Tag Archives: drought

‘What the Climate Emergency Looks Like’: Extreme Heat Busts Records Across Asia

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Sweltering temperatures have devastated numerous Asian countries this month, eliciting demands for lifesaving climate action.

By Kenny Stancil. Published 4-19-2023 by Common Dreams

The European model shows temperatures across Southeast Asia rising well above normal Monday. Image: WeatherBell.com

Hundreds of millions of people throughout Asia are suffering Wednesday as a deadly heatwave turbocharged by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis continues to pummel large swaths of the continent, with little relief in sight—reigniting calls for immediate action to slash greenhouse gas pollution.

Record-high temperatures have been observed in several Asian countries this month, including at 109 weather stations across 12 Chinese provinces on Monday. Scorching heat in India, meanwhile, has killed more than a dozen people and forced school closures this week.

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Researchers Warn Great Salt Lake’s Retreat Threatens Crucial Ecosystem, Public Health

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“The lake’s ecosystem is not only on the edge of collapse. It is collapsing,” said one ecologist.

By Julia Conley.  Published 1-7-2023 by Common Dreams

Scientists are warning Utah officials that the Great Salt Lake is shrinking far faster than experts previously believed, and calling for a major reduction in water consumption across the American West in order to prevent the lake from disappearing in the next five years.

Researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) led more than 30 scientists from 11 universities and advocacy groups in a report released this week showing that the lake is currently at 37% of its former volume, with its rapid retreat driven by the historic drought that’s continuing across the West. Continue reading →

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Nobody loved you, 2022

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From devastating floods in Pakistan to Italy’s far-right PM to overturning Roe v Wade, this was a year of extremes

By Adam Ramsay  Published 12-30-2022 by openDemocracy

A flooded village in Matiari, in the Sindh province of Pakistan. Photo: Asad Zaidi/UNICEF

How do you turn 365 days experienced by eight billion people – and billions more other beings – into some kind of story?

Maybe you start with some events?

In which case, 2022 was the year that Covid vaccines kicked in. Daily global deaths hit 77,000 on 7 February, and have declined fairly steadily ever since. It was the year Russia invaded Ukraine, the first war between major European powers since 1945. Continue reading →

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After COP27, all signs point to world blowing past the 1.5 degrees global warming limit – here’s what we can still do about it

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Young activists have been pushing to keep a 1.5-Celsius limit, knowing their future is at stake.
AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty

 

Peter Schlosser, Arizona State University

The world could still, theoretically, meet its goal of keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, a level many scientists consider a dangerous threshold. Realistically, that’s unlikely to happen.

Part of the problem was evident at COP27, the United Nations climate conference in Egypt.

While nations’ climate negotiators were successfully fighting to “keep 1.5 alive” as the global goal in the official agreement, reached Nov. 20, 2022, some of their countries were negotiating new fossil fuel deals, driven in part by the global energy crisis. Any expansion of fossil fuels – the primary driver of climate change – makes keeping warming under 1.5 C (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times much harder. Continue reading →

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Rallies Across Africa Demand Global Action, Climate Justice Ahead of UN Summit

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“The urgency of the climate crisis cannot be understated, particularly here in Africa, which is the region most vulnerable to climate impacts,” said one campaigner.

By Brett Wilkins  Published 9-23-2022 by Common Dreams

Ugandan climate activists demonstrate in Kampala on September 23, 2022. (Photo: Hilda F. Nakabuye/Twitter)

Thousands of African activists and members of communities on the frontlines of the worsening climate emergency turned out Friday to call on world leaders—who will gather in Egypt in November for the United Nations Climate Summit—to urgently address a crisis that disproportionately impacts their lives.

Demonstrators took to the streets, public spaces, and even waterways in countries across a continent that’s responsible for just 4% of global greenhouse emissions to demand climate justice and an end to fossil fuel exploration and extraction ahead of the U.N.’s COP27 conference, scheduled to start November 6 in Sharm El-Sheikh. Continue reading →

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Intense heat and flooding are wreaking havoc on power and water systems as climate change batters America’s aging infrastructure

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Volunteers distributed bottled water after Jackson, Mississippi’s water treatment plant failed during flooding in August 2022.
Brad Vest/Getty Images

 

Paul Chinowsky, University of Colorado Boulder

The 1960s and 1970s were a golden age of infrastructure development in the U.S., with the expansion of the interstate system and widespread construction of new water treatment, wastewater and flood control systems reflecting national priorities in public health and national defense. But infrastructure requires maintenance, and, eventually, it has to be replaced.

That hasn’t been happening in many parts of the country. Increasingly, extreme heat and storms are putting roads, bridges, water systems and other infrastructure under stress. Continue reading →

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Alaska on fire: Thousands of lightning strikes and a warming climate put Alaska on pace for another historic fire season

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A large tundra fire burned near St. Mary’s, Alaska, on June 13, 2022.
BLM Alaska Fire Service/Incident Management Team/John Kern

Rick Thoman, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Alaska is on pace for another historic wildfire year, with its fastest start to the fire season on record. By mid-June 2022, over 1 million acres had burned. By early July, that number was well over 2 million acres, more than twice the size of a typical Alaska fire season.

We asked Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks, why Alaska is seeing so many large, intense fires this year and how the region’s fire season is changing. Continue reading →

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Children ‘Dying Before Our Eyes’: Aid Workers Plea for Help as Famine Unfolds in Somalia

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“Already 1.5 million children below the age of five are malnourished,” said one United Nations official, “and we expect that 356,000 of these may not survive through the end of September.”

By Brett Wilkins  Published -22-2022 by Common Dreams

Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary-General Jan Egeland listens to a woman speaking during a visit to drought-stricken Somalia on June 21, 2022. (Photo: Jan Egeland/Twitter)

International aid workers are issuing desperate pleas for help this week as severe climate-driven drought coupled with critically depleted global food supplies due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are fueling a slide into “catastrophic famine” in Somalia that could claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of children by summer’s end.

“Already 1.5 million children below the age of five are malnourished, and we expect that 356,000 of these may not survive through the end of September this year,” Adam Abdelmoula, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator for Somalia—which has suffered an unprecedented four consecutive failed rainy seasons—said during a visit to Dolow in the south near the Ethiopian border. Continue reading →

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UN Chief: IPCC Report a ‘Damning Indictment of Failed Climate Leadership’

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“The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership is criminal,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

By Jake Johnson.  Published 2-28-2022 by Common Dreams

The Holy Fire At Lake Elsinore, California August 9, 2018 Photo: slworking2/flickr/CC

A landmark scientific report published Monday warns that the human-caused climate crisis is driving a “dangerous and widespread disruption in nature” and impacting billions of lives across the globe, emergencies that can only be redressed by immediate and sweeping action that world leaders have thus far failed to take.

The product of years of collaborative research by scientists from around the world, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report “emphasizes the urgency of immediate and more ambitious action to address climate risks,” said Hoesung Lee, chair of the IPCC. Continue reading →

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More Than 130 Groups Call on CFTC to Shut Down ‘Dystopian’ Water Futures Market

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“In this time of global-warming-induced drought in California, the last thing we need is to gamble on our precious water resources.”

By Julia Conley.  Published 12-20-2021 by Common Dreams

Drought conditions, at a filtration pond, in Campbell, CA 2014. Photo: Tyler Bell/flickr/CC

Warning Wall Street against commodifying what has been treated since ancient history as “a common right for everyone,” more than 130 civil society groups on Monday demanded that federal regulators shut down the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s water futures market.

Food & Water Watch organized the petition, which was sent to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a year after the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) opened the world’s first market for water futures contracts, based on water rights in drought-plagued California. Continue reading →

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