Situation Report

Leaning on the lines.(Raquel Pérez Puig for Quartz)

qz.com - by Ana Campoy - November 11, 2017

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Seven weeks after hurricane Maria, the traffic lights are still down in San Juan. The narrow, cobbled streets of the city’s historic center, one of the island’s top tourist attractions, turn pitch black as soon as the sun sets. With appliances useless during the blackout, many of the city’s residents can’t cook, store food, or take a real shower.

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A main power line failed Thursday in Puerto Rico, plunging several cities, including San Juan, into darkness. Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo for The New York Times

nytimes.com - by Frances Robles - November 10, 2017

SAN JUAN, P.R. — A main power line that serves the northern half of Puerto Rico failed Thursday, knocking out electricity to seven cities that had only recently regained service and dealing a major setback to the island’s desperate efforts to regain normality.

Seven weeks after Hurricane Maria completely disabled Puerto Rico’s power grid, the island was generating just 18 percent of its electrical capacity, returning service to where it had been two and half weeks ago. On Thursday morning, the island had been at about 43.2 percent of capacity.

The disruption also me ant that many people no longer had running water, because pumping stations are powered by electricity.

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Smoke rose from trees burned in a wildfire in Wrightwood, Calif., last year. A report from 13 federal agencies says extreme weather events have cost the United States $1.1 trillion since 1980. Credit Jonathan Alcorn/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

CLICK HERE - Climate Science Special Report - Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), Volume I

nytimes.com - by Lisa Friedman and Glenn Thrush - November. 3, 2017

Directly contradicting much of the Trump administration’s position on climate change, 13 federal agencies unveiled an exhaustive scientific report on Friday that says humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has created the warmest period in the history of civilization.

Over the past 115 years global average temperatures have increased 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to record-breaking weather events and temperature extremes, the report says. The global, long-term warming trend is “unambiguous,” it says, and there is “no convincing alternative explanation” that anything other than humans — the cars we drive, the power plants we operate, the forests we destroy — are to blame.

Cases of dengue have risen sharply in India.(Reuters/Paulo Whitaker)

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Dengue burden in India: recent trends and importance of climatic parameters

CLICK HERE - Increasing probability of mortality during Indian heat waves

qz.com - by Priyanka Vora - November 2, 2017

Even as several parts of India are in the grip of severe dengue outbreaks, a team of researchers has found clues to why the mosquito-borne disease might be spreading across the country faster than before. The answer lies in increased temperatures, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.

A rise in temperature results in a shorter “extrinsic incubation period” or EIP, which is the time required for the virus to develop in the mosquito, the study by scientists from Hyderabad, Guwahati, and Liverpool shows. A shorter incubation period leads to higher transmission rates of dengue infection in a community, the authors said.

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