Climate

A runner tries to navigate a flooded section of sidewalk underneath the Longfellow Bridge in Cambridge, Mass.  Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe

statnews.com - by Kate Sheridan - February 15, 2019

. . . the potential risks of climate change — and the attendant increase in natural disasters — stand to outstrip any … incremental gains, as the companies described in recent risk assessment reports to the British nonprofit CDP.

Hurricanes and superstorms, power outages and flooding all threaten manufacturing facilities and research sites, particularly when animals are involved. Droughts, too, threaten critical water supplies. Forest fires, even if remote from a given plant or research facility, bring smoke and air pollution that can similarly disrupt the day-to-day work for drug makers and their supply chain . . .

. . . STAT surveyed the risk assessment plans for more than a dozen major pharmaceutical companies and spoke with officials at labs that survived extreme weather events and others who are planning to avoid their repercussions. All emphasized that the risks are already real — and underscored how hard the industry is working to prepare to meet the challenge.

A transmission tower and downed lines in the mountainous terrain of eastern Puerto Rico. Workers from the island and throughout the United States have worked to restore power after Hurricanes Irma and Maria last September.

It took months to restore electricity in Puerto Rico after hurricanes dealt a one-two punch. Many homes are still without power, and the system’s future is far from certain.

nytimes.com - by JAMES GLANZ and FRANCES ROBLES - Photographs by TODD HEISLER - May 6, 2018

 . . . After Maria and the hurricane that preceded it, called Irma, Puerto Rico all but slipped from the modern era . . .

 . . . an examination of the power grid’s reconstruction — based on a review of hundreds of documents and interviews with dozens of public officials, utility experts and citizens across the island — shows how a series of decisions by federal and Puerto Rican authorities together sent the effort reeling on a course that would take months to correct. The human and economic damage wrought by all that time without power may be irreparable.

HEAT ISLANDS  Heat claims more lives than floods, hurricanes and other weather-related disasters. How will cities cope as temperatures rise?  ULTRAFORMA/ISTOCKPHOTO

When days and nights get too hot, city dwellers are the first to run into trouble

sciencenews.org - by AIMEE CUNNINGHAM - April 3, 2018

Since 1986, the first year the National Weather Service reported data on heat-related deaths, more people in the United States have died from heat (3,979) than from any other weather-related disaster — more than floods (2,599), tornadoes (2,116) or hurricanes (1,391). Heat’s victim counts would be even higher, but unless the deceased are found with a fatal body temperature or in a hot room, the fact that heat might have been the cause is often left off of the death certificate, says Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

As greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, heat’s toll is expected to rise. Temperatures will probably keep smashing records as carbon dioxide, methane and other gases continue warming the planet. Heat waves (unusually hot weather lasting two or more days) will probably be longer, hotter and more frequent in the future.