Scaremongering about droughts lets the government and the water firms off the hook.
After the lowest rainfall in July since 1911, the UK is facing an unusually dry summer. Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects in the media, aided by the Met Office and the Environment Agency, have talked up this weather event as a ‘drought’ of truly Biblical proportions. In Britain, the drought has now replaced July’s heatwave as the focus of climate scaremongering.
Horrific footage shows the moment when drivers on a major Canada highway were slammed with hail the size of golf balls on Monday.
Gibran Marquez was traveling on a central Alberta highway with two others when the trio had to pull over as their vehicle was hit with hail.
Marquez posted the video of the storm on Twitter that showed the passengers pulled over on the highway and ducking while chunks of hail break the car windows.
Drought has a way of revealing things. Receding waters can highlight the precarity of the crucial systems that keep societies functioning and expose hidden ancient cities.
In the case of Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir, diminishing waters have in recent months uncovered long buried secrets and other mysterious finds: at least three sets of human remains, including a body inside a barrel that could be linked to a mob killing, and a sunken boat dating back to the second world war.
The Rogers outage was a reminder that the failure of some technologies can make an entire society vulnerable. But we need to remember that software glitches are not the only threat.
At some point – perhaps next year, perhaps decades from now – the entire sky will turn red as a deluge of high-energy particles from the sun strikes Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere. As a result, power grids, telephones and the Internet could be inoperable for months – perhaps even years.
The alarming discovery of giant African snails — which can stretch up to 8 inches long — has sparked concern and quarantines in a Florida county.
The state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs confirmed the presence of the mammoth mollusks in Pasco County this week and warned residents to keep their distance.
A once-in-a-lifetime drought in the western part of the US is turning up dead bodies – but that’s the least of people’s worries.
Sitting on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, Lake Mead – formed by the creation of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River – is the largest reservoir in the United States and provides water to 25 million people across three states and Mexico. Here, the stunning scale of a drought in the American west has been laid plain for all to see.
The water level is now so low that bodies of murder victims from decades back, once hidden by its depths, have surfaced.
An invasive worm species known for its “voracious appetite” and ability to jump a foot in the air is raising alarm in California, where scientists have expressed concerns about the threat the worms pose to forest ecosystems.
The Amynthas agrestis, also known as the Asian jumping worm, Alabama jumper or crazy snake worm, have been spotted in California in recent months. The earthworm is native to east Asia, particularly to Japan and the Korean peninsula. However, in recent years the worms made their way to North America via various landscape plants that have been imported from the region.
Some of the first images have emerged from Tonga’s volcano and tsunami-hit islands, after a New Zealand defence force surveillance flight returned from the cut-off country, as three deaths from the disaster have been confirmed in Tonga.
Town goes dark amid massive bug infestation
The Argentinean town of Santa Isabel has been forced to shut off its lights for several days in an effort to persuade the millions of bugs that have invaded its streets to leave and look for another place to stay.
#ARGENTINA 🇦🇷
Impresionante invasión de escarabajos (cascarudos) afectó la localidad de Santa Isabel, en La Pampa. 📹 @chematierrahttps://t.co/j1nuqCzO2Z pic.twitter.com/08vUASa8ai— C e n t i n e l a 3 5 (@QuakeChaser35) January 10, 2022
BRASILIA, Jan 8 (Reuters) – At least five people died and nine were seriously injured when a wall of rock collapsed on top of motor boats below a waterfall in southeastern Brazil on Saturday, the local fire department said.
A tower of rocks suddenly broke away from the canyon wall and came crashing down on several leisure boats, sending out a huge wave over the lake at Capitolio, in Minas Gerais state.
#Capitólio, Minas Gerais: a stone wall collapsed and fell on 3 boats. Initial information speaks of 1 dead and 15 wounded pic.twitter.com/TtyWnWU8xO
— Bellum et Pax 🇧🇷 (@BellumPaxBR) January 8, 2022
It occurred “due to heavy rains, which caused the loosening of a wall of stones in Lago de Furnas, in Capitolio,” Romeu Zema, governor of Minas, said https://t.co/v4C34a6o4e pic.twitter.com/GG54WmpTEh
— ANADOLU AGENCY (@anadoluagency) January 8, 2022
Firefighters on Thursday night were trying their best to preserve homes in the line of a fast-moving wildfire, which has shocked the state at a time when the ground should usually be thick with December snow.
The Marshall Fire, just south of Boulder, was sparked by extreme winds gusting over 100mph, which knocked down power lines and sparked a fire.
Officials on Thursday night confirmed that at least 580 homes had been lost – making the Marshall Fire the most devastating destruction of property in state history.
Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study.
The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.
The study is the first large-scale global assessment of the plastic-degrading potential of bacteria and found that one in four of the organisms analysed carried a suitable enzyme. The researchers found that the number and type of enzymes they discovered matched the amount and type of plastic pollution in different locations.
I know there’s a joke in here somewhere.
Emergency crews in western Canada continued searching on Friday for victims of flash floods and mudslides which tore through the region this week, as survivors described harrowing escapes from the disaster.
British Columbia declared its third state of emergency in a year on Wednesday after a month’s worth of rain fell in two days, swamping towns and cities, blocking major highways and leaving much of the province under water.
So far, officials have confirmed just one fatality, in a landslide near the village of Pemberton. But gripping testimony from a journalist who survived that incident suggests that figure is likely to rise.
A deadly storm described by officials as a once-in-a-century weather event has severed road and rail links around Vancouver, Canada.
Two motorways connecting the West Coast city were closed after being damaged by severe flooding.
Thousands of people were forced to leave their homes due to the massive storm, which struck on Monday.
A woman was killed in a highway landslide, and rescuers say at least two other people are missing.
