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Residents in Alaska’s capital cleared out waterlogged homes on Wednesday after a lake dammed by the picturesque Mendenhall Glacier gave way, causing the worst flooding in Juneau yet from what has become a yearly phenomenon.

At least 100 homes and some businesses were damaged by rapidly rising floodwaters that crested early on Tuesday, according to initial estimates. In some areas, cars floated in chest-high water as people scrambled to evacuate. The waters receded by Wednesday, and the river level was falling.

The flooding happened because a smaller glacier nearby had retreated – a casualty of the warming climate – and left a basin that fills with rainwater and snowmelt each summer. When the water creates enough pressure, as happened this week, it forces its way under or around the ice dam created by the Mendenhall Glacier, enters Mendenhall Lake and eventually makes its way to the Mendenhall River.

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Four key pillars of the global climate are melting in the heat trapped by rising fossil fuel emissions, a new study has found.

The relatively stable climate that nurtured human civilization depends in large part on these structures: the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic currents that warm Europe.

Under current policies, the world faces a scenario in which those pillars have roughly even odds of either surviving or collapsing during the next three centuries, according to results published Thursday in Nature Communications.

The scientists warned that if the pillars are fatally undermined by heat, the resulting damage could prove impossible to undo — even if temperatures are successfully brought down later in the 21st century.

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Scientists say the drying Great Salt Lake in Utah is now becoming a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the climate to warm, according to a new study.

Due largely to water diversions by farmers and Utah’s booming population growth, the Great Salt Lake has shrunk by almost half in recent years.

Scientists spent seven months in 2020 sampling emissions coming off the dried saline lake bed. Canada's Royal Ontario Museum published the study on Thursday in the journal One Earth.

"Human-caused desiccation of Great Salt Lake is exposing huge areas of lake bed and releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere," said Soren Brothers, the museum's climate change curator who led the study.

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Hurricane Beryl was unusual in many ways before it struck Texas on 8 July – it sped up more than 35mph in a 24-hour period twice, and it became the first category 5 storm to form as early as it did in the hurricane season. And as the world increasingly warms because of the burning of fossil fuels, research suggests that storms like Hurricane Beryl will become more common – concerning coastal residents who will have less time to evacuate.

While residents are more likely to leave when directed to do so by their local government, emergency managers are shying away from enacting community-wide mandatory evacuations because of how much time they take to put in place.

After 2021’s Hurricane Ida strengthened 60mph in a day, the New Orleans mayor, LaToya Cantrell, said there wasn’t enough time to reroute all traffic out of the city and organize a municipally assisted evacuation for those without transportation. Emergency managers in Houston similarly expressed concern that calling for a mandatory evacuation on such short notice could leave drivers stranded in the storm’s path.

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Oregon’s wildfire season is off to an explosive start with more than 1m acres (405,000 hectares) charred in less than a month, as experts warn that extreme heat and unusual lightning strikes are creating “catastrophic conditions” for fires to ignite and spread.

The state is currently home to the largest wildfire burning in the US. By Friday afternoon, the Durkee fire had burned nearly 290,000 acres (117,000 hectares) and was only 20% contained. The fire had forced evacuations, shut down a major interstate highway and even produced its own weather system.

The Durkee fire is one of more than 100 lightning-ignited fires, including four “megafires”, that have started over the past week and are currently raging in the eastern and central parts of Oregon. A megafire is defined by the National Interagency Fire Center as blazes that have burned more than 100,000 acres (40,000 hectares).

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