Latest news with #disasters
Washington Post
15 hours ago
- Health
- Washington Post
The Los Angeles fires may have killed hundreds more people than official records show
The devastating January fires that consumed entire swaths of Los Angeles, displaced tens of thousands of people and altered parts of the city's iconic landscape, may have been far more deadly than previously recorded. While the official death toll was at least 30 people, the blazes could be linked to hundreds of fatalities in the month after the fires first sparked, according to new research published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The scientists compared recorded deaths in Los Angeles County between Jan. 5 and Feb. 1 to those of past years — excluding 2020 through 2023 because of the coronavirus pandemic — and estimated that 440 more deaths this year in that time could be attributed to the fires. In total, 6,371 deaths were recorded, compared to 5,931 expected, according to their models. The findings emphasize how climate-driven disasters can be far deadlier than they initially seem, with ripple effects that extend in the weeks and months after the extreme events. The disasters are linked to lingering environmental damages and social upheaval that result in long-term, dangerous ills for hard-hit communities. The methodology to calculate excess deaths in the wake of a natural disaster is sometimes used to capture the complete toll of these events — scientists catch fatalities that may not be directly linked to the catastrophe, but were a result of circumstances that would not have otherwise occurred. 'These additional deaths likely reflect a combination of factors, including increased exposure to poor air quality and healthcare delays and interruptions,' the authors wrote. The amount of excess deaths linked to the Los Angeles fires stunned one of the paper's authors, Andrew Stokes, an associate professor the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. Stokes also worked on conducting excess death studies during the coronavirus pandemic, where he and other researchers found an approximately 16 percent increase in deaths than were recorded, he said. But for the fires, the amount found is more than 10 times the 30 fatalities recorded. 'It highlights that it's very difficult to attribute a death to a natural disaster,' he said. 'Because while some deaths are due to direct exposure others are due to the sustained exposure.' Stokes also noted the time period of the research was small — less than a month — and effects beyond Feb. 1 are entirely likely but would be missed in their count. 'There's certainly a long tail,' he said, adding first-responders and those living in LA County and neighboring areas may face long-term health hazards given their exposure to the smoke and contaminants. Similar studies have been done in the wake of other extreme events including heat waves and hurricanes. Researchers found that a European heat wave this summer may have resulted in nearly three-times as many heat-related deaths. And an analysis published last year found that the average U.S. hurricane leads to as many as 11,000 excess deaths. For the authors, the Los Angeles fires were an opportunity. Often excess death studies linked to disasters are challenging because they rely on robust mortality data that's not always accessible in the rural areas where these events occur. But when the fires razed parts of one of the largest counties in the country, burning homes, cars, storefronts and nature preserves, there was a chance to show the extent of the hazards. The hope, Stokes said, is that their results demonstrate that in other places, where you don't have that data, you could still be aware of the harms. 'I worry, for example, that when it comes to wildfires that have occurred elsewhere that we'll never know the full toll of those because the studies haven't been done and are difficult to do,' Stokes said. 'But here we've been able to show this discrepancy between the official toll versus what we believe to be the the true toll and the the differences are quite staggering.' Brianna Sacks and Kevin Crowe contributed to this report.
France 24
a day ago
- Science
- France 24
Plastic pollution inextricably linked with numerous 'public health crises'
05:21 24/07/2025 Environment : Tracing Darwin's footsteps through modern ecological discovery Environment 23/07/2025 Failing to protect the planet from climate change could violate international law Environment 15/07/2025 'Whole range of factors: environmental, human and societal, contributing to worsening of disasters' Environment 10/07/2025 As Marseille reels from early summer wildfire, France rolls back environmental protections Europe 09/07/2025 Recent European heatwave caused 2,300 deaths, scientists estimate Environment 07/07/2025 Texas deadly floods: A state 'can't deal with this scale of disaster' without federal resources Americas 30/06/2025 Stocamine in Alsace: 'Toxicity of chemical waste won't disappear, nobody knows how to deal with it' France 20/06/2025 'Collective problem needs collective solution: Global warming projected to increase well beyond 2°' Environment 12/06/2025 Climate change disrupting species' habitats and altering both productivity and seasonality Environment
Forbes
5 days ago
- Science
- Forbes
Investigating Weather With New Satellites
It's no surprise to many of us that the world is facing unique kinds of weather challenges right now. Governments around the world are trying to get up to speed on information about changing weather and the life of the biosphere. In the U.S., The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA is responsible for much of this research. Among recent NOAA findings is that the United States has experienced 24 weather-related disasters causing over $1 billion dollars in damages, and that the country has been experiencing at least 10 of these a year for a decade. That's part of what has set the stage for ongoing efforts to improve our national response to the climate situation. The NOAA maintains various types of equipment and methods to analyze global weather and predict likely outcomes, while diagnosing the health of the planet. Citing increased disaster risk, the agency has established key goals including disaster response, recovery (restoring essential services and facilities) and mitigation of damage. But how does this work? What tools do we have at our disposal, and how does the public sector work with the private sector to address this? Innovating Weather Investigation Dan Slagen is CMO at a company that is helping to figure out what's happening at a global level. I covered the work of this startup before, in the context of what happens at Davos each year, and our 'under the dome' work with TCS, although the prior post had a bigger focus on deep space and market context. In a recent TED talk, Slagen reviewed more of what's happening with this type of research, and how the company is contributing to more granular understanding. He pointed out the value in observations with model training, inference and initialization, and reinforcement learning. 'Why is weather forecasting so hard?' Slagen asked. Answering his own question, Slagen suggested that there's a critical data problem that he called a 'lack of global coverage,' along with other 'coverage performance limitations.' But new satellites and deployment strategies may help. The Technology One of the interesting parts of Slagen's presentation, to me, was the enumeration of five kinds of data work that support operations. The first one is multi-spectrum imaging, and the second one is high-resolution imaging. These are pretty straightforward. The third one was new to me – It's called radio occultation. On Googling, it turns out that this is the study of planetary landscapes and infrastructure with remote sensing (check out this link from UCAR). Then there's a synthetic aperture radar, which according to the expert sources I reviewed, is a form of active remote sensing that uses the movement of the radar platform (like a satellite or plane) to simulate a large antenna — a "synthetic aperture" — which allows it to capture very high-resolution images. ChatGPT provides this step-by-step explanation of how it works, in plain English, using Wikipedia and government sources: In addition to the above four technologies, Slagen simply named 'telecom.' None of these, he suggested, is specifically designed for atmospheric 3-D research. A Government Directive 'NASA realized (the deficiency) years ago,' Slagen said, 'and they essentially said, 'look, whoever comes up with a new data architecture is going to completely give a step step function change to global weather forecasting forever.' went to work, building a microwave sounder satellite, and now has seven of these in orbit, having launched the most recent one from Cape Canaveral weeks ago. 'We're building a full-blown constellation that is the first commercial constellation on earth,' Slagen added, 'in order to 'see' weather for the first time.' Why is it important? One of Slagen's points is the collective cost of disasters; estimated at $1 billion every 13 days in the U.S. That keeps insurance adjusters busy. 'There are very few things on earth that affect all 8 billion people,' Slagen said. 'Weather just happens to be one of those things.' First of Its Kind As for Slagen's claim that is pioneering private sector work on microwave sounder satellites, when I googled, I also found resources for a similar project undertaken by Northrop Grumman, a publicly traded company on the NYSE. However, digging a little deeper, it appears that the firm created the tech for NOAA, so yes, technically, project represents that first fully private sector initiative of its kind. Watching the rest of the presentation, you can see how all of this contributes to robust weather data: Slagen shows us vibrant color pictures of weather activity, much of which, he explains, is new. We see storm movement in detail, and can forecast what's going to happen in our personal lives as weather events develop. That's a big value in a world where the weather seems to be constantly changing more and more often.
France 24
24-07-2025
- General
- France 24
Environment : Tracing Darwin's footsteps through modern ecological discovery
01:54 23/07/2025 Failing to protect the planet from climate change could violate international law Environment 15/07/2025 'Whole range of factors: environmental, human and societal, contributing to worsening of disasters' Environment 10/07/2025 As Marseille reels from early summer wildfire, France rolls back environmental protections Europe 09/07/2025 Recent European heatwave caused 2,300 deaths, scientists estimate Environment 07/07/2025 Texas deadly floods: A state 'can't deal with this scale of disaster' without federal resources Americas 30/06/2025 Stocamine in Alsace: 'Toxicity of chemical waste won't disappear, nobody knows how to deal with it' France 20/06/2025 'Collective problem needs collective solution: Global warming projected to increase well beyond 2°' Environment 12/06/2025 Climate change disrupting species' habitats and altering both productivity and seasonality Environment 11/06/2025 'Protecting our oceans: Behavioural change comes from laws and changing of the system' Environment
NHK
24-07-2025
- Climate
- NHK
Climate crisis visible in tropical glaciers
The melting of glaciers in the Andes due to global warming is raising the risk of imminent disasters and future water shortages.
