Tag: Floods

Some Farmers Have Discovered That Online Stardom Can Be More Lucrative Than their Crops or Livestock

An anonymous reader shares a report: It’s not an easy time to be an American farmer. The number of farms in the US is declining, according to the Department of Agriculture, as consolidation makes big operations even bigger. In 2017, the most recent year for the USDA’s industry census, the average farm income was just $43,053, and less than half of…

Climate Change is Forcing One Person From Their Home Every Two Seconds, Oxfam Says

Climate-fueled disasters have forced about 20 million people a year to leave their homes in the past decade — equivalent to one every two seconds — according to a new report from Oxfam. From a news report: This makes the climate the biggest driver of internal displacement for the period, with the world’s poorer countries at the highest risk, despite their…

India’s Ominous Future: Too Little Water, or Far Too Much

Throughout India, the number of days with very heavy rains has increased over the last century. At the same time, the dry spells between storms have gotten longer. Showers that reliably penetrate the soil are less common. For a country that relies on rain for the vast share of its water, that combination is potentially ruinous. The New York Times reports:…

Did asteroid collision trigger Earth’s abrupt cooling 12,800 years ago?

Why did Earth’s climate rapidly cool 12,800 years ago? New evidence suggests that a comet or asteroid collision is to blame, with support coming from the bottom of a South Carolina lake. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/asteroid-comet-younger-dryas-abrupt-cooling…

Extreme Weather Events This Decade Have Cost America $750B

An anonymous reader quotes NBC News: An analysis of weather disasters that did more than $1 billion in damage from the National Centers for Environmental Information finds that such high-cost events are up markedly since the 1980s. (The dollar figures for the events were adjusted for inflation.) There have been 250 such events since 1980 and almost half them, 111, have…

Hurricane Dorian: Why it’s so destructive

Dorian, the 2nd most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record, has devastated the Bahamas, with the death toll expected to rapidly rise as rescue work gets under way. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/hurricane-dorian-why-its-so-destructive…

A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises

Countries that are home to one-fourth of Earth’s population face an increasingly urgent risk: The prospect of running out of water. From a report: From India to Iran to Botswana, 17 countries around the world are currently under extremely high water stress, meaning they are using almost all the water they have, according to new World Resources Institute data published Tuesday….