Environment

Newsweek  - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has experienced its wettest April to date after a startling amount of rain equal to four times its average has drenched the Steel City. Heavy rains from several storm systems have battered Pittsburgh this month. The city was doused last week, as rainfall rates exceeded 4 inches per hour. That storm was part of a system traveling northward from the Gulf Coast states, where it caused flooding so severe that caskets floated out of their graves in Texas. The deluge prompted meteorologists to issue a flash-flood emergency for Allegheny County in Pennsylvania.

Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World: In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways... With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.  - Penquin Random House

Inside Climate News - For people living within three miles of a large solar farm, positive attitudes about the development outnumber negative ones by about a three-to-one margin, according to a new national survey released this week by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  Some of the results are likely to be encouraging for solar developers, and could be used in local debates to show that community sentiment may favor solar more than is evident just from looking at often-contentious testimony at local public hearings.  But solar opponents also can point to parts of the report that show serious concerns about development. For example, the survey found that people who live within three miles of projects that are 100 megawatts or larger have negative attitudes that outnumber positive ones by about 12 to one.  In other words, positive sentiment is largely coming from people near smaller projects.