12 August 2017, New York Times, Portugal Forest Fires Worsen, Fed by Poor Choices and Inaction. When Portugal’s deadliest wildfire killed more than 60 people in June not far from the hamlet where Daniel Muralha lives, it was just the pensioner’s latest brush with death. 2003, Mr. Muralha, 77, narrowly survived a huge forest fire that engulfed his house. In 2015, a fire destroyed his field. And this July, he watched anxiously as fire burned the trees above his property. fires are getting worse and worse, which means this place is going to become a desert,” he said. “I’m too old to move elsewhere, but more people, of course, decide to leave after every fire.” What he describes is an increasingly urgent problem for his country. Hotter, drier summers are setting off more forest fires, which are accelerating a decades-old migration from rural areas, leaving lands untended. That, in turn, helps fuel new and more intense fires that spread and burn even faster. deadly spiral, forestry experts and environmentalists say, has been worsened by political inaction, a history of poor land management and the prioritizing of firefighting over fire prevention, even in the face of more frequent tragedies. But Portugal has become a particularly stark case of what the future may hold if changes to land, climate and economies go mismanaged. The deaths in June provoked a fresh round of soul-searching and spurred an investigation, still continuing, into how and why the wildfire engulfed Pedrógão Grande, about 10 miles from where Mr. Muralha lives, close to Oleiros. Oleiros and its environs are a prime example of the changes to the landscape that have rendered Portugal ever more vulnerable to fire. Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
9 August 2017, The Conversation, Southeast Europe swelters through another heatwave with a human fingerprint. Parts of Europe are having a devastatingly hot summer. Already we’ve seen heat records topple in western Europe in June, and now a heatwave nicknamed “Lucifer” is bringing stifling conditions to areas of southern and eastern Europe. Several countries are grappling with the effects of this extreme heat, which include wildfires and water restrictions. Temperatures have soared past 40℃ in parts of Italy, Greece and the Balkans, with the extreme heat spreading north into the Czech Republic and southern Poland. Some areas are having their hottest temperatures since 2007 when severe heat also brought dangerous conditions to the southeast of the continent. The heat is associated with a high pressure system over southeast Europe, while the jet stream guides weather systems over Britain and northern Europe. In 2007 this type of split weather pattern across Europe persisted for weeks, bringing heavy rains and flooding to England with scorching temperatures for Greece and the Balkans. Read More here
7 August 2017, New York Times, Scientists Fear Trump Will Dismiss Blunt Climate Report. The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration. The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited. “Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. It was uploaded to a nonprofit internet digital library in January but received little attention until it was published by The New York Times. The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” they wrote. Read More here
2 August 2017, The Conversation, ‘Just do the weather’: does it matter if TV weather presenters aren’t experts? When Olympic swimming champion Giaan Rooney was asked to fill in presenting the weather segment on Melbourne’s Channel Seven weeknight news program just before Christmas 2012, she was taken aback. She pointed out that she knew nothing about weather and that her credibility was in sport. “Don’t worry, just do the weather,” was the reply from the network. Six weeks later, the 30-year-old Rooney was invited to continue in the role, replacing the 52-year-old presenter and trained meteorologist David Brown, who had been presenting on Seven for 20 years. As it turned out, Brown remained with the network and eventually went on to present the weather for Seven’s Sydney weeknight bulletin. But the switch from Brown to Rooney illustrates a dilemma that has never been resolved. Just who should present the weather on television? Weather presenters have long been a crucial component of any television news team, and are promoted as such. For many in the audience, they’ve also been the main conduit of weather information. Ten years ago 90% of Australians received at least some of their weather information from television. This has since fallen to 71%, according to a Bureau of Meteorology survey. But that’s still a lot of eyeballs. And with their segments usually perched at the end of bulletins, the extent to which weather presenters connect with viewers helps to determine whether their station can carry the valuable news audience over to the start of the next program. Read More here