"In the country that gave the world the word tsunami, the Japanese nuclear establishment largely disregarded the potentially destructive force of the walls of water. The word did not even appear in government guidelines until 2006, decades after plants — including the Fukushima Daiichi facility that firefighters are still struggling to get under control — began dotting the Japanese coastline."
"A mass of showers and thunderstorms that has been sprawling across Texas and northern Mexico in recent days over South Texas consolidated into Tropical Storm Arthur on Wednesday. Life-threatening flooding, property damage and disruptions to commerce and travel may unfold as inches of rain pour down over a portion of the southeastern United States into Friday."
"High winds drove a wildfire into an eastern Washington neighborhood, forcing the evacuation of about 1,500 people and destroying at least 15 homes, officials said Wednesday."
"There’s an increasingly narrow strip of New Orleans marshland that hardly anyone lives on, but without it, hundreds of thousands of people will face far greater risks from storms and floods."
"Some day in the next 12 months – maybe in late-August, maybe not until next spring – Lake Mead will drop below the critical threshold of 1,035 feet above sea level. That is the water-level elevation at which hydropower generating capacity at Hoover Dam, the largest in the Colorado River basin, will be cut by 70 percent."
"In the days after Hurricane Helene devastated the southern Appalachians in late September 2024, Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent Tracy Swartout went up in a helicopter to survey the damage. What she saw was deeply troubling. 'When Helene happened, we ended up with 58 landslides spread across 200 linear miles of the parkway,' Swartout says."
"Few public universities get more federal research funding than the University of Washington."
"Ten of the 11 plant workers killed at a Longview, Wash., paper mill last month died from alkaline chemical burns, the result of caustic liquid that flooded out of a failed holding tank and through the plant."
"If the blob persists for years, it could eventually cool the climate around Greenland, Iceland and northern Europe."
"El Niño has developed in the Pacific Ocean, a climate pattern that can reshape weather around the globe into 2027. The last El Niño was in 2023-24, and forecasters say this one is developing earlier than many typically do."
