Word: drought
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...situation was worsened by a relatively wet winter in 2004-05, which let trees and scrub grow densely, followed by extremely dry weather since, which turned the vegetation to still more fuel. In fact, this past year has seen the worst drought in Los Angeles' recorded history. Adding to the tinder were those Santa Ana winds, which strike regularly in the autumn but rarely with the power of the past week. "They usually come in small, medium and large," says Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "These were Godzilla winds...
...that the October wildfires may be only the start - not just of future fires in future seasons but of more to come this year. The Santa Ana winds have just begun and typically peak in the winter. What's more, there is not likely to be much relief from drought conditions. The National Weather Service predicts a La Niña pattern this winter, which occurs when sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean are cooler than usual. La Niña usually translates to dryer and hotter weather in the American South...
...still be those who wonder how an environmentalist could be, as the Peace Prize's description goes, the person who has "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations." They shouldn't. Climate change is already a key instigator of conflict in areas like Darfur, where drought likely worsened by global warming helped trigger a civil war that has claimed over 200,000 lives. (Nor are Gore and the IPCC the first greens to win the Peace Prize; that would be the Kenyan Wangari Maathai, a conservationist and political activist who won in 2004.) As the IPCC...
...tell how the mass drowning will affect Africa's wildebeest population as a whole. But it's safe to say that as the weather gets more erratic, these kinds of freak deaths will become more common - early last year, the Masai Mara had the opposite problem, and a drought left almost 100 hippos dead. These days, it looks like the only alternative to letting nature take its course is to change the course of nature...
...sold for biofuel production. The plan dovetails with Beijing's ambitious goal of generating 2 million tons of bio-ethanol a year by 2010, and 15% of its energy from renewable resources by 2020. (Seventy percent of mainland China's energy comes from coal today.) In another desert village, drought-resistant shrubs called sand willows are being planted to keep encroaching sands at bay, but there are also plans to start processing them in a biomass thermal power plant, which will burn the willows to generate electricity and create another clean source of fuel...