TV News LIES

A growing wildfire in Oregon has destroyed multiple homes and prompted evacuation orders in the Columbia River Gorge area, in what officials are calling an early warning of the fire season ahead.

The so-called Rowena fire had grown on Thursday to 3,500 acres (1,400 hectares) and remained 0% contained, prompting officials to issue evacuation orders for hundreds of homes and to temporarily close a section of an interstate highway.

The state’s governor, Tina Kotek, invoked the Emergency Conflagration Act for the Rowena Fire, allowing the state’s fire marshal agency to mobilize resources, it said in a statement.

The agency said it was mobilizing an incident management team and six structural taskforces, with three responding on Wednesday night and the other three arriving early on Thursday. The fire has already destroyed about 20 homes, according to local news reports, and is threatening nearly 2,200 structures.

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A major US government website supporting public education on climate science looks likely to be shuttered after almost all of its staff were fired, the Guardian has learned.

Climate.gov, the gateway website for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa)’s Climate Program Office, will imminently no longer publish new content, according to multiple former staff responsible for the site’s content whose contracts were recently terminated.

“The entire content production staff at climate.gov (including me) were let go from our government contract on 31 May,” said a former government contractor who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “We were told that our positions within the contract were being eliminated.”

Rebecca Lindsey, the website’s former program manager, who was fired in February as part of the government’s purge of probationary employees, described a months-long situation within Noaa where political appointees and career staff argued over the fate of the website.

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Severe thunderstorms across the southern and eastern U.S. threatened a barrage of dangerous weather conditions from flooding rains and destructive winds to "very large hail" and possible tornadoes, forecasters said.

Tens of millions of people were at risk Monday, June 9 of severe thunderstorms from northern Texas and New Orleans to western New York, with forecasters warning of damaging winds, hail, some tornadoes and flash flooding as areas receive 1 to 3 inches of rain, according to the National Weather Service.

Over 12 counties in southeastern Texas and parts of western Louisiana were under severe thunderstorm watches. Flood warnings, which indicates that flooding is imminent or has been reported, were active throughout the central and southern U.S., especially along major rivers following rounds of heavy rain late last week and over the weekend.

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Smoke from wildfires in Canada is spreading across multiple states in the US including the eastern seaboard, prompting multiple states to issue air-quality alerts.

The poor air quality stretching across the US came as a result of dozens of wildfires burning across Canada as the country’s annual wildfire season roars into destructive action.

The fires, which have been sparked by both humans and natural causes, have prompted at least 25,000 residents in three Canadian provinces to evacuate in recent days.

On Wednesday afternoon, a map from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow forecast showed large swaths of moderate to unhealthy air quality across the east, midwest and southern parts of the US, featuring smoke and dust.

Also on Wednesday, the New York state department of environmental conservation issued an air-quality advisory from 11am to 11pm for multiple counties including parts of New York City.

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Huge expanses of ice are melting alarmingly fast, raising new concerns about "catastrophic consequences for humanity," a study published May 20 says.

The study focuses on two masses of ice currently sitting on land: The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. As temperatures rise, that ice is melting, flowing into the ocean and making sea levels rise.

While change in sea level rise is often measured in centimeters or inches, the ice melt potential of these sheets could raise sea levels dozens of feet.

It's happening even faster than expected, authors warn in the study published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

“Recent satellite-based observations of ice sheet mass loss have been a huge wake-up call for the whole scientific and policy community working on sea-level rise and its impacts," said study co-author Jonathan Bamber, of the University of Bristol in the UK.

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