North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum
proclaimed a statewide fire and drought emergency Monday, ordering
state agencies to "maintain high levels of readiness."
The executive order activates
the State Emergency Operations Plan and authorizes the North Dakota
National Guard to activate if needed.
Drought conditions and high
winds have created a fire emergency in North Dakota.
The U.S. Drought Monitor
report released last week showed 8 percent of the state in extreme
drought, 32 percent in severe drought, 27 percent in moderate drought
and 33 percent abnormally dry. The conditions have increased the fire
risk for North Dakota, with 30 counties issuing emergency
declarations, burn bans or other fire restrictions so far.
Arizona
is so hot that cactus are dying, food is baking and plastic is
melting as record breaking temperatures persist
Areas across Arizona are so
hot that cactus are dying, food is baking and plastic is melting.
"Arizona has had record
or near-record heat for over a week now," AccuWeather Senior
Meteorologist Ken Clark said.
While the heat will ease this
week, temperatures will remain higher than normal, Clark added.
On June 20, 2017, Phoenix hit
a new daily heat record at 119 degrees Fahrenheit, surpassing the
previous record of 116 F.
A high fire danger is in place
due to the blistering heat and occasional wind, according to Clark.
The Hellenic National
Meteorological Service warns that temperatures are expected to
escalate as high as 45C over the next few days as Greece witnesses
the summer's first heatwave.
On Tuesday the heat that
started at the end of last week is expected to intensify as
temperatures are expected to reach a minimal of 37-38 degrees Celsius
on the mainland, while in Athens temperatures will reach 35-36
degrees and western Greece is expecting heavy rains around mid-day.
Also expecting heavy storms on
Monday are the areas of Epirus, Sterea, Peloponnese, Western and
Central Macedonia.
From Wednesday the mercury
will rise even further with temperatures in Athens reaching a minimal
of 38 degrees Celsius with areas on the mainland reaching over 40
degrees Celsius.
Scientists have for the first
time tracked soot from Canadian wildfires all the way to the
Greenland ice sheet, where they found that the dark,
sunlight-absorbing particles landed on the ice and had the potential
to significantly enhance its melting — pointing to a possible new
driver of sea level rise.
It’s the first end-to-end
documentation of a process that, it’s feared, could hasten
Greenland’s melting in the future — and since the ice sheet could
contribute over 20 feet of eventual sea level rise, any such process
is one that scientists weigh carefully.
“That’s the first time
we’ve been able to connect that whole logic chain from, here’s a
fire and here’s where it ended up on the ice sheet,” said Chris
Polashenski, one of the study’s authors and a researcher with the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering
Laboratory.
The Larsen C ice shelf is
about to calve one of the biggest icebergs on record. The
iceberg-to-be is hanging on by a thread, with just eight miles of
solid ice standing in the way of a rift that's spent years carving
through the ice. Scientists can track the growth of the crack with
precision during the summer season by flying over it, but even during
the dead of Antarctic night, they're still able to see it clearly
thanks to eyes in the sky.
Two European satellites, known
as Sentinel-1, criss-cross over the region every six days like
clockwork. Their sensors are able to see through clouds and darkness
to provide a real-time image of the most-watched patch of ice on the
planet.
CAPE GRIM, Tasmania — On the
best days, the wind howling across this rugged promontory has not
touched land for thousands of miles, and the arriving air seems as if
it should be the cleanest in the world.
But on a cliff above the sea,
inside a low-slung government building, a bank of sophisticated
machines sniffs that air day and night, revealing telltale indicators
of the way human activity is altering the planet on a major scale.
For more than two years, the
monitoring station here, along with its counterparts across the
world, has been flashing a warning: The excess carbon dioxide
scorching the planet rose at the highest rate on record in 2015 and
2016. A slightly slower but still unusual rate of increase has
continued into 2017.
Scientists are concerned about
the cause of the rapid rises because, in one of the most hopeful
signs since the global climate crisis became widely understood in the
1980s, the amount of carbon dioxide that people are pumping into the
air seems to have stabilized in recent years, at least judging from
the data that countries compile on their own emissions.
That raises a conundrum: If
the amount of the gas that people are putting out has stopped rising,
how can the amount that stays in the air be going up faster than
ever? Does it mean the natural sponges that have been absorbing
carbon dioxide are now changing?
"The climate affects
the spread of a mosquito-borne virus in two main ways. First, it
plays a crucial role in the geographical distribution of the
mosquitos, which can only thrive in the long term if temperature and
precipitation levels are high enough. Second, the virus replicates
especially quickly in the body of the mosquito if the ambient
temperature is high and remains relatively constant over the course
of the day. For this reason, the risk of being infected with the
Chikungunya virus has – until now – been mainly limited to
tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and South America."
The mosquito-borne viral
disease Chikungunya is usually found in tropical areas. Researchers
at the University of Bayreuth and the European Centre for Disease
Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm have now discovered how
climate change is facilitating the spread of the Chikungunya virus.
Even if climate change only progresses moderately – as scientists
are currently observing – the risk of infection will continue to
increase in many regions of the world through the end of the 21st
century. If climate change continues unchecked, the virus could even
spread to southern Europe and the United States. The researchers have
published their findings in Scientific Reports.
It is the Asian tiger mosquito
and yellow fever mosquito that infect humans with the Chikungunya
virus. The climate affects the spread of a mosquito-borne virus in
two main ways. First, it plays a crucial role in the geographical
distribution of the mosquitos, which can only thrive in the long term
if temperature and precipitation levels are high enough. Second, the
virus replicates especially quickly in the body of the mosquito if
the ambient temperature is high and remains relatively constant over
the course of the day. For this reason, the risk of being infected
with the Chikungunya virus has – until now – been mainly limited
to tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and South America.
Utterly flawed process of the IPCC revealed by Guy McPherson
Utterly flawed process of the IPCC revealed by Guy McPherson
Lightning Sparking More Boreal Forest Fires
A
new NASA-funded study finds that lightning storms were the main
driver of recent massive fire years in Alaska and northern Canada,
and that these storms are likely to move farther north with climate
warming, potentially altering northern landscapes.
The
study, led by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of
California, Irvine, examined the cause of the fires, which have been
increasing in number in recent years. There was a record number of
lightning-ignited fires in the Canadian Northwest Territories in 2014
and in Alaska in 2015. The team found increases of between two and
five percent a year in the number of lightning-ignited fires since
1975.
BangladeshDeclares Lightning Strikes a Disaster as Deaths Surge
Bangladesh
has seen a near-record number of deaths this year from a phenomenon
that appears to be worsening with climate change: lightning strikes.
So
far this year, 261 people have died from lightning in the country,
putting the South Asian nation on track to beat last year's 265
deaths. Most lightning deaths usually occur during the warm months of
March to July.
India
has seen a similar surge in lightning deaths, with 93 people killed
just in the past two days, officials said
The
study found that a specific atmospheric event, a snowstorm in late
July and early August of 2013, was the critical factor in delivering
the soot to the surface of Greenland. Without that storm to
bring them down from the atmosphere to the surface, the soot
particles could have traveled over the ice sheet at a high altitude
and never landed.
“A lot
of the time, the wind blows from a fire to the ice sheet and the
black carbon doesn’t actually end up on the ice sheet,” said
Polashenski.
Greenlandnow a major driver of rising seas: study
Ocean
levels rose 50 percent faster in 2014 than in 1993, with meltwater
from the Greenland ice sheet now supplying 25 percent of total sea
level increase compared with just five percent 20 years earlier,
researchers reported Monday.
The
findings add to growing concern among scientists that the global
watermark is climbing more rapidly than forecast only a few years
ago, with potentially devastating consequences.
Hundreds
of millions of people around the world live in low-lying deltas that
are vulnerable, especially when rising seas are combined with land
sinking due to depleted water tables, or a lack of ground-forming
silt held back by dams.
Major
coastal cities are also threatened, while some small island states
are already laying plans for the day their drowning nations will no
longer be livable.
"This
result is important because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC)"—the UN science advisory body—"makes a
very conservative projection of total sea level rise by the end of
the century," at 60 to 90 centimetres (24 to 35 inches), said
Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at the University of
Oxford who did not take part in the research.
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