5 of California’s 6 Largest Fires on Record Are Burning Now: The Astonishing 2020 Wildfire Season in Context
Editor’s note: This post has been revised to reflect the most accurate data on fire acreage in the 1980s. The original relied on data from the NIFC for 1980-1983 and the updated version excludes this period, as the data are less reliable. The 1980s statistics now reflect data from MTBS and CalFire. California is a state […]
In the US West Scorched by Wildfires, We Can Barely Breathe. It’s Going to Get Worse.
Smoke over US West from wildfires Sept 2020/NASA Worldview In California, we’ve counted ourselves among the lucky this past week if the worst we’ve had to cope with is a thick layer of smoke transforming our daytime skies into eerie orange hellscapes. Compared with the trauma of losing a home or loved one, having to […]
How Will People Cope With Extreme Heat and Rising COVID-19 Risks This Week?
This post was coauthored with Juan Declet-Barreto. Over the last 30 days, hundreds of daily high temperature records have been broken across the United States, and extreme heat is expected to continue across much of the Southeast and Southern Great Plains regions this week. In a new analysis, detailed below, UCS evaluated the current COVID-19 public health guidance for 26 highly populated […]
