Ecology

 New Yorker - In early 2023, climate scientists—and anyone else paying attention to the data—started to notice something strange. At the beginning of March, sea-surface temperatures began to rise. By April, they’d set a new record: the average temperature at the surface of the world’s oceans, excluding those at the poles, was just a shade under seventy degrees. Typically, the highest sea-surface temperatures of the year are observed in March, toward the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. Last year, temperatures remained abnormally high through the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn and beyond, breaking the monthly records for May, June, July, and other months. The North Atlantic was particularly bathtub-like; in the words of Copernicus, an arm of the European Union’s space service, temperatures in the basin were “off the charts.” ... “We don’t really know what’s going on,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told me. “And we haven’t really known what’s going on since about March of last year.” He called the situation “disquieting.”

Thursday night’s storms left trails of destruction across parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Arkansas. About 40 people were injured and dozens of homes damaged in one Indiana community. Tornadoes were also suspected in Illinois and Missouri. The Indian Lake area in Ohio’s Logan County appeared to be the hardest hit. Read More.

 In recent decades, Central America has had the highest deforestation rate of any region, losing about 20 percent of its forests from 1990 to 2020, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.