TV News LIES

Hoof it through the national parks of the western United States—Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon—and breathe deep the pristine air. These are unspoiled lands, collectively a great American conservation story.

Yet an invisible menace is actually blowing through the air and falling via raindrops: Microplastic particles, tiny chunks (by definition, less than 5 millimeters long) of fragmented plastic bottles and microfibers that fray from clothes, all pollutants that get caught up in Earth’s atmospheric systems and deposited in the wilderness.

The National Hurricane Center is tracking two disturbances in the Atlantic Ocean, the agency said in its latest advisory issued Wednesday.

In the western Atlantic, an area of low pressure located a few hundred miles southeast of Bermuda is producing a "small area of disorganized shower and thunderstorm activity," the NHC said. However, dry air and strong upper-level winds "are expected to limit additional development of this system during the next day or so."

The hurricane center now gives the disturbance a "near 0% chance" of development in the next seven days.

In the central Tropical Atlantic, the NHC said "an area of disorganized showers is associated with a tropical wave. Some slow development of this system is possible this weekend into early next week while it moves westward to west-northwestward at 10 to 15 mph," the hurricane center said in its 2:00 p.m. forecast update.

More...

A landslide cut a path down a steep, thickly forested hillside and crashed into several homes in Ketchikan, killing one person and injuring three in the latest such disaster to strike mountainous southeast Alaska.

The landslide Sunday afternoon prompted a mandatory evacuation of 60 nearby homes in the city, a popular cruise ship stop along the famed Inside Passage in the Alaska panhandle. The slope remained unstable Monday, and authorities said that state and local geologists were arriving to assess the potential for further slides.

Four homes were critically damaged, officials said, and homes next to the slide area were still being assessed. Several homes and businesses reported flooding.

Last November, six people — including a family of five — were killed when a landslide destroyed two homes in Wrangell, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) to the north. Torrential rains were blamed for landslides that killed two people in Haines in 2020 and three people in Sitka in 2015.

More...

A heatwave has left US midwest states confronting what may be some of the most sweltering days the region has seen this summer, with 55 million people included in alerts over the conditions.

A late-season high-pressure system over cities such as Chicago; Des Moines, Iowa; and Topeka, Kansas, has left them experiencing rare “extreme heat” for a long period of time, “with little to no overnight relief”, according to the National Weather Service.

States in the region have set up several public cooling centers in preparation for the dangerous heat.

An air quality alert is in effect in states including Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee, where heat indices are forecast to reach 105F (40.5C) to 115F (46.1C). Experts recommended residents to limit prolonged outdoor activity, especially those with chronic respiratory illnesses.

More...

Hurricane Hone passed just south of Hawaii on Sunday, dumping so much rain that the National Weather Service called off its red flag warnings that strong winds could lead to wildfires on the drier sides of the islands.

Meanwhile, the eastern Pacific saw a new threat emerge as Tropical Storm Hector formed, packing top sustained winds of 45 mph (75 kph). There were no coastal watches or warnings in effect as Hector churned far out at sea, the National Hurricane Center said.

Hone (pronounced hoe-NEH) had top winds of 85 mph (140 kph) Sunday morning as it swirled slowly past the Big Island, centered about 45 miles (72 kilometers) off its southernmost point, according to Jon Jelsema, a senior forecaster at the Central Pacific Hurricane Center. He said tropical storm force winds were blowing across the island’s southeast-facing slopes, carrying up to a foot (30 centimeters) or more of rain.

More...

As we await the arrival of La Niña in the Pacific, there may be one already brewing in the Atlantic.

Researchers still need to collect temperature data throughout August to determine if a La Niña has in fact formed over the equator in the Atlantic Ocean, but this summer has already been unusual, said Franz Philip Tuchen, a postdoctoral associate with the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies.

The year started with record high sea surface temperatures, topping 86 degrees, before quickly and dramatically cooling off. This type of whiplash is more dramatic than any year before, Tuchen recently wrote.

“It’s almost unprecedented in the time series that we have, and that’s longer than 40 years,” he told Nexstar.

If the Atlantic sea surface temperatures stay where they were around June and July, it’ll officially constitute a La Niña in the Atlantic.

More...

 

 

 

California experienced its hottest month on record in July as grueling heat baked the American west for weeks on end.

The state’s average temperature for the month was 81.7F (27.6C), according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, but some areas endured days of temperatures greater than 100F (about 38C). Several cities broke temperature records during a heatwave in early July – Palm Springs hit 124F on 5 July, while Redding in the state’s far north saw a high of 119F on 6 July.

Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth, recorded its hottest month ever in July, according to the National Park Service (NPS). In Nevada, Las Vegas reached 120F on 7 July, its hottest day in history, and set a record for number of days over 115F.

The impacts of extreme heat are being felt across the US and the world as the climate crisis drives increasingly severe and dangerous weather conditions. Last month about one-third of the US population was under warnings for record heat. The Earth saw its hottest day in recorded history on 22 July, breaking a record set just one day earlier.

More...

Four key pillars of the global climate are melting in the heat trapped by rising fossil fuel emissions, a new study has found.

The relatively stable climate that nurtured human civilization depends in large part on these structures: the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic currents that warm Europe.

Under current policies, the world faces a scenario in which those pillars have roughly even odds of either surviving or collapsing during the next three centuries, according to results published Thursday in Nature Communications.

The scientists warned that if the pillars are fatally undermined by heat, the resulting damage could prove impossible to undo — even if temperatures are successfully brought down later in the 21st century.

More...