Disasters

"Hoover Dam has helped store Colorado River water since 1935, but reservoir levels are nearing the lowest point since Lake Mead was filled."

"Wearing soot-smudged, fire-resistant clothing and helmets, several wildland firefighters armed with hoes moved through a stand of ponderosa pines as flames tore through the underbrush. The firefighters weren’t there to extinguish the fire. They had started it."

"More than 150,000 people were left homeless in the aftermath of a cyclone that unleashed storm surges in eastern India and Bangladesh, officials said on Thursday, with heavy rains hampering relief work in some low-lying coastal areas."

"The climate crisis is damaging the mental health of hundreds of millions of people around the world but the huge costs are hidden, scientists have warned."

"There’s a 40% chance that the world will get so hot in the next five years that it will temporarily push past the temperature limit the Paris climate agreement is trying to prevent, meteorologists said."

"Administration will also launch NASA initiative aimed at collecting better climate data"

"President Biden announced Monday that he was doubling the amount of money the U.S. government will spend helping communities get set for extreme weather events, proclaiming the need for full readiness as he visited government workers and told them to prepare for another season of natural disasters.

"President Biden thrust his administration into a race to confront the economic risks of global warming by signing an executive order yesterday that brought the once niche issue of climate finance into the highest levels of government."

"The United States must double or quadruple the rate at which it thins and removes dead wood from its forests to reduce the threat of wildfires that have become more frequent and severe due to climate change, the Biden administration said on Thursday."

"Just months after the conclusion of the busiest Atlantic hurricane season on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released its 2021 outlook, calling for another active season. The agency is the latest of several forecasting groups watching the upcoming hurricane season’s potential to overperform for the sixth year in a row."

"Storms, floods, wildfires — and to a lesser degree, conflict — uprooted 40.5 million people around the world in 2020. It was the largest number in more than a decade, according to figures published Thursday by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a nonprofit group based in Geneva that tracks displacement data annually."