moving band of storms stretching from Virginia to southern New Jersey dumped up to one inch (2.5 cm) of rain in less than an hour in some places, said Jim Hayes, a National Weather Service meteorologist in College Park, Maryland.
"The
storms were intense but they were moving pretty quickly," he
said.
A
massive storm in the southern Indian Ocean will set up the largest
swell of the year, thus far, for West Australia and Indonesia later
this week and this weekend. This will likely be one of the largest
swells of the past several years for both regions as well. Multiple
satellite passes confirm seas of 50 feet, with one pass indicating
seas of just a hair under 60 feet. Satellite confirmed seas of 60
feet have happened only a handful of times around the globe in the
last decade. Mariners in the area should monitor conditions closely
into the weekend."
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