wildfires

Two new studies highlight the vulnerability of California forests. Climate change, mainly caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, has heated the atmosphere faster than conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains can adapt, shifting their ideal elevation 600 feet above where it was nearly a century ago, according to a study published in PNAS Nexus.

A new study led by chemists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that wildfire smoke particles, which can remain in the stratosphere for a year, can cause chemical reactions that deplete the protective ozone layer. The findings occurred during the megafire in Australia in December 2019 to January 2020. The study, published in the […]

Even as miners, loggers and ranchers fell them at record rates, scientists are still learning about all the things that forests do to keep the local and global climate comfortable and stable.  Most recently, they have provided “compelling evidence” for the first time for a link between deforestation and rainfall decline across the tropics as […]

The Laguna Beach, California, city council has voted to ban the sale and public use of balloons — inflated with helium or not — in order to stop a major source of marine trash and reduce the risk of wildfires. Starting next year, all balloons in the community of 23,000 will be prohibited from being […]

About 3.4 million adults in the U.S. (1.4% of the adult population) were displaced from their homes by extreme weather disasters in 2022, a new survey from the U.S. Census Bureau reveals. Those findings, based on the 68,500 responses to the Bureau’s Jan. 4-16 Household Pulse Survey , are far higher than figures from the […]

It can be tempting to think that the recent wildfire disasters in communities across the West were unlucky, one-off events, but evidence is accumulating that points to a trend.

In a new study, we found a 246% increase in the number of homes and structures destroyed by wildfires in the contiguous Western U.S. between the past two decades, 1999-2009 and 2010-2020.

The Federal Reserve — the central banking system of the U.S. — has told the six largest banks in the country to put together data on the anticipated effect climate change events like wildfires, floods, heat waves, droughts and hurricanes would have on their business operations. The banks have until July 31 to provide the […]

The climate crisis has its fingerprints on several extreme weather events over the past two years, from drought in California to heavy rain in the UK. That’s the conclusion of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) special report Explaining Extreme Events in 2021 and 2022 from a Climate Perspective, presented by the National […]