Wildfire smoke contains a mixture of toxic pollutants that can be harmful to both the lungs and the brain.
Bloomberg Creative/ Bloomberg Creative Photos via Getty Images
Pollution from more frequent floods and wildfires – exacerbated by the warming climate – is threatening human health and poses particular risks to the brain.
Each year the global temperature is 1 C above the 1951-80 average temperature, glaciers lose, on average, about 0.8 metres of water equivalent depth.
(Jeff Walllis/flickr)
Policy-makers need the courage to commit to meaningful reductions of greenhouse gas emissions if we want to avoid the widespread loss of mountain glaciers.
Many trees were still green in Maine’s Grafton Notch State Park on Oct. 1, 2021, when the area’s foliage is typically near peak color.
Cappi Thompson via Getty Images
Warm autumn weather has produced dull leaf colors across the eastern US this year, but climate change isn’t the only way that humans have altered trees’ fall displays.
A firefighter checks homes after a mudslide that killed 23 people in Montecito, Calif., in 2018.
Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Studies show climate change is raising the risk of cascading hazards that alone might not be extreme but add up to human disasters. Communities and government agencies aren’t prepared.
Flooding is seen in the Manayunk section of Philadelphia after the remnants of Hurricane Ida, Sept. 2, 2021.
AP Photo/Matt Rourke
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and that share is growing. Rapid climate change could make many cities unlivable in the coming decades without major investments to adapt.
Firefighters and residents battle a blaze in hot, dry conditions in Athens, Greece, in August 2021.
AP Photo/Petros Karadjias
Susan Kocher, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources et Ryan E. Tompkins, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources
Two forest researchers whose own communities were threatened by fires in 2021 explain how historic policies left forests at high risk of megafires.
Arctic peatland in the Mackenzie Valley. A quarter of all global peatland carbon is found in Canada.
(Ed Struzik)
Peatlands play an outsized role in filtering water and mitigating floods, drought and wildfire — and they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests.
Before satellites, fire crews watched for smoke from fire towers across the national forests.
K. D. Swan, U.S. Forest Service
William Deverell, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences et Elizabeth A. Logan, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The US has learned that it cannot suppress its way to a healthy relationship with fire in the West. That strategy failed, even before climate change proved it to be no strategy at all.
Disasters can happen anywhere at any time. Be prepared.
fstop123 via Getty Images
The Massif des Maures was devastated by fires this year, but the region’s hardy cicadas continued to sing thanks to their unique survival methods.
Properties destroyed by the Lytton Creek wildfire on June 30 are seen as a cloud produced by the fire rises in the mountains above Lytton, B.C.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
This enormous, unprecedented algal bloom could have profound implications for carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and for the marine ecosystem.
The words Government Arson are painted on a shipping container on a property that was destroyed by the White Rock Lake wildfire in August in British Columbia.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
A fire scientist explains the risk of flying embers that can travel over a mile from a wildfire and how people can protect their homes.
University of Oregon running back Travis Dye celebrates his touchdown against Fresno State in a stadium smokey from nearby wildfires.
(AP Photo/Andy Nelson)
It might be time to reschedule football season. With rising temperatures, poorer air quality and a worsening hurricane season, climate change threatens the future of the American sport.
Parts of Lake Elsinore, California, were overrun with muddy floodwater after a storm hit the Holy Fire burn scar in 2018.
Jennifer Cappuccio Maher/Digital First Media/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin via Getty Images
Wildfire Specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension; Adjunct Professor Bren School of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Professor of Civil, Environmental & Ecological Engineering, Director of the Healthy Plumbing Consortium and Center for Plumbing Safety, Purdue University