Whether that leads to big changes in the public’s will to address the climate crisis and adapt to a landscape that is expected to burn with increasing intensity “remains up in the air”, she said.
For climate scientists and fire ecologists who have been warning for decades that global heating would bring on hotter heatwaves, drier droughts and more fire, “it can be really demoralizing and very frustrating to find ourselves here,” Kearns said. “Maybe this year will finally be the one ...
“All of these fires bear some sign of climate change, which is really a threat multiplier,” said Faith Kearns, a scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources. “We have always had fires in the west. The landscape is in many ways forged in fire. But the intensity of the fires we...
This week, smoke from the various fires in the west is expected to carry across the country, reaching up into Minnesota and bleeding into central Canada. Forecasters are predicting that the intense high temperatures that came last weekend as a heat dome smothered the west are likely to ease lat...
“The fire behavior we are seeing on the Bootleg fire is among the most extreme you can find and firefighters are seeing conditions they have never seen before,” Al Lawson, an incident commander for the Bootleg fire, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Bootleg fire in southern Oregon engulfed more than 240 sq miles (621 sq km) and has doubled in size three times over the weekend. After the fire disrupted electric transmission lines, California’s power grid operator asked residents to conserve electricity on Monday evening to av...
In northern California, the largest wildfire to hit the state this year broke out over the weekend and has so far consumed more than 140 sq miles (362 sq km). The Beckwourth Complex grew so fast and with such intensity that it whipped up a rare fire tornado – a swirling vortex of smoke and fire.
“For our most vulnerable, disadvantaged communities, this also creates compounding health effects,” Ortiz said. “First there’s the heat. Then for many families their water supplies are affected. And then it’s also the same heat and drought that are exacerbating wildfires and leading to ...
Extreme heatwaves over the past few weeks – which have smashed records everywhere from southern California to Nevada and Oregon – are causing the region’s water reserves to evaporate at an alarming rate, said Jose Pablo Ortiz Partida, a climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scient...
Firefighters are battling blazes from Arizona to Washington state that are burning with a worrying ferocity, while officials say California is already set to outpace last year’s record-breaking fire season.
As fires propagate throughout the US west on the heels of record heatwaves, experts are warning that the region is caught in a vicious feedback cycle of extreme heat, drought and fire, all amplified by the climate crisis.
Four years later Starr served as a member of Trump’s legal team in the former president’s first impeachment trial over dealings with Ukraine.
Starr’s handling of sexual assault scandals has dogged him during other phases in his career. In 2016 he was stripped of the presidency of Baylor University after the institution under his watch failed to take appropriate action over a sexual assault scandal involving 19 football players an...
Though Starr’s role in securing the Epstein deal was public knowledge, Brown’s book reveals the lengths that the lawyer was prepared to go to in order to protect from federal justice an accused sexual predator and pedophile. The extent of his involvement is all the more striking given the eq...
In the fallout, Alex Acosta, who as Miami’s top federal prosecutor in 2008 had signed off on the Epstein sweetheart deal, was forced to resign as Donald Trump’s labor secretary.
Following Brown’s exposé, a judge ruled that the secret agreement was illegal, opening up the possibility of a renewed federal prosecution. Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in July 2019 – 11 years after Starr and the rest of his legal team had worked so hard to shield him ...
In 2018 Brown published a three-part exposé in the Miami Herald that lifted the lid on the “non-prosecution agreement” that had been reached covering up Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. The reporter managed to identify 80 potential victims, some as young as 13 and 14.
The outcome of this process was a secret deal that only became public years later, largely through Brown’s own reporting. Given the number of victims and the severity of the allegations, Epstein got off exceptionally lightly with a sentence that saw him serve just 13 months in jail. During his...