Lauren Sommer
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Temperature records have been set this week across Arizona, California, and Nevada, with the hottest March days ever recorded in some cities.
The National Weather Service has issued heat warnings for millions of people, the earliest in the year these warnings have ever been issued, according to the agency.
Scientists with World Weather Attribution, a research collaborative, analyzed the heat wave.
They found that because of heat-trapping emissions, climate change has made this heat wave four times more likely to happen now than it was a decade ago.
On Wall Street, in pre-market trading, Dow futures are lower.
As the climate gets hotter, oceans are rising.
That's because polar ice and glaciers are melting and because the water itself expands as it gets warmer.
A new study from Wageningen University in the Netherlands finds that scientific studies may be underestimating how much sea levels could rise.
The researchers found the computer models scientists use
start with a current sea level that's about 10 inches too low on average.
If that's corrected, those same models would show as many as 130 million more people potentially affected on coastlines if sea level rises by three feet.
FEMA relies on thousands of disaster workers to respond on the ground when storms and wildfires hit.
Those workers are on two- or four-year contracts, which generally are renewed.
Recently, FEMA has been terminating employees whose contracts are up, something disaster response experts say could hurt the agency's ability to respond.
On Thursday, FEMA abruptly stopped that policy, according to an internal email obtained by NPR.
The Trump administration has been critical of FEMA and is working to overhaul the agency.
In a statement to NPR, FEMA says its disaster workforce is designed to fluctuate, but did not respond to questions about whether the termination policy would be reinstated after the winter storm.