Climate change could cause the number of people dying in Britain from unbearable heat to increase by more than 10,000 every year, the Health Protection Agency has warned. [The Telegraph]
… by 2080 the temperature in towns and cities could rise by 10C, peaking at up to 40C (104F) in London, in the summer for several days.
A panel convened by the UN reported on Monday at a meeting in Bangkok that the system, known as the clean development mechanism (CDM), was in dire need of rescue. The panel warned that allowing the CDM to collapse would make it harder in future to raise finance to help developing countries cut carbon. [Guardian]
The first eight months of 2012 have been the warmest of any year on record in the contiguous United States, and this has been the third-hottest summer since record-keeping began in 1895, the U.S. National Climate Data Center said on Monday. [Reuters]
West Nile virus has caused symptoms in at least 1,993 Americans and killed 87 so far this year. And it’s unlikely that this virus, which humans contract from infected mosquitoes, will be getting any less dangerous in the near future. [Los Angeles Times]
With a 520-mile-long coast lined largely by teeming roads and fragile infrastructure, New York City is gingerly facing up to the intertwined threats posed by rising seas and ever-more-severe storm flooding. [New York Times]
Hay fever sufferers face longer pollen seasons and highly allergenic new strains from invasive plants, a new report on the health effects of climate change on the UK warned on Tuesday. [Guardian]
Royal Dutch Shell on Monday was moving its drill ship off a prospect in the Chukchi Sea, a day after drilling began 70 miles off the Alaska coast because sea ice was moving toward the vessel. [Associated Press]
The smallest U.S. soybean harvest in nine years will leave inventories in the world’s largest exporting nation at the lowest in four decades. [Bloomberg]
Across the West, high winds and temperatures exacerbated already dangerous fire conditions, prompting the National Weather Service to issue red-flag warnings for wide swaths of eastern Washington and Oregon, Idaho, Montana and all of Wyoming. [Washington Post]
At its ongoing conference in South Korea, the International Union for Conservation of Nature released a report on Friday indicating that live coral coverage on reefs in the Caribbean has plummeted from nearly 50 percent in the 1970s to less than 10 percent today. [New York Times]