Category: Climate & Environment
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A regional humanitarian update records 16,000 people affected by rains and flooding in Peru, a further 44,000 hit by ongoing rain, and 2 to 3 million expected to need food assistance in Honduras and Guatemala. None of it has drawn international coverage.
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Torrential rain has killed four people in eastern Spain, with rescue helicopters deployed in the Valencian Community including Oliva. Why this stretch of coast floods the way it does, and why early tolls in flash floods usually move.
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The Norte Fire has engulfed homes and triggered evacuation orders around San Juan Capistrano in Orange County, driven by hot offshore winds. October is not an odd month for this in southern California — it is the worst one.
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Two cyclones in succession — Fytia and Gezani — have affected more than 681,000 people across Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique, with 23.2 million dollars committed so far. The sequencing is what makes this dangerous, and it has gone almost entirely unreported.
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Ho Chi Minh City has postponed its low-emission zone by six months. In a city where millions earn their living on a motorcycle, the sequencing against metro expansion decides whether the scheme is a nudge or a loss of access.
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Drought cuts the harvest and expensive fuel makes importing the shortfall costlier — each shock removes the other’s remedy. Rice is unusually exposed, because so little of world production is actually traded.
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NOAA gives a 69 per cent chance that the developing El Niño reaches an intensity beyond anything recorded since 1950. The forecast’s value is its lead time — months of warning for droughts that funding systems are built to respond to only after they arrive.
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NOAA says the US just had its hottest summer in 132 years, beating the Dust Bowl summer of 1936 by 0.4°F. On a continent-wide seasonal average, that is a large margin — and the record warm nights matter more for survival than the record days.
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Fifteen countries spend more subsidising fossil fuels than on their entire health budgets, against an estimated 546,000 heat-related deaths a year. Both numbers are built from methods worth understanding before the statistic is used as a slogan.
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A research team chartered a jet and flew toward a reentering satellite to sample the air. Satellites are designed to burn up so they don’t become debris — but the metal they vaporise stays in the stratosphere, and no regulator is clearly responsible for it.