Category: Climate & Environment
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Hurricane Lowell’s centre is forecast to pass west of the main Hawaiian islands, and Kauai is still under a tropical storm warning with up to 14 inches of rain possible. Why the category number tells you little about what a storm does to a mountainous island — and why islands prepare differently.
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France recorded 53 days of heatwave conditions this summer, a figure Météo-France calls unprecedented, and its hottest June-to-August period since measurements began in 1900. The environment minister has promised adaptation measures and a five-year funding plan by the end of September.
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A mudslide killed one person and left eleven missing in Jiangxi this morning — a week after the typhoon that caused the rain made landfall somewhere else. Slopes fail on a delay, which is why the danger outlasts the coverage.
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UNEP’s Limiting Overshoot report, published on 2 September, treats exceeding 1.5°C as settled and asks a different question: how high the peak goes, how long it lasts, and whether temperatures can be brought back down. The best case it offers is 1.8°C.
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The World Meteorological Organization says there is a nearly 100 per cent chance El Niño lasts through February 2027 — the most unequivocal wording it has ever used. What that certainty covers, and what it does not, are two different things.
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A judge extended the pause on border wall construction in Big Bend National Park. The striking part is the mechanism: a cabinet secretary can waive the Endangered Species Act outright, and judicial review barely applies.
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Two dead and about fifteen missing after a flash flood through Bright Angel Creek. Sixty were airlifted out. The flood also destroyed the only water pipeline serving the park, where 1,600 people live year-round.
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A glacial lake outburst, a rock-ice avalanche and a debris flow are three different things, and the difference decides whether a warning was ever possible. What is known about how the Nepal disaster started — and what is not yet known about why.
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A glacier collapse sent water, mud and debris down the Lhende Khola valley on Wednesday morning, burying villages on both sides of the Nepal–Tibet border. It is the region’s deadliest disaster since the 2015 earthquake.
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Ice in the cracks of a mountain face acts as cement. Warm it slightly and steep slopes lose their binding. The evidence from the Alps is strong, the Himalayan record is thinner, and no single collapse can be attributed to warming.