Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia's history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City.
The new trees number in the thousands - at least 4,000 per acre or as many as 20,000, depending on who is counting. A few rise above head-height, the most energetic sentinels of regeneration. What will become of this nursery in the wild in the next hundred years, or thousand, is the crux of a scientific and policy dispute.
In Grazalema, Spain's wettest town, a year's-worth of rain fell in a fortnight and overloaded the karst aquifer beneath it. Water rushed into homes through floors, walls and even electricity sockets. Authorities ordered everyone to evacuate. I felt a lot of fear, said Sanchez Barea, a guesthouse owner whose home is one of hundreds still in an exclusion zone.
Wildlife populations are in decline. Recreation sites are crowded and often underfunded. Wildfires are larger, more destructive and harder to control. Climate change is reshaping natural systems, from ocean fisheries to mountain snowpacks, faster than institutions can respond. At the same time, communities are being asked to host new energy projects, transmission lines and mineral development - often without clear processes, adequate resources or trust that decisions are being made in the public interest.
Lyn Cheedy, a Yindjibarndi elder, takes her grandson to the pool most afternoons. At first, the cold water is refreshing. Then a gust of wind hits. The wind burns you, she says. I have to keep splashing my face, and your hair is drying that quick it's like you're sitting in front of an oven. In the Pilbara, heat and cyclones are nothing new, says Cheedy. Her people have survived extreme conditions for millennia.
To identify the 20 five-billion-dollar weather disasters since 2020, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Information report, Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (2024). The 20 events are listed in order of the estimated cost of the damages, adjusted for inflation. Two of the events are winter storms, three are wildfires, four are droughts, five are severe storms, and six are tropical cyclones.
Vast swathes of Europe's water reserves are drying up, a new analysis using two decades of satellite data reveals, with freshwater storage shrinking across southern and central Europe, from Spain and Italy to Poland and parts of the UK. Scientists at University College London (UCL), working with Watershed Investigations and the Guardian, analysed 200224 data from satellites, which track changes in Earth's gravitational field. Because water is heavy, shifts in groundwater, rivers, lakes, soil moisture and glaciers show up in the signal, allowing the satellites to effectively weigh how much water is stored.
The Fog Five hope to clear up the debated present and future state of the iconic scenery staple of California's coast. It's so ever-present in so many of our lives, Fernandez says. Whether we love it or hate it, it's there.
As a child growing up in northern Sweden, environmental historian Sverker Sörlin fell in love with snow. "I see the light outside, before I even open the slatted blinds. Snow! The miracle of whiteness is shining through the slats," he recalls in his latest book, Snö. Now, he fights for snow's survival. And survive it must, Sörlin argues, if we're to avoid droughts, sinking tundra fields and an overheated planet. With amazing anecdotes, emotive memories and pleas for climate action, Snö aims to galvanize readers.
At the end of August 1939, the German archaeologist Otto Völzing discovered around 200 fragments of carved mammoth ivory at the back of a cave in southern Germany. With war just a week away, Völzing's find was hurriedly collected in a box, where it lay unnoticed in a museum archive for decades. It wasn't until the 1960s, when the shards were inventoried, that something astonishing emerged out of the heap of broken pieces.
Before colonial settlers arrived in the 1700s, Indigenous people likely traveled to the island in the summer to take advantage of the abundant fish and crabs, according to the National Park Service. Many descendants of the original settlers with surnames like Crockett, Parks and Thomas have remained to this day. The isolation has allowed the development of a unique accent, one that some residents describe as a mix between "Southern" and "Elizabethan" English.
A severe thunderstorm moved through north-west Indiana on 19 August, dropping 6in of rain on Whiting, a largely industrial town, flooding streets and temporarily closing schools. The flooding also shut down the BP Whiting Refinery, the largest fuel refinery in the midwest, with a capacity to process around 400,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Residents living around the facility quickly reported oil and gas fumes in their flooded basements,
In the 1980s, there were 33 weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damages (inflation adjusted) - or 3.3 per year. With each decade passing, the yearly average of such events increases. In the 1990s, there were 5.7 such events per year on average, in the aughts the average was 6.7 per year, in the 2010s it was 13.1, and in the last three years it was 22 billion-dollar events per year, including 28 in 2023 - the most of any year.