Weather

For more than a week, the Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, Canada has burned, bringing a halt to up to a quarter of the country’s oil production! Over 100,000 residents of the area have been evacuated and 20 percent of homes have been destroyed in a fire that experts expect to take months to completely put out (BBC, May 8, 2016).

“Sweltering temperatures and a severe water crisis have claimed more than 300 lives in India. Officials have banned daytime cooking in some parts of the country to prevent accidental fires that have killed 80 more people… temperatures since the start of April have reached 44 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit)” (Deutsche Welle, May 1, 2016). “The water crisis is very bad here. Wells have dried up in almost every household.

“The unthinkable is happening” said one Indian power plant operator in reaction to the severe drop in water levels on the Ganges River that closed his plant for ten days (BBC, March 27, 2016). For the second year in a row in India, monsoon rains have been scarce, snowmelt limited, and ground water levels have fallen. The falling river level has caused power plants to go offline, stranded river barges and caused shortages of drinking and washing water (ibid.).

“Thousands of homes in the north of England have been affected by severe flooding, some for the second or even third time in the past few years. In South America, where El Niño flooding has been responsible for at least eight deaths, more than 144,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in Paraguay, at least 20,000 in Argentina and several thousand in Uruguay and southern Brazil” (The Guardian, December 28, 2015).

California, the most populous state in America with 40 million people, is in the fourth year of a record-breaking drought with nearly half of the state showing extreme to exceptional drought conditions (U.S Drought Monitor, November 10, 2015).