California is in the midst of a scorching late-summer heat wave that threatens to worsen wildfire conditions, while several wildfires have broken out this week, prompting multiple evacuation efforts across the state.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said in a statement Thursday that there will be “Nothing but heat for the next three days,” and warned that many areas will see even hotter temperatures on Friday.

“The hot temperatures lived up to their billing today and then some as light offshore flow in the morning combined with extremely hot temperatures aloft to roast most of southern California in triple-digit heat,” the NWS said in an update on Thursday at 2:12 p.m. PST. “Only the immediate coastal areas were spared the extreme heat, though even there, temperatures were 5-10 degrees above normal.”

Most Californians are under some level of heat advisory, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Temperatures are expected to peak for most of the state on Friday, with many areas breaching 100°F. Some areas, like Coachella Valley, have already reached temperatures close to 120°F, on par with Death Valley — one of the hottest places on Earth. 

David Eisenman, professor of medicine and public health at UCLA and co-director of the Center for Healthy Climate Solutions, told the Los Angeles Times that with such extreme temperatures, it’s important to stay cool, drink water or visit a cool place, like a cooling center or library.

“We know that extreme heat causes more deaths than any other natural disaster,” he said. “The problem is we don’t look at [heat events] in the same sort of frightened way. We’ve also been slow as a nation to take extreme heat seriously as a disaster,” 

The NWS said in an update Friday morning that “Dangerously hot conditions are possible away from the coast, especially in the mountain and foothill locations where overnight low temperatures will cool little from daytime highs.”

As for the state’s raging wildfires, Cal Fire on Thursday reported the state’s ninth wildfire emergency incident in three days, the most devastating of which being the Boone Fire, which broke out on Tuesday and has burned more than 16,000 acres. It is only 5% contained as of Friday. The cause of the fires is still undetermined.

In Los Angeles, the city has set up at least five cooling centers this week amid the hottest temperatures the city has seen since 2020. Los Angeles and large parts of southern California are under “extreme” heat risk, according to the NWS.

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain told The Associated Press that there’s an “extreme contrast” between people who live close to the sea versus people living farther from the coast. “It’s these inland areas where we see people who… are killed by this extreme heat or whose lives are at least made miserable.”

Swain also hinted toward an aspect of climate injustice in regard to the rise in extreme temperatures. California is “becoming more expensive, more exclusive in the places that are least likely to experience extreme heat,” he said. “The people who are most at risk of extreme heat” — those with limited financial resources — “are precisely the people experiencing extreme heat.”

The NWS said that weather models point to slight cooling onshore winds on Saturday, but added that “all this will likely do is lower temps from ridiculously hot to extremely hot, or roughly 1-4 degrees of cooling.” Through the weekend, daytime temperatures are expected to remain about 10-15 degrees above normal, with the nights to be “extremely warm.”

“Hot conditions will linger into early next week, then a cooling trend will develop as an upper-level trough will dig into the Pacific Northwest,” The NWS said on Friday. Temperatures are expected to return to “near-normal” by Wednesday.

The post California Facing Extreme Heat Wave Amid Wildfires appeared first on EcoWatch.

Living in a neighborhood with a high concentration of trees could significantly lower levels of inflammation and, importantly, decrease the risk of heart disease, new research from Green Heart Louisville’s first wave of clinical research from its HEAL study shows.

Aruni Bhatnagar, the medical professor and cardiology researcher at the University of Louisville who is spearheading the project, told The Washington Post that he wanted to “do something” about the air pollution plaguing the city. His solution was to plant thousands of trees in Louisville neighborhoods and methodically study health data from participating residents to see the effect they had on health. 

“We are trying to see if we can decrease the rates of heart disease in a community,” Bhatnagar told NBC.

The results showed a “significant decrease” in levels of hs-CRP, an important marker for inflammation, in areas where tree and shrub counts were more than doubled. In excess, inflammation is known to contribute to a laundry list of diseases and illnesses, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, obesity, and as the study points out, heart disease. 

“I wouldn’t have expected such a strong biomarker response, Peter James, director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, told NBC. “And that speaks to maybe something truly is causal here with how trees impact health.” 

Bhatnagar is leading dozens of researchers who are monitoring the health data from more than 750 participants, who range from 25 to 75 years old. The participants are part of a middle-income neighborhood, which tend to have both fewer trees and worse health outcomes compared to affluent neighborhoods.

^{Map of the Green Heart Louisville Project area showing neighborhoods where trees were planted and those where no trees were planted for the project. University of Louisville}

Some previous research has shown that people living in greener spaces tend to have better health outcomes, but the fact that most of those greener spaces happened to be in wealthy areas raises some questions. Namely, whether living in green areas can truly lead to improved health, or whether there were other factors to consider, like socioeconomic-related differences in levels of elevated stress — which has also been shown to lead to inflammation — or access to healthcare.

“We can’t just go, ‘Oh, look, this is [a] greener place and people are happier’ because most places that are greener are richer, etc.,” Bhatnagar told The Washington Post. He also mentioned his interest in the Bradford Hill criteria of causation, a group of nine scientific principles to determine whether there is a true causal — or cause and effect — relationship between two correlated things, or if the correlation is merely coincidental.

“Although several previous studies have found an association between living in areas of high surrounding greenness and health, this is the first study to show that a deliberate increase in greenness in the neighborhood can improve health,” Bhatnagar told Medical Xpress. “With these results and additional studies that we hope to report soon, we are closer to understanding the impact of local tree cover on residents’ health. This finding will bolster the push to increase urban greenspaces.”

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More than 10,000 survivors and loved ones of survivors of “climate-driven disasters” have signed an open letter to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) urging an investigation into fossil fuel companies for “climate-related crimes.”

Of the signatories, more than 1,000 were survivors of these disasters and more than 9,000 were loved ones. Public Citizen said they, along with Chesapeake Climate Action Network, delivered the letter to the DOJ.

The letter comes at a time of increased public pressure against the fossil fuel industry and during which climate-related civil lawsuits have increased at an unprecedented pace, and have been mostly successful. 

“The burning of fossil fuels has racked up enormous profits for fossil fuel companies while stoking the fire of climate change and driving increasingly lethal extreme weather events that have destroyed lives, property, and livelihoods,” the letter says. “And the damage is far from over. Communities across the country are battling a summer onslaught of deadly heat waves, hurricanes, and wildfires.”

One of the survivors, Allen Myers, said in a statement, “The 2018 Camp Fire burned down my family home in Paradise, took the lives of 84 neighbors, and left hundreds of families displaced for years.” He added that some of his friends are experiencing the same thing, as the Park Fire devastates homes in Butte County.

“Let’s be clear, the fingerprints of the fossil fuel industry are all over it. The industry continues to ignore the catastrophic consequences of burning fossil fuels, which heats our atmosphere and increases the scale and frequency of disasters. The Department of Justice needs to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable now,” Myers said.

The letter also asserts that fossil fuel companies have known since the 1950s about the dangers posed by the use of fossil fuels, and, in the decades since, waged a “disinformation campaign” to dispel the science and mislead the public.

Indeed, fossil fuel companies have funded research into the possibility of human-caused climate change as early as 1954, when a group of fossil fuel interests backed the study of early modern climate science, according to The Guardian, and according to the BBC, ExxonMobil’s climate change data in the 1970s was at times even more accurate than NASA’s.

It’s possible that fossil fuel companies knew about these risks even before they started funding these experiments, as the idea of climate change was by no means new in the 1950s. Joseph Fourier was likely the first to propose the greenhouse effect in 1824, although it wasn’t named as such until 1901 by Nils Gustaf Ekholm. In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote was the first to show by experiment that carbon dioxide could act as a warming blanket, and in 1938, Guy Callendar connected atmospheric carbon to Earth’s warming.

As for the disinformation campaign the document alleges, that too is well documented. Since at least the 1970s, fossil fuel companies have kept the skeleton of climate change in their closet while lying to the public.

The post Climate Disaster Survivors Call For Criminal Investigation Into Fossil Fuel Industry appeared first on EcoWatch.

As wildfires become more frequent and intense, they’re creating raging thunderstorms that fuel them even further, making them much more difficult to fight.

These pyrocumulonimbus clouds (pyroCbs) are caused when a wildfire’s intense heat and smoke create strong updrafts, where they condense and form clouds. Those clouds can then develop into fierce thunderstorms that ignite more fires, potentially miles from the fire that created them. 

“PyroCbs are such massive, almost volcanic-like eruptions,” Rajan Chakrabarty, an aerosol scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Grist. “These pyroCbs create their own fire weather.” In addition to thunder, pyroCbs can create intense winds, hail and even tornadoes.

Last week, that breed of fire weather devastated Jasper, a town in Alberta, Canada, causing at least 25,000 people to be evacuated, reported The New York Times. “They tried to put helicopters on it,” Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, told the Times. “They couldn’t stop it, which is unfortunate because it led to a good chunk of the town burning down.” 

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles told Nature that the devastation seen in Jasper is in no way unique. “The sobering reality is that these are not extreme outliers in some ways,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of fires behave like these ones in recent years, which I don’t think is reassuring at all.”

This year, wildfires in the U.S. have been much more devastating than expected. California’s wildfires are already five times more devastating than anticipated, and its Park Fire has become the sixth largest in the state’s history.

This trend tracks with the recent rise in reports of pyroCbs, and while that points to climate change as a catalyst, with better identification methods, it raises the question of the true extent to which climate change is responsible. “They seem to be happening more frequently,” Payton Beeler, an atmospheric scientist at Richland, Washington’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, told Grist. “Whether that’s a function of warming climate and better identification, I think it’s probably both. But the impacts seem to be very long-lasting and long-ranging.”

David Peterson, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California, told The New York Times, “The big open question right now is what is the role of pyroCbs in a warming climate system? What are the effects of pushing smoke up extremely high into the stratosphere, especially when smoke that high persists for a year?”

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has selected Peterson to lead a five-year study on the effects of pyroCbs on Earth’s climate, which will begin in October.

The Naval Research Laboratory is working on a detection system for these fires. “We need to develop a warning capability for fires that are more likely to generate pyroCbs because it means something different if you’re fighting it, evacuating people, and predicting where the smoke is going,” Peterson said. “Right now we’re in catch-up mode.”

The post Wildfires Are Creating Their Own Thunderstorms appeared first on EcoWatch.

Following record-low reports of butterflies in the UK, British charity Butterfly Conservation is sounding the alarm.

The charity, which crowdsources data from UK participants through their Big Butterfly Count, put out a blog post explaining that participants are reporting “just over half” the amount of butterflies compared to this time last year. This year’s Big Butterfly Count concludes on August 4.

“The lack of butterflies this year is a warning sign to us all. Nature is sounding the alarm and we must listen,” said Dan Hoare, Butterfly Conservation’s director of conservation said in the post. Butterflies are a key indicator species. When they are in trouble we know the wider environment is in trouble too.”

Butterfly Conservation points to a “wet and windy spring,” along with colder-than-usual summer temperatures to explain the decline, because butterflies mate less often in wet environments, although the current season’s weather is not the only factor. “80% of butterflies in the UK have declined since the 1970s,” the blog post said, “with habitat loss, climate change and pesticide use the main drivers of this decline,” referencing one of their previous reports from 2023.

While the butterflies are mating less often this season due to the wet spring, last year’s drought is also harming them because the plants their caterpillars eat need to be properly watered, reported The Guardian.

A 2020 study published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology points out that because some butterfly species tend to struggle with controlling their body temperatures, they seek out “microhabitats” at the right temperature.

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A post shared by Butterfly Conservation (@savebutterflies)

These butterflies, which are classified as specialist species due to their specific habitat requirements, tend to be among the first to be impacted by climate change, making them important indicator species to monitor as an early warning sign for the impacts of climate change.

This makes the current decline in UK butterflies all the more dire, as climate change causes fluctuations in both weather patterns and temperature. Butterflies are also important for pollination and pest control, meaning their absence will likely have consequences for habitats too.

Hoare urged people in the UK to help by monitoring butterfly counts. “People are telling us that they aren’t seeing butterflies, but simply telling us is not enough,” he said. “We need everyone to record what they are or aren’t seeing by doing a Big Butterfly Count as this will give us the evidence we need to take vital action to conserve our butterfly species.”

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