A Plan to Avert a Vast Oil Spill Off Yemen Finally Moves Ahead – the New York Times
A decaying tanker holds about four times the amount of oil leaked in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. Experts have warned that it is an ecological time bomb that could explode or disintegrate at any moment…The tanker is moored north of the port city and was once the site of fierce battles in the country’s eight-year-old war, which created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises…
The Tiny Craft Mapping Superstorms at Sea | Interactive – the New York Times
Shortly after dawn on Sept. 30, 2021, Richard Jenkins watched a Category 4 hurricane overrun his life’s work. The North Atlantic storm was a behemoth — 50,000 feet tall and 260 miles wide. Wind circled the eye wall at 143 miles per hour; waves the size of nine-story apartment buildings tumbled through a confused sea. Puerto Rico lay 500 miles to the southwest; Bermuda was 800 miles straight ahead. Eighty miles northwest, the 23-foot boat that Jenkins had designed and built over the last decade struggled to stay upright…
What China Has Been Building in the South China Sea – the New York Times
China has been rapidly piling sand onto reefs in the South China Sea, creating seven new islets in the region. It is straining geopolitical tensions that were already taut.
China’s activity in the Spratlys (Islands) is a major point of contention between China and the United States and was a primary topic of discussion between President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China during the Chinese president’s visit to the White House in September. On Monday, the United States sent a Navy destroyer near the islands, entering the disputed waters…
If Your House Were Falling Off a Cliff, Would You Leave? – the New York Times
On a stormy day in the spring of 2021, the sea defenses on the beach below Lucy Ansbro’s cliff-top home in Thorpeness, England, washed away. Then, the end of her garden collapsed into the North Sea…“We lost three and a half meters of land,” said Ms. Ansbro, a 54-year-old television producer, sitting in her kitchen on a recent morning. “Every time I went out, I didn’t know if the house would still be here when I came back…”
The Climate Impact of Your Neighborhood, Mapped – Interactive Feature – the New York Times
New data shared with The New York Times reveals stark disparities in how different U.S. households contribute to climate change. Looking at America’s cities, a pattern emerges.
Households in denser neighborhoods close to city centers tend to be responsible for fewer planet-warming greenhouse gases, on average, than households in the rest of the country. Residents in these areas typically drive less because jobs and stores are nearby and they can more easily walk, bike or take public transit…
How Do California’s Storms Weigh In Compared With History’s Big Ones? – the New York Times
The storms that have walloped California in fierce waves since last month have left many communities cleaning up and digging out from flooding and landslides. By one metric, though, the state has seen much worse…
What Will ‘Weather Whiplash’ Mean for California? – the New York Times
California is built upon the great gamble of irrigation. Left alone, much of the land in the Western United States would be inhospitable to teeming cities. But we’re Americans — we couldn’t let the desert stand in our way.
More than a century ago, the United States Bureau of Land Reclamation began taming the water in the West…
Getting Inside California’s Wild Weather 8 Miles Over the Pacific – the New York Times
A Times reporter and photographer rode along with a team gathering data on the colossal atmospheric rivers that have drenched the state…
California storm damage could top $1 billion – the New York Times
Major weather disasters have been striking the United States much more often in recent years as the global climate changes.
The damage from weeks of storms and flooding in California could exceed a billion dollars, according to the state’s emergency agency and private weather forecasters. That toll comes on the heels of 2022, one of the worst on record for large-scale weather and climate disasters around the United States..