Climate change, natural disasters 2017- June 2019

9 natural disasters that took the lives of hundreds of thousands
The Global Climate Action Summit
The Really Big One
An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest.
The question is when.

28 June
At Nearly 115 Degrees, France Experiences Its Hottest Day on Record
(NYT) The spell of unusually warm weather stretched across much of Europe this week, bringing urgent government alerts, contributing to wildfires in Spain and Germany, and leading to the death of at least two people.
While experts have yet to draw a firm connection between this relatively early — and extreme — heat wave and global warming, it fits a clear overall trend. As greenhouse gas emissions lead to a rise in global temperatures, heat waves around the world are occurring more often, and they are hotter and last longer.

21 June
Disaster Upon Disaster
(New York) How much suffering must one region endure before we begin to see it, properly, as a new category of suffering? How many natural disasters does it take to qualify as biblical, or apocalyptic, or at least to make us understand that we are living not through a bad week, or a bad year, but an unraveling climate system in which so much of what we take for granted as permanent features of the built environment may be turned into flotsam and jetsam by unprecedented weather?
By the end of the century, should unabated warming continue, a recent study suggested, parts of the planet could be pummeled by six climate-driven natural disasters at once. That kind of multiplying climate misery may seem still far away, but in fact we are seeing more and more instances of one disaster following directly in the footsteps of another, a whole new experience of sequential catastrophe, each making the impact of the next one worse.
Last month, in the Midwest, 500 tornadoes swept through the region in just 30 days — an average of 20 every day. The region is still underwater from historic flooding earlier in this spring, with some places deluged by seven feet of water and others issuing multiple disaster declarations in a single week. The Mississippi River has been flooding for three straight months; in Baton Rouge, the river rose past “flood stage” the first week of the year, according to Weather.com, “and has been above that threshold ever since.” In March, major flooding began in Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska — and in Nebraska alone, damages are expected to reach $1.3 billion. The whole Midwest, the New York Times wrote, “has been drowning,” and farmers are so far behind in their planting — with only a fraction of corn and soybean crops actually in the ground — that the whole year’s harvest is in peril.

16 June
Namibia forced by drought to auction 1,000 wild animals
Southern African nation aiming to limit starvation and generate conservation funds
The authorities declared a national disaster last month, and the meteorological services in the southern African nation estimate that some parts of the country faced the deadliest drought in as many as 90 years.
Drought-hit Namibia has authorised the sale of at least 1,000 wild animals – including elephants and giraffes – to limit loss of life and generate US$1.1 million for conservation, the authorities confirmed Saturday.
“Given that this year is a drought year, the [environment] ministry would like to sell various type of game species from various protected areas to protect grazing and at the same time to also generate much needed funding for parks and wildlife management,” the environment ministry spokesman Romeo Muyunda said.

27 May
Deadly tornadoes, ‘catastrophic’ flooding and extreme heat grip parts of U.S.
… while many residents are left picking up the pieces after tornadoes and fierce winds ripped through their homes last week, those in the region are still bracing for more violent storms this week in what the National Weather Service is calling “life-threatening” and “catastrophic” flooding.

16 May
1 big thing: We still don’t know how tornadoes form
(Axios) With a multiday severe weather outbreak poised to strike the central U.S., an armada of weather researchers is heading into the Plains. Their mission: to solve some of the elusive mysteries of tornado formation.
Why it matters: Scientists know what to look for on Doppler radar imagery to detect tornadoes, and the National Weather Service warns people with an average lead time of about 15 minutes. However, meteorologists have not overcome the hurdle of determining why one storm produces a tornado while another identical-looking storm does not, which is needed to improve the false alarm rate. Climate change may subtly shift Tornado Alley
While scientists prowl the Plains in search of monster storms, others are looking at broader-scale trends that show tantalizing clues about how Tornado Alley may be shifting both geographically and temporally as the climate changes.
The U.S. has the greatest number of tornadoes of any nation on Earth, and where they occur affects emergency management preparations, insurance markets, and individual decisions on whether to build a storm shelter. If, as global warming continues, Tornado Alley migrates, or outbreaks become more massive, this would shift the risk distribution.
A 2018 study showed regional shifts in tornado frequency, with an uptick in tornadoes east of the Mississippi River and a slight decline to the west.

12 May
Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End.
A bulletin from our climate future.
By David Wallace-Wells
(New York) Fires ignite randomly — downed power lines, out-of-control campsites — and so they are hard to predict. The next few years are as likely to be erratic ones, climate scientists say, as they are to be cumulatively worse. But over time, the prediction becomes much clearer. It is expected that by 2050, the area burned each year by forest fires across the western United States will at least double, and perhaps quadruple, what it is today as a result of warming. That is just three decades from now — the length of the mortgages that banks have extended to the homes on those fire-prone lands.
After that, the picture becomes ­murkier — projections diverge, mid-­century, in part because different scientists take different approaches to estimating just what the fire environment will look like in a particular ecosystem once all its land has burned. In greater Los Angeles, that could happen as soon as 2050, when past experience, harrowing and biblical as it may seem, could cease to be any kind of guide for what’s ahead.

22 March
Hunger, disease stalk Africa cyclone survivors, U.N. sees 1.7 million affected
(Reuters) – Hundreds of thousands of people scrambled for shelter, food and water across a swathe of southern Africa on Friday after a cyclone killed hundreds and swept away homes and roads, testing relief efforts for survivors facing a growing risk of cholera.
Cyclone Idai ‘might be southern hemisphere’s worst such disaster’
Millions from Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe affected as houses and roads submerged
‘Everything is destroyed’: Mozambique fears massive human toll from Cyclone Idai
Five days have passed since the powerful storm landed a direct hit on Mozambique’s fourth-largest city, Beira, which was almost totally destroyed. The city and its surrounding coastal plain were submerged by a storm surge that was reported to be above six meters high in some places. Continued torrential rain has only intensified the flooding and complicated efforts to save thousands of stranded people. (19 March)

2 March
Mount Kenya: Wildfires rage around Africa’s second highest peak
Wildlife rangers and Kenyan soldiers are battling to stem fierce wildfires on Mount Kenya national park, around 190 kilometers (118 miles) northeast of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
More than 80,000 hectares (200,000 acres) of forest land has been destroyed at the World Heritage site since the fires broke out a week ago.
Kenya’s Wildlife Service (KWS), the government agency responsible for national parks, said in a statement on Saturday that it had “made good progress” in containing the fires. However, it noted reports of fresh outbreaks. Other officials on the ground said the fires are still spreading at an alarming rate, and that firefighters faced challenges containing them due to high temperatures and changing wind direction

1 March
Australia experiences hottest summer on record
(BBC) The warm weather, 2.14C above the long-term average, caused bushfires, blackouts and a rise in hospital admissions.
Wildlife also suffered, with reports of mass deaths of wild horses, native bats and fish.
Parts of eastern Australia continue to suffer through their worst drought in recent history.
Drought seen from the air
Extreme floods kill 500,000 cattle

2018

10 November
‘Paradise is Gone’: California Fires Devastate Communities
Fires continue to rage on both ends of California, spreading with breakneck speed and displacing hundreds of thousands of people in a state where a once-seasonal worry has become a near-constant terror. At least nine are dead in the so-called Camp Fire, about 100 miles north of Sacramento, and two others have died in fires near Los Angeles.
In what fire officials said was an unstoppable storm-front fire, beginning early Thursday morning, the Camp Fire has exploded across 100,000 acres and destroyed more than 6,700 homes and commercial buildings.
Paradise, home to about 26,000 people, was shrouded in smoke on Saturday. Flames still licked downed power poles, and ghostly chimneys jutted up from charred concrete foundations. Evidence of the chaos of escape lined the road out of town, in the charred frames of cars and trucks that were abandoned midescape. Some cars had crashed into one another as flames roared on both sides of the road. At least five people died in their vehicles, overcome by the inferno, authorities said.

4 November
Italian storms claim 17th life, flatten 14 million trees
(The Weather Network) Areas from the far northeast to Sicily in the southwest have been affected by the storms, with the worst damage in the northern regions of Trentino and Veneto – the region around Venice – where villages and roads have been cut off by landslides.
In the Alps near Belluno, 100 km (60 miles) north of Venice, pine trees and red spruces were snapped wholesale like matchsticks.

30 October
Italy storms kill 11 and floods inundate St Mark’s Basilica, Venice
Third day of storms bring widespread damage to towns as lagoon city baptistery is submerged by 90cm of water
The lagoon city’s St Mark’s Square remained under water for a second day while the adjacent St Mark’s Basilica was inundated, its baptistery totally flooded and its mosaic floors covered by 90cm (2ft 11in) of water.
“The basilica has aged 20 years in just one day, and perhaps I am being overly optimistic about that,” said Carlo Tesserin, the church’s chief administrator. “It is becoming ever more difficult for us and indeed could become impossible for us to repair the damage, especially in an age of climate change
Widespread damage was also reported in towns and cities in the north, south and centre of Italy. Many of the 11 deaths were caused by falling trees as winds as strong as 90mph whipped the country.
Meanwhile, heavy snowfall across south-central France, with up to 40cm (16in) falling in some towns and villages, caused chaos on the roads and knocked out electricity to nearly 200,000 homes, authorities said on Tuesday. Venice Is Flooding Because of Climate Change, But Corruption Is Keeping It Under Water

7 October
Magnitude 5.9 earthquake hits northern Haiti
(CNN) At least 10 people were killed after a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck near Haiti on Saturday night, according to Haiti’s civil protection agency.
‘Not a straightforward event’: How multiple disasters stunned experts and ravaged a corner of Indonesia
(WaPost) In Palu, they thought they knew all the risks. Indonesians live along one of the world’s most active fault lines — and Palu, in particular, sits atop a gradually slipping plate. But a tsunami surge through the narrow bay and mud flows burying villages and residents were never among their fears until last week.
Indonesia has spent millions on disaster preparedness since a massive earthquake and tsunami in December 2004.
But this time, everything that was meant to work did not.
A warning system based on computer simulations failed to gauge the chances of a huge tsunami, estimating waves far smaller. Tsunami detection buoys were not functioning or in the wrong location.
Even the sensors that did work fooled scientists to think the worst was over — even while a third deadly tsunami surge was bearing down on Palu.
Now, the devastation in the central region of Sulawesi island will add a new chapter to the understandings of how shifts on the ocean floor can spawn deadly walls of water and can turn firm soil into muddy rivers that entombed hundreds of people.
Scientists say the back-to-back disasters — which have killed nearly 1,800 people, with more than 5,000 feared missing — were among the most complicated they had seen. It began Sept. 28 just after 6 p.m. with a magnitude 7.5 slip-strike quake, where the earth moves side by side.
3 October
Six days after Indonesia’s double disaster, needs remain acute

14 September
Hurricane Florence vs. Typhoon Mangkhut: The difference between the 2 major storms
(Global News) Two storms are happening simultaneously at two ends of the world — Hurricane Florence over the U.S. east coast and Typhoon Mangkhut in the Phillipines. Here is how the two storms compare, the damage expected from each of them, and the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon.
Given Mangkhut’s higher categorization, it is expected to have a bigger storm surge, but Florence is expected to move slowly and linger much like Hurricane Harvey last year, exasperating its effects. Mangkhut is expected to bring less rainfall than Florence because it is forecasted not to linger as long.
“Water is going to be the big issue with Florence whereas wind is the big issue with the typhoon,” said Bob Robichaud, a Warning Preparedness Meteorologist for Environment and Climate Change Canada.

13 September
Donald Trump Doesn’t Care About Puerto Rico
Recent comments by the president that serve to erase the severity of Hurricane Maria’s death toll on the island confirm that he’s never really seen the disaster as anything more than a conspiracy against him
(The Atlantic) On Wednesday morning Donald Trump tweeted: “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” referring to the most recent study finding that 2,975 people died as a result of the storm. “When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000,” he continued. In a follow-up tweet, he picked up the thread. “This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico,” he said.

11 September
Trump: Hurricane will be ‘tremendously big and tremendously wet’
President Trump on Tuesday warned about the impending arrival of Hurricane Florence, currently a Category 4 storm that is expected to make landfall later this week.
“They haven’t seen anything like what’s coming at us in 25, 30 years, maybe ever. It’s tremendously big and tremendously wet. Tremendous amounts of water,” Trump said in the Oval Office

22 August
The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here
With a new global summit approaching, communities in the southern United States are calling attention to the disaster scenarios they currently face.
(The Atlantic) [C]ommunities in the southern U.S. are dealing with a host of dangers caused by climate change—including drought, heat, and rising sea levels—to which already marginalized people are particularly vulnerable
Climate change is not a future problem. Climate change is a current problem. Yet the United States—despite this recent history—has pulled back from a number of already insufficient commitments to reversing emissions and global warming. Faced with this vacuum, American nongovernmental organizations and states have stepped forward with campaigns designed to reinvigorate climate activism and policy making. But they have a long way to go, especially in connecting a mainstream climate movement with the majority of the victims of those disasters.

9 August
Buildings collapse as strong new quake rocks Indonesia, death toll tops 300
Island reeling from earlier temblor on Sunday that left 270,000 people homeless
(CBC) The Indonesian island of Lombok was shaken by a third big earthquake in little more than a week Thursday as the official death toll from the most powerful of the quakes topped 300.
The strong aftershock, measured at magnitude 5.9 by the U.S. Geological Survey, caused panic, damage to buildings, landslides and injuries. It was centred in the northwest of the island and didn’t have the potential to cause a tsunami, Indonesia’s geological agency said.
Indonesia is prone to earthquakes because of its location on the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin. In December 2004, a massive magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

8 August
One of the largest banks issued an alarming warning that Earth is running out of the resources to sustain life
(Business Insider) The world spent its entire natural resource budget for the year by August 1, a group of analysts at HSBC said in a note that cited research from the Global Footprint Network (GFN). That means that the world’s citizens used up all the planet’s resources for the year in just seven months, according to GFN’s analysis.

7 August
California fire explodes in size, is now largest in state history
(CNN) Catastrophic wildfires continue to ravage California, as one blaze nearly doubled in size over the last three days, making it the largest in the state’s history.
No one has been injured in the Mendocino Complex Fire, which consists of two fires — the Ranch Fire and the River Fire — burning around Clear Lake, in several counties in Northern California.

In a strikingly ignorant tweet, Trump gets almost everything about California wildfires wrong
(LA Times) No one would mistake President Trump for an expert on climate change or water policy, but a tweet he issued late Sunday about California’s wildfires deserves some sort of award for most glaring misstatements about those two issues in the smallest number of words.
Trump blamed the fires on “bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized.” He complained that water needed for firefighting is being “diverted into the Pacific Ocean.”

4-6 August
Domino-effect of climate events could push Earth into a ‘hothouse’ state
Leading scientists warn that passing such a point would make efforts to reduce emissions increasingly futile
(The Guardian) A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests could tilt the Earth into a “hothouse” state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile, a group of leading climate scientists has warned.
This grim prospect is sketched out in a journal paper that considers the combined consequences of 10 climate change processes, including the release of methane trapped in Siberian permafrost and the impact of melting ice in Greenland on the Antarctic.
The authors of the essay, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stress their analysis is not conclusive, but warn the Paris commitment to keep warming at 2C above pre-industrial levels may not be enough to “park” the planet’s climate at a stable temperature.
They warn that the hothouse trajectory “would almost certainly flood deltaic environments, increase the risk of damage from coastal storms, and eliminate coral reefs (and all of the benefits that they provide for societies) by the end of this century or earlier.”
On climate change, it’s time to start panicking
The crisis over global warming warrants an unparalleled response
(Salon) Global warming has made the news for a number of reasons this week: The Supreme Court rejected a request by President Donald Trump to halt a lawsuit by children and teenagers to force the federal government to address man-made climate change; Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation took new steps to reverse President Barack Obama’s rules requiring car manufacturers to steadily reduce greenhouse gas pollution from their vehicles; former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denounced those same Trump policies as “stupid”; and The New York Times ran a brilliant piece documenting how, between 1979 and 1989, the world had the opportunity to effectively address man-made climate change… and squandered it. … A number of scientists have come out to argue that the devastating blazes were at the very least exacerbated by climate change, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. As Jennifer Francis, a professor at Rutgers University who studies atmospheric circulation, told the newspaper regarding the searing heat weave and weaker wind patterns, “We’re seeing this mix of conditions across North America and Europe, but they’re all connected. The weather patterns are just stuck. They’re trapped.”
7 ways Europe is feeling the heat
The heat is melting roads, disrupting power supplies and killing people.
By Ginger Hervey
Europe is baking.
From reindeer in Finland heading for the beach, to hospitals overheating, to bus drivers in Belgium threatening to wear skirts, this week’s unprecedented heat wave is frying the Continent.
The World Meteorological Organization has deemed the all-time high for Continental Europe as 48 degrees Celsius, set in Athens in 1977 — a figure that could be beaten this weekend.
Hospitals overheating
Complaints arose after indoor temperatures at a Paris hospital reached almost 40 degrees. France’s health minister told French media Thursday that “little by little” hospitals are introducing measures to beat the heat, including installing air conditioning in some rooms.
Hospitals in several countries are reporting record numbers of emergency visits related to respiratory problems and dehydration. In the U.K., a parliamentary report predicted more than 7,000 people could die each year from heat-related causes by 2050, as higher temperatures of 38.5 Celsius will be the norm. (Around 2,000 people died in Britain in a 2003 heat wave.)

1-2 August
The Economist: The world is losing the war against climate change
Rising energy demand means use of fossil fuels is heading in the wrong direction
We’ve reached a milestone in our demand for Earth’s natural resources, and it could have major consequences
This year’s Earth Overshoot Day falls on August 1, the earliest it has ever been.
Renewable natural resources are being consumed 1.7 times faster than they can regenerate, according to the Global Footprint Network.
A large ecological footprint can cause a loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, and deforestation, as well as more severe droughts and hurricanes around the world.
Europe facing its hottest day ever as heatwave hits with 48°C heat on its way
A weather map illustrates the magnitude of the intense heatwave gripping south west Europe.
It shows a sea of red spreading from Africa and across Spain and Portugal.
Forecasters predict temperatures of up to 48C later this week, which would be the hottest temperature ever recorded in mainland Europe.
Spanish authorities are making preparations for emergencies during the heatwave expected to continue through Sunday. 27 of the country’s 50 provinces are at ‘extreme risk’ from heat beginning Thursday, the national weather agency said.

24 July
In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea
Europe has sweltered through an unusually hot and dry summer, breaking temperature records and fueling significant fires in several countries, including Sweden and Britain.
The extreme conditions are in line with patterns that scientists attribute to climate change. Heat waves can be linked to climate change in several ways: Increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hold more of the sun’s heat, raising temperatures globally. A hotter climate in turn changes the way air and ocean currents move around the planet, which can further increase temperatures in certain places, like the Mediterranean.
“In the Mediterranean we also see a drying effect: If you have a drier soil, it heats up more quickly,” said Friederike Otto, the deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.
Intense heat wave to build across western Europe as wildfires rage in Sweden
Some locations that may have their highest temperatures of the year this week include Madrid, Spain; Paris, France; Frankfurt, Germany; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Stockholm, Sweden.
While unseasonable heat is expected each day through this weekend, the hottest conditions are expected on Thursday and Friday.
High temperatures will soar to or above 32 C (90 F) from the interior of Spain through much of France, Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany both days. High temperatures may reach 35 C (95 F) in Paris, Brussels and Cologne.
Temperatures may reach 32 C (90 F) as far north as southern Sweden, including Stockholm.
Japan’s Record-Breaking Heatwave Declared Natural Disaster, 80 Dead
Preliminary government data shows that the heatwave caused 65 deaths from July 16-22. Another 22,647 people were also sent to hospitals with heat stroke symptoms. Both of the figures are the highest for one week since record-keeping began in 2008, according to the Asahi Shimbun.

19 July
Heat Wave Scorches Sweden as Wildfires Rage in the Arctic Circle
As Europe grapples with near-record temperatures and sustained drought, Sweden has become the latest nation to confront a wave of wildfires as far north as the Arctic Circle, prompting the authorities to evacuate some villages and to appeal for help from neighboring Norway and distant Italy.
There were no immediate reports of any deaths or injuries, but the intensity of the fires and the extreme weather conditions earlier in the year have prompted anguished debate among some Swedes who have described the conflagrations in apocalyptic terms and linked them to global warming.

9 July
Rescuers search for survivors after Japan floods kill at least 126
(Reuters) – Rescuers in western Japan dug through mud and rubble early on Tuesday, racing to find survivors after torrential rain that began last week unleashed floods and landslides that killed up to 130 people, with dozens missing.

6 July
Global Warming May Actually Be Twice As Hot As Climate Models Projected
(Tech Times) A new study suggests that global warming that’s twice as bad may be in store for humans in the future.
The new projections are rather grim: the polar ice caps could collapse and the Sahara Desert could become green as a result of aggressive changes in various ecosystems.
The Study
Global warming may be twice as projected by climate models and sea levels may rise 20 feet even if the world meets the 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit target, an international team of researchers from 17 nations noted in the new research.
The team explored evidence from three warm periods that occurred in the last 3.5 million years when Earth was 32.9 degrees F (0.5 degrees Celsius) to 35.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) hotter than pre-industrial 19th-century temperatures.
In their observations, the team saw that there are “amplifying mechanisms,” not well-represented in climate models, which make long-term warming worse than what is forecasted in climate models.

2 July
Worth reading for the innovative graphics alone.
Analysis: ‘Global’ warming varies greatly depending where you live
(Carbon Brief) As part of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the international community committed in 2015 to limit rising global temperatures to “well below” 2C by the end of the 21st century and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C”.
However, these global temperature targets mask a lot of regional variation that occurs as the Earth warms. For example, land warms faster than oceans, high-latitude areas faster than the tropics, and inland areas faster than coastal regions.
Furthermore, global human population is concentrated in specific regions of the planet.
Here, Carbon Brief analyses how much warming people will actually experience where they live, both today and under future warming scenarios.

3-5 May
Kilauea: Earthquakes follow eruptions from Hawaii volcano
(BBC) A number of strong earthquakes have hit Hawaii’s Big Island, a day after the eruption of the Kilauea volcano.
One 6.9 magnitude quake, south-east of the volcano, was the most powerful to hit the US state since 1975.
It briefly cut power and sent people fleeing from buildings but there was no tsunami warning.
Meanwhile, several fresh eruptions spewed fountains of lava 30m (100ft), destroying several homes and leaving fissures on three streets.

4 January
Historic ‘bomb cyclone’ unleashes blizzard conditions from coastal Virginia to New England. Frigid air to follow
On Thursday afternoon, the sprawling storm was hammering the coast from the Mid-Atlantic to southeast Maine with punishing winds and blinding snow.

2017

29 December
The Top 7 Climate Findings of 2017
Research breakthroughs astound scientists
(Scientific American) As the potential effects of climate change are seen around the world – from starving polar bears to record-breaking storms – interest in climate science is soaring. Scientists are digging into the “how,” “why” and “what’s next” of global temperatures, melting ice, emission sources and sinks, changing weather patterns, and rising seas
… this year marks the first time some of the papers concluded that an event could not have occurred – like, at all – in a world where global warming did not exist. The studies suggested that the record-breaking global temperatures in 2016, an extreme heat wave in Asia and a patch of unusually warm water in the Alaskan Gulf were only possible because of human-caused climate change.
Scientists say these are likely not the only events to occur strictly because of climate change. They’re just the first to be discovered. But the research does suggest that we’re now crossing another threshold by entering a world in which climate change is not only influencing the events that shape the planet, but is an essential component for some of them.

15 December
Major Report: Some Extreme Weather Can Only Be Blamed on Humans
A high-profile science panel finds several severe events in 2016 could not have naturally occurred
(Scientific American) This week the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published an assessment of the connection between climate change and extreme events in 2016, the society’s sixth annual report on the topic. The report selects a handful of extreme events from the previous year and disentangles anthropogenic climate change’s effects from natural variability (meaning what we would expect to happen without human influence). For the first time in the report’s history, scientists said that they have found that several of the events could not have occurred if the planet was not heating up.
According to the new report, three human-caused extreme events in 2016 were: the overall global temperature increase; record heat in Asia, with crises like the dangerous heat wave that hit Thailand in April 2016; and finally, marine hot spots in the Gulf of Alaska, Bering Sea and off the coast of northern Australia. Areas of the Bering Sea became part of a mysterious mass of warm ocean water dubbed “the Blob”—a phenomenon that cannot “be explained without anthropogenic climate warming,” according to a press release from the Bulletin.

13 December
2016’s record heat not possible without climate change, says report
(Axios) At least three instances of extreme weather would not have happened without climate change, according to the American Meterological Society’s annual report on extreme weather and climate change. Past reports found certain weather events were ‘influenced’ or made more frequent by climate change, but the tools researchers used weren’t powerful enough to measure just how much climate change played a role. This is the first time the report has definitively pointed the finger at global warming.
Why it matters: These weather anomalies are becoming more common, say the report authors, and they can have massive health and economic impacts. If the role climate change played in causing them can be pinpointed, researchers may be able to better predict how climate change might impact our future. For example, by understanding how marine heat waves change weather, scientists were able to predict the 2016/2017 Somalian drought, and mitigate some of the loss of life.

12 December
Why are California’s wildfires so historic? For starters, a diablo is at work.
(WaPost) this latest inferno — three wildfires eating at the hills in and around Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city — is frightening even for people who are accustomed to big burns. What’s more, it follows the state’s deadliest fire on record by only a few weeks. …
“These hot, dry winds develop from an unusual pattern of high and low pressure cells, and are most prominent in autumn. They follow the normal summer and fall drought that occurs in this Mediterranean-type climate, leading to severe fire weather conditions,” Keeley wrote. They’ve played a role in California’s most catastrophic fires, he said, including the 1991 Tunnel Fire in Oakland that left 25 people dead. “The speed of these fires is a major factor leading to the loss of human lives.” …
Like every state, California has a great diversity of plants, including an abundance of dry shrubland called chaparral. Since the addition of housing near wooded landscapes forces firefighters to douse blazes that would normally burn away vegetation in a natural low-intensity fire cycle, new plants grow when it rains and join the old dried-out growth in summers. Together they sit and wait for a potential fire catastrophe.
Also, because humans track and traffic nonnative species from across the world, more fire-resistant grass that’s native to California has given way to faster growing and faster burning grasses that don’t belong on the landscape. They basically become a fuse that leads flames to dry vegetation, which combusts when the fire reaches them.

7 December
Southern California Fires Live Updates: Threats in Ventura and San Diego Counties
(NYT) “It felt like the whole world was burning down.”
That’s how our Los Angeles reporters describe the wind-driven wildfires that have scorched 116,000 acres across Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Schools are closed, roadways are shut and nearly 200,000 people have been told to evacuate. Winds are strengthening, and none of the fires are close to being contained. Here’s the latest.
This video examines how recent weather, climate change and rapid development have made California’s fire season so brutal this year.
(The Atlantic) California Burning: The hot, dry, Santa Ana winds are the most immediate cause for the massive wildfires in Southern California, but several other factors,  including climate change, are likely contributing to 2017’s prolonged and serious fire season.

27 November

27 November
Indonesia orders immediate evacuation as highest alert issued for Bali volcano
(Reuters) – Indonesia closed the airport on the tourist island of Bali on Monday and ordered 100,000 residents living near a grumbling volcano spewing columns of ash to evacuate immediately, warning that the first major eruption in 54 years could be “imminent”.
“Plumes of smoke are occasionally accompanied by explosive eruptions and the sound of weak blasts that can be heard up to 12 km (7 miles) from the peak,” the Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) said in a statement after raising the alert from three to its highest level of four.
“The potential for a larger eruption is imminent,” it said, referring to a visible glow of magma at Mount Agung’s peak overnight, and warning residents to evacuate a danger zone at a radius of 8-10 km (5-6 miles).

13 November
15,000 scientists give catastrophic warning about the fate of the world in new ‘letter to humanity’
(The Independent) The message updates an original warning sent from the Union of Concerned Scientists that was backed by 1,700 signatures 25 years ago. But the experts say the picture is far, far worse than it was in 1992, and that almost all of the problems identified then have simply been exacerbated.
Mankind is still facing the existential threat of runaway consumption of limited resources by a rapidly growing population, they warn. And “scientists, media influencers and lay citizens” aren’t doing enough to fight against it, according to the letter.
If the world doesn’t act soon, there be catastrophic biodiversity loss and untold amounts of human misery, they warn.
Only the hole in the ozone layer has improved since the first letter was written, and the letter urges humanity to use that as an example of what can happen when it acts decisively. But every single other threat has just got worse, they write, and there is not long left before those changes can never be reversed.

3 November
Climate change: what to expect and are there really two sides? (video)
(CBC) Many view climate change as the most pressing issue of our time. But how, specifically, is it going to affect us and our planet? Is there still time to make a difference? And what does it mean to believe “both sides” of climate change science? CBC’s Bob McDonald weighs-in

11 October
(Reuters) Fast-moving wildfires raging across Northern California’s wine country have killed 17 people, left about 150 missing and destroyed 1,500 homes, wineries and other structures, state fire officials said. The flames from 17 major blazes have blackened more than 115,000 acres since fires broke out on Sunday amid hot, dry conditions and high winds.

10 October
California fires: at least 10 killed in ‘unprecedented’ wine country blaze
Wildfires destroy 1,500 structures and large swaths of northern California wine country as powerful winds fuel ‘an inferno like you’ve never seen before’
California’s governor, Jerry Brown, has declared a state of emergency in eight mostly northern counties – Butte, Lake, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Orange, Sonoma and Yuba counties. The flames are barely contained and are threatening thousands of homes and vineyards in the wine country north of San Francisco.

6 October
Tropical storm Nate hits Mexico. The storm, which killed 20 people in Central America on Thursday, arrives in the Yucatan Peninsula today. If it undergoes “rapid intensification” in the Caribbean, it could turn it into a hurricane by Sunday, when it’s expected to reach the US Gulf Coast.

30 September

CODRINGTON, ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA – SEPTEMBER 24: (Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Should they go back?
(WaPost) In this, the cruelest season of storms that anyone alive has known, entire islands, such as Barbuda, have been wiped clear. There’s no power across Puerto Rico, and it probably won’t fully return for months. Dominica is devastated, with no commerce and hardly any usable homes. St. John and St. Martin — playgrounds for the affluent and homelands for the descendants of slaves, adventurers and colonizers — have been boomeranged back to a time before luxury resorts and timeshare condos.
The storms pushed the islands back to the primitive, basic state that made the sandbars of the Caribbean so alluring to European empires, pirates and tourists for half a millennium.
The World Bank has encouraged island nations to build in resiliency — put much of the electrical network underground, invest in drainage systems, pass stricter building codes, rebuild hospitals so they can double as storm shelters. On islands that have taken such steps, recent storms have caused far fewer deaths than strong hurricanes did in the past, Sayed said.
“The whole thing is about cost-benefit analysis,” said Saurabh Dani, a disaster-risk-management specialist at the World Bank. “The social and economic cost of trying to recover from a devastating storm makes you realize that it might be worth the cost” to invest in expensive precautions such as moving electrical wires from overhead poles to underground trenches.
Major storms can paralyze production in agriculture and industry for years, Schwartz said, but “hurricanes bring benefits too — eliminating insects, renewing fields.” The difference between long-term devastation and quick recovery depends on “the willingness of the government to spend on preparation,” he said. “One dollar spent in preparation is worth four in recovery.”

26 September
America’s Natural Disaster Response Is Its Own Disaster
After three major hurricanes, FEMA is facing its costliest challenge ever. Congress can’t just throw money at the problem. It’s time for reform.

Three catastrophic — and catastrophically expensive — storms in a row prove that the federal government’s “current model for natural-disaster preparation is deeply flawed,” argues The New Republic’s Emily Atkin. As climate change worsens the impacts of severe weather, “the biggest short-term mistake Congress could make would be to delay approval of necessary funding,” she writes. “But the biggest long-term mistake would be to consider this year a fluke.”

Crisis in Puerto Rico: Most of the U.S. territory is without power and running water after Hurricanes Irma and Maria knocked out large portions of its infrastructure, leaving hospitals struggling to care for patients and families on the mainland waiting for news about their loved ones. The island’s wildlife are also in trouble, with researchers working to save a unique colony of rhesus macaques after the storms destroyed much of Puerto Rico’s vegetation. The devastation makes aid an urgent priority, and it’s too early to say whether the federal government’s response measures up.
US won’t waive shipping restrictions for Puerto Rico relief
(The Hill) The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined the request to waive the Jones Act, which limits shipping between coasts to U.S.-flagged vessels, according to Reuters. DHS waived the act following hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which hit the mainland U.S.
The agency has in the past waived the rule to allow cheaper and more readily-available foreign vessels to supply goods to devastated areas. But DHS said Tuesday that waiving the act for Puerto Rico would not help the U.S. island territory due to damaged ports preventing ships from docking.
‘People are starting to die’: Distribution chaos snarls effort to aid desperate Puerto Ricans

Thousands flee as Vanuatu volcano verges on eruption
Up to 70 percent of people on South Pacific islands moved to emergency shelters as Monaro becomes increasingly active.
The Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department warned of “flying rocks and volcanic gas”, which could affect villages up to 6.5km away, after raising the volcano alert level from three to four.
Schools on the island – which is more than 1,750km east of northern Australia – have been closed and up to 70 percent of its population will be evacuated, according to Vanuatu’s National Disaster Management Office.

24 September
2 new quakes shake southern Mexico, already coping with disasters
(CNN) A 6.1 magnitude earthquake Saturday morning was centered in Oaxaca state near Matias Romero, a town about 275 miles southeast of Mexico City, the US Geological Survey said. Roughly speaking, the epicenter was between the centers of this month’s two more violent earthquakes — the 7.1 magnitude temblor that hit Tuesday closer to the capital, and the 8.1 magnitude quake that struck September 8 off the southern Pacific coast, near Chiapas state.
A 6.1 magnitude quake can produce strong shaking and considerable damage to poorly built structures and slight to moderate damage in better-constructed buildings, the USGS says.
The earlier major quakes killed hundreds of people and turned buildings into dust and debris in parts of Mexico. More than 300 people have been reported killed in Tuesday’s quake; nearly 100 reportedly died in the September 8 temblor.

23 September
Fears of dam collapse add to Puerto Rico’s misery after hurricane
(Reuters) – Puerto Rico’s governor met with mayors from around the ravaged island on Saturday after surveying damage to an earthen dam in the northwestern part of the U.S. territory that was threatening to collapse from flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
Some 70,000 people who live downstream from the compromised dam, forming a lake on the rain-swollen Guajataca River, were under order to evacuate, with the structure in danger of bursting at any time.

21 September
Entire towns in Mexico flattened as scale of earthquake damage emerges
Thousands of left homeless in towns and communities outside Mexico City as official rescue and relief efforts struggle to cope with the widespread destruction
Hopes that rescuers will find more survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings in central Mexico were fading on Thursday, as the scale of the devastation wreaked by the country’s deadliest earthquake for a generation started to become clear.
At least 250 people died and 1,900 were injured in the 7.1 magnitude quake which struck Mexico on Tuesday – 32 years to the day after the country’s deadliest earthquake killed thousands and laid waste to the capital city. The death toll will certainly rise as rescue workers continue to search the precarious ruins amid the threat of aftershocks, collapsing rubble and gas leaks.
Parts of Mexico City – which is built on a drained lakebed – have been devastated, but details of the destruction outside the capital are only now starting to emerge, with reports of entire towns flattened and thousands of people left homeless.
Hurricane Maria churns through Caribbean as ravaged Puerto Rico takes stock of an ‘island destroyed’
Puerto Rico gets its first full look at staggering damage left by the strongest storm to hit the island in more than 80 years.
Search-and-rescue efforts on this storm-ravaged island redoubled Thursday as residents took stock of the devastation left by Hurricane Maria, which continued to plague the U.S. territory in the form of dangerous flash floods even as its core drifted northwest to deliver a weaker but still punishing blow to the Dominican Republic.
The powerful storm knocked out power to the entire island and felled cellphone towers, leaving many residents unable to call for help or communicate with family members. Downed trees blocked roadways, some of which were turned into fast-flowing, muddy rivers. The obstacles complicated efforts to assess the full scope of damage, though authorities are already estimating that the potential cost could to reach into the billions.
Puerto Rico battered by Hurricane Maria: ‘Devastation – it’s everywhere’
Worst storm to hit Puerto Rico in 80 years felled trees and smashed buildings
Governor’s spokesman describes scene of ‘total devastation’
After hours of hurricane-force winds and torrential rain, Puerto Ricans emerged from hurricane shelters on Thursday morning to find that their island was still under threat from landslides, flash floods and crippled water and electricity systems.
Where will the next earthquake strike? How a chain of frightening quakes in the ‘Ring of Fire’ is terrorising the Pacific – and leaves California on edge
Earthquakes struck NZ, Japan, Vanuatu, and Indonesia in less than 24 hours along the ‘Ring of Fire’
There was also a huge 7.1 magnitude quake in Mexico City on Tuesday – but experts ruled out a connection
Seismologists say they could be linked by seismic waves travelling along faults and spark a domino effect The
‘Ring of Fire’ stretches from New Zealand to Chile through Indonesia, Japan, and California

9 September
‘The ocean is missing!’ Rare phenomenon caused by Irma sucks the water from Bahamas beaches
Hurricane Irma is so strong that it is sucked water into itself and away from shorelines in the Bahamas
Video footage from Long Island, Bahamas shows a dry ocean floor after Hurricane Irma hit on Friday
A meteorologist explained low pressure in the center of the storm caused the water to be drawn upwards into itself and away from the beach
The water will not rush back like a tsunami and the shore will likely be back to normal Sunday afternoon

8 September
A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been
As Hurricane Irma prepares to strike, it’s worth remembering that Mother Nature never intended us to live here.
(Politico) The thing is, it’s really nice here, except when it isn’t. Those Seminole War soldiers would be stunned to see how this worthless hellscape of swarming mosquitoes and sodden marshes has become a high-priced dreamscape of swimming pools and merengue and plastic surgery and Mar-a-Lago. It probably isn’t sustainable. But until it gets wiped out—and maybe even after—there’s still going to be a market for paradise. Most of us came here to escape reality, not to deal with it.

(The Atlantic) It’s still unclear what the impact of Hurricane Irma will be on Florida, but the National Hurricane Center in Miami is in its path and monitoring the situation. One difficulty comes in communicating warnings to those who don’t speak English. And by combining ship tracking images and wind tracking data, it’s possible to see how marine craft have been avoiding the storm. Also, despite EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s statement that it isn’t appropriate to talk about climate change in the midst of a natural disaster, James Hamblin argues the opposite.

Magnitude-8.1 earthquake strikes off southern Mexico
Dozens killed in southern provinces, as tsunami wave of up to one metre is measured off Salina Cruz coast.
A major earthquake off the southern coast of Mexico has killed at least 34 people, according to authorities, with the president saying it was the biggest hit the country in a century.
Some of the worst initial reports came from the town of Juchitan in Oaxaca state, where sections of the town hall, a hotel, a bar and other buildings were reduced to rubble.
“There have been half a dozen of magnitude five and four aftershocks reported already,” Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist with US Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center, told Al Jazeera. “There are possibilities that the aftershocks will probably continue for the next several months.”

Hurricane Irma tears through Caribbean islands and is on collision course with Florida
Irma moved toward Florida’s doorstep on track for landfall this weekend with potential once-in-a-generation wrath.
“It’s not a question of if Florida’s going to be impacted, it’s a question of how bad Florida’s going to be impacted and where the storm ends up,” William “Brock” Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said at a briefing on Friday.
Floridians are familiar with ominous forecasts and hurricane warnings, and many in the state have memories of the brutal impact left behind by Hurricane Andrew — which made landfall as a Category 5 monster in 1992. … “I can guarantee you that I don’t know anybody in Florida that’s ever experienced what’s about to hit South Florida,” Long said. “They need to get out and listen and heed the warnings.”

5 September
Building better defenses against rising floods and storms
By Vinod Thomas, Visiting Professor – National University of Singapore Author – Climate Change and Natural Disasters
(Brookings) … as climate change intensifies these hydro-meteorological events, the only lasting response is to step up risk management, which includes mitigation and prevention, prediction, and early warning.

The Houston Flooding Pushed the Earth’s Crust Down 2 Centimeters
The 275 trillion pounds of water from Hurricane Harvey deformed the ground in Texas.
(The Atlantic) GPS data from special stations around Houston detected that the whole area had been pushed down roughly two centimeters by the weight of the water that fell during Hurricane Harvey.
Why this would happen is simpler than you might think. A gallon of water weighs about 8.34 pounds. And by one estimate, Harvey dropped 33 trillion gallons of water across the area it hit. So that’s roughly 275 trillion pounds.

2 September

The Guardian: World weatherwatch

It’s human nature to care more about disasters closer to home, and our moral duty to overcome it
(Quartz) As some have pointed out, the Western media has focused intently on covering Houston’s disaster. Meanwhile, weather has been no less catastrophic in South Asia this summer, where monsoon rains caused floods that have killed more than 1,000 people in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal.
Depending on where you are in the world, one of those natural disasters will probably evoke more viscerally disturbing images—of people you know, or could know, of city streets and infrastructure that you can easily picture—than the other. … The juxtaposition between our emotional and rational response to international crises was highlighted by the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, in one of his lesser-known works, “Theory of Moral Sentiments.” (2 September 2017)

What Climate Scientists Want You to See in the Floodwaters
(NYT op-ed) The answer, for scientists and everyone else who has been watching, is not to say definitively and dismissively, “This is the result of climate change” or “There’s nothing we can do.” It’s a chance to understand what is actually happening to the climate and all the ways human behavior leads to — and can mitigate — future disaster.
We start with two premises. Climate change doesn’t cause extreme events. It amplifies them. And in any weather-related calamity, our susceptibility to harm is, at its root, constructed by ourselves.
On the climate side of risk, we have unambiguous evidence that the hazards are changing. Our emissions of heat-trapping gases have already increased the likelihood and severity of heat waves, extreme rainfall and storm surges. Much of the world’s population occupies places susceptible to this kind of extreme weather that will increasingly be exacerbated by the changing climate.
Scientists can now even evaluate how much climate change has increased the odds of individual extreme events, including rainfall and flooding.
On the human side of risk, we should as a society embrace the fact that how and where we build our homes, plant our crops, construct our roads and bridges, and locate our schools and industries can provide resilience and safety rather than invite calamity. When rivers overtop their banks with floodwaters, for instance, does the water flow into wide-open flood plains and city streets with good drainage, or are those flood plains paved over and the drainage clogged? Consider that while the Texas Medical Center was able to maintain continuous care for its patients, thanks to dozens of floodgates and above-ground generators, the hospital became largely inaccessible when surrounding streets turned into rivers.

1 September
Rains lash southern Pakistan after causing havoc in India
(AP via The Hindu) Torrential monsoon rains are lashing Pakistan’s port city of Karachi following downpours in neighboring India that especially caused havoc in Mumbai.
TV footage showed streets were submerged already after the heavy rains began early on Thursday. Pakistan’s meteorological department says rains will continue for three days in various parts of Sindh province, where authorities closed schools as a precaution.

B.C. travelers warned about wildfires, with 2017 reaching historical worst levels
The B.C. government announced today (September 1) that it is extending the state of emergency to September 15.
There are currently 136 wildfires reported in the province (reported as of midnight on August 31).
There were 21 new fires (three of those were human-caused) that were discovered on August 30.
So far this year, there have been 1,176 fires since April, which have burned a whopping total of 1,080,941 hectares of the province, according to statistics from the B.C. Wildfire Service website.
This year’s amount has already surpassed the historical record from 1958 when a total of 856,000 hectares were burnt. (Records have been kept since 1912.)

31 August
A peculiarly western concern?
A growing army of animal lovers is on the ground in Houston, responding to owners’ pleas to find their lost dogs and cats
Animal rescue groups were worried even before the hurricane made landfall, because the long memory of Katrina still looms large in the minds of those who did rescue work in 2005, where tens of thousands of pets died.
Katrina changed a great deal about how animal evacuees are handled, not least because 44%of those who refused to evacuate did so because they were worried about their pets.

30 August
A Storm Forces Houston, the Limitless City, to Consider Its Limits
(NYT) “There could have been ways to have more green space and more green infrastructure over the years, and it just didn’t work that way, because it was fast and furious,” said Phil Bedient, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Rice University. Many developments were not built with enough open land or enough detention areas to take in floodwaters, Dr. Bedient said. “It’s been known for years how to do it,” he said, “it just costs the developers more money to do it that way.”
The post-Harvey rebuilding drama here is bound to unfold as a frontier nation increasingly faces up to limits — as southern and western cities mature, as resources are strained by a growing population, and as climate change, exacerbated by Houston’s signature industry, threatens bigger, wetter, ever-more-dangerous storms.
The city grew rapidly in the postwar years, and in an effort to control storm water and direct the runoff to the Gulf of Mexico, two key bayous through the city were channelized — essentially converted to concrete culverts — while a third was widened, Dr. Bedient said. A network of channels — 1,500 of them, today totaling 2,500 miles — were built to move storm runoff out of neighborhoods and down to the sea.
But in the end, they may have provided a false sense of security. “And so the building just went rampant, and there weren’t many controls,” Dr. Bedient said. “We had no zoning. It was like the Wild West, and you just built housing subdivision after housing subdivision up close to the bayous, up close to the channels.”
By the 1980s, Dr. Bedient said, officials came to realize that the system could not handle big rainfalls: the green space that could have absorbed much of the water from a big storm was now paved over with parking lots, houses, churches and malls.

Floods in India, Bangladesh and Nepal kill 1,200 and leave millions homeless
Authorities say monsoon flooding is one of the worst in region in years
At least 1,200 people have been killed and millions have been left homeless following devastating floods that have hit India, Bangladesh and Nepal, in one of the worst flooding disasters to have affected the region in years.
International aid agencies said thousands of villages have been cut off by flooding with people being deprived of food and clean water for days.
South Asia suffers from frequent flooding during the monsoon season, which lasts from June to September, but authorities have said this year’s floods have been much worse.

17 August
Wildfires trap 2,000 people in town in central Portugal
Flames and smoke surround Mação, making it impossible to enter or leave – the latest in country’s deadliest year for fires
In mid-June, wildfires near Pedrógão Grande in central Portugal killed 64 people and injured more than 250 others. In once incident, flames spread so quickly that some people died after being trapped in their cars as they tried to drive to safety.
Fires have destroyed 141,000 hectares of land in Portugal this year, civil protection officials said on Wednesday, citing provisional figures.
Firefighters have tackled more than 10,000 separate fires this year – 2,500 more than at the same period in 2016.

10 August
Iraq sends workers home as ‘ungodly’ heat grips Middle East
Power networks struggle in Baghdad and building work halted in Riyadh, while high humidity affects coastal cities
the Middle East is enduring a summer so brutal that even those accustomed to Baghdad’s searing August weather are labelling it “ungodly”.
As temperatures rose towards 51C (124F) on Thursday, Iraq’s government declared a mandatory holiday, allowing civil servants to shelter at home.
In Kuwait, where birds have reportedly dropped from the skies, and Riyadh, where building work has ceased this week, locals have called for mercy from a hotter-than-normal air mass that has remained nearly stationary over central Arabia for more than three weeks, stretching the capacity of electricity networks beyond limits.
While the centre of the region is being scorched, on the Mediterranean coast Beirut and Istanbul have also been blighted by a cruel summer – in their cases, extreme humidity that has made comparatively modest daytime temperatures seem far higher.

4 August
Extreme heat warnings issued in Europe as temperatures pass 40C
Authorities in 11 countries warn residents and tourists to take precautions amid region’s most intense heatwave – nicknamed Lucifer – since 2003

30 July
Heavy rain brings flooding and loss of life
From New Zealand to India and North America, wet weather has brought misery to tens of thousands of people

26 March
Storms lash America and Australia, and chill returns to Spain
Thunderstorms caused damage in Georgia and in Sydney, and Spanish farmers face another cold snap
A line of severe thunderstorms ripped through parts of the US state of Georgia on Tuesday last week. There were powerful winds, gusting to around 60mph, which brought down trees across northern Georgia and the Atlanta area. Around 170,000 people were left without power at the height of the storm on Tuesday night, which also brought heavy rain and large hail. Meanwhile in Australia, Sydney was also battered by a severe thunderstorm last Wednesday which left tens of thousands of homes without power. The storm brought heavy rainfall and damaging winds, especially to western Sydney, felling trees, bringing down power lines and causing localised flooding. The clean-up operation was hindered on Thursday by further heavy rain, before conditions improved later in the week.

15 February
Weather bombed north-east US feels the chill
Explosive meteorology of Storm Orson sheds snow as pressure plummets
Storm Orson has made an impact on parts of the north-east US, leaving more than a metre (40in) of snow over the past week as it underwent explosive cyclogenesis, dropping 24 millibars in just 15 hours.
Following the worst drought Bolivia has seen in more than 25 years, severe thunderstorms plagued parts of central South America last week. Whilst rainfall helped alleviate drought conditions, more than 75mm of rain fell in just a few hours across parts of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, triggering severe flash floods as water inundated the dehydrated and impermeable ground. Other regions were hammered by crippling hailstorms, leaving at least two fatalities.
The Kashmir valley in northern India has also been buried by its heaviest bout of snowfall in 25 years, an event that initially coincided with the harsh weather period known as Chillai Kalan , when regional temperatures can drop as low as -20C (-4F).

13 February
Winter Storm Warnings Issued For The East Coast | 12-18″ of Additional Snowfall Today For Northern Maine