Close to half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of this century, and humans will be the cause.

This is the Sixth Mass Extinction — a loss of life that could rival the die-out that caused the dinosaurs to disappear 65 millions years ago after an asteroid hit the planet. 

This time, though, we’re the asteroid.

At least that's how Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of "The Sixth Extinction," sees it.

"We are deciding," Kolbert writes, "without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy."

In "The Sixth Extinction," Kolbert traces our understanding of extinction from the first time it was proposed as a theory in the 1740s until now, with scientists mostly agreeing that humans may be causing it.

It took scientists a long time to accept that entire species could disappear

It used to be that when researchers came across old animal bones, their first goal was to identify them with a species that already existed. In 1739, for example, when a group of researchers unearthed the first Mastodon bones, they assumed they were looking at the remains of two different animals — an elephant and a hippopotamus.

It wasn't until French naturalist Georges Cuvier suggested that the bones were from "a world previous to ours" that researchers first started to consider the idea that an entire species could have existed and then disappeared.

This realization should awaken us to the idea that our impact on the planet could have serious implications. 

One of the main culprits in the sixth extinction, Kolbert says, is climate change, but modern agriculture and a rapidly growing human population have contributed as well. By warming the planet, introducing invasive species to different areas, and encouraging the spread of previously contained fungi and viruses, people are killing the life around us.

Here's Kolbert:

No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.

We know what mass extinctions look like. And a growing number of scientists have agreed that we are likely causing a new one.

Yet we are doing surprisingly little to curb the tide.

"It is estimated," Kolbert writes, "that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion."

That adds up to between 30% and 50% of all life on Earth that could be gone by the end of the century— unless we start taking action now.

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DON'T MISS: This is what caused the biggest extinction in Earth's history

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The BMW i8 is not your run-of-the-mill hybrid. Sporting a 129 HP motor in the front and a 228 HP turbo engine in the back, the car won't leave you wanting for power and performance. Oh — and did we mention it's absolutely gorgeous?

Produced by Justin Gmoser. Additional reporting by Benjamin Zhang. 

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The Louisiana Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans are in trouble. Land there is sinking below sea level rapidly, faster than anywhere else in the world, at rates that scientists predict the rest of the world will see only at the end of this century.

This erosion has been going on since the Mississippi was re-routed in 1932 to protect communities from the river's seasonal flooding — but those same floods used to carry sediment that restored land washed out to sea by erosion and storms.

About 2,000 square miles of Louisiana have disappeared from the coast already. Climate change and the more frequent powerful storms that are expected as result, along with rising sea levels, are expected to exacerbate these problems.

Fortunately, there is a master plan in place to save the Gulf Coast. But it's a 50-year, $50 billion plan, and so far, the money is not there.

Here's the official plan to save the coast:

In the southwest part of the state, there's an emphasis on marsh restoration — marshland absorbs floods and can be a barrier to land loss.

The center of the Louisiana coast will require artificial protections like levees and natural barriers to land loss like oyster reefs.

Protecting New Orleans and the surrounding area will be particularly challenging, requiring barriers to block storm surges and the restoration of natural features.

SEE MORE ABOUT THE SCARY FUTURE THE GULF COAST FACES: New Orleans could be wiped off the map later this century

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Google is in talks to invest in the largest wind power project in Africa.

According to CNBC, Google wants to back Kenya’s Lake Turkana Wind Power Project, a massive undertaking that will require more than $700 million.

The project will span 40,000 acres, raise Kenya’s energy capacity by 20 percent, and be an enormous boon to a country where less than 25% of the population has access to power.

Though most of Google’s green energy investments have been within the United States, it has invested in Africa before — most notably in 2013 when it poured $12 million into a South African solar project, one of the largest on the continent.

Kwame Parker, Standard Bank's head of power and infrastructure for East Africa, told CNBC that Google’s global profile would send ripples beyond Turkana itself. Google's investment would be “a significant vote of confidence for investors considering African power market entry," he said.

But that’s not the only impact this investment could have. It could also help secure a $250 million investment based on President Barack Obama’s Power Africa initiative. To receive the government investment, the Turkana project would require "meaningful involvement of the U.S. private sector," which Google’s investment would likely satisfy.

Google also has significant interest in wind power on the technology side. Its innovative arm, Google X, is currently developing the potential next phase in wind energy production. Google’s Makani wind turbines fly in the air like kites to utilize the strong winds available at higher altitudes.   

SEE ALSO: Google is starting a new company to improve cities

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SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's Premier Li Keqiang reaffirmed the government's commitment to achieve peak carbon emissions by "around 2030," the State Council said in a statement issued late on Friday.

The statement contained no new commitments ahead of crucial climate talks scheduled to take place in Paris at the end of the year.

Li, at a meeting of the State Council's National Leading Group on Climate Change, also said it would impose a "tough limit" on the expansion of heavily polluting and energy-intensive industries.

China's coal consumption decreased for the first time in years in 2014, leading some to speculate that its carbon emissions could peak sooner than many had expected.

As the country's energy-intensive heavy industrial sector has suffered over the past two years, electricity production - responsible for the bulk of coal consumption in China - has also lagged.

Electricity output growth in May was flat on the year, after declining outright in the first quarter.

"In 2014, China's energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission per unit of GDP dropped by 29.9 percent and 33.8 percent over 2005," the State Council, or cabinet, said in the statement.

"The binding targets on energy conservation and emissions reduction set in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan could well be achieved as scheduled."

China has also been engaged in a strong push to raise the percentage of non-fossil fuel energy sources in its overall energy supply mix. Nonetheless, the Friday statement contained no explicit pledge to cap coal consumption.

(Reporting by Nathaniel Taplin; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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NOW WATCH: California could learn a few things about water conservation from this college dorm in Florida

Volcanic eruptions have sculpted the landscape, buried cities and reshaped the course of history.

When volcanoes blow their tops, they can do so without warning — and with devastating consequences.

In 1996, a leading international volcanology group identified more than a dozen volcanoes that are particularly deserving of study because they have a history of large, destructive eruptions, are close to populated areas, and could erupt again in the near future.

Many of these volcanoes remain active today, and could wreak havoc on communities that live in their shadow.

Mauna Loa, an active volcano on Hawaii's Big Island, is widely considered the largest land volcano on Earth. It has a volume of 18,000 cubic miles! Because of its shape, Mauna Loa is known as a shield volcano. The last time it erupted was 1984, when lava poured out of vents on its northeast rift zone on Pu‘u‘ula‘ula (Red Hill), shown below. No recent eruptions have killed anyone, but they have destroyed villages.

Taal Volcano, located on the island of Luzon, is the second most active volcano in the Philippines. It has erupted violently several times in the past, including a 1911 eruption that killed more than 1,300 people and destroyed homes and livestock. It last erupted in 1977.

Tenerife is the largest island in the Canary Island archipelago, crowned by Pico de Teide volcano. At 12,198 feet above sea level, the peak, shown in this satellite image taken in August 1991, represents the highest elevation in the Atlantic Ocean. Teide has erupted several times since the island was settled in 1402, most recently in 1909.

The world is running out of water. 

New NASA satellite data shows that a majority of the world's largest underground aquifers — the predominant source of our drinking water — are being depleted faster than they can be refilled.

From its recent 2003 to 2013 study, NASA concluded that 21 of the 37 largest aquifers (underground reservoirs that store groundwater from rain and snow) are running out too fast to be replenished.

An additional 13 are declining at a rate that puts them in a category NASA calls the "most troubled."

Here's a map from the report showing the 37 largest aquifers in the world and their state of depletion. Red indicates aquifers that are being depleted faster than they can be replenished (in millimeters). Cream indicates aquifers that have remained relatively stable, and blue aquifers are in good shape:

This is extremely troubling considering that we draw about a one-third of the world's water from aquifers.

“The situation is quite critical,” Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and principal investigator of the University of California Irvine-led studies, told the Washington Post.

NASA gathered its data using special satellites called Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, which took precise measurements of the world’s groundwater aquifers. Since the bigger, heavier water sources exerted a stronger gravitational pull on the satellite, they could use this data to spot the largest sources of water.

Should we have seen this coming?

The depletion of water around the world, while alarming, shouldn't come as any surprise. Every Little Drop, an organization devoted to water conservation, said that between 1900 and 2000, worldwide water use increased six-fold, and the UN expects the situation to get "considerably worse" by 2030. 

Bank of America Merrill Lynch reports that water scarcity is our biggest problem worldwide.

At present, droughts are happening on every single continent in the world, save Antarctica, reports the Global Drought Information System. In the US, drought-stricken California is currently drawing 60% of its water from aquifers.

Why it's likely to get worse

Two aquifers in America, including California's Central Valley Aquifer and one that stretches across the southeast coast of Florida, are also being used at an unsustainable rate, the Post reports. According to the US Government Accountability Office, 40 of 50 states have at least one region that is expected to face some kind of water shortage within the next 10 years. 

Here's a map of the amounts of water used domestically in each state, with dark blue being the most and light blue being the least:

Underground drilling for natural resources like gold, iron, and oil has put added stress on the aquifers, the Post reports, and the top-three fastest depleting aquifers are all located in the Middle East. 

This is compounded by the fact that climate change has dried out regions of the planet along the equator and caused areas north and south to experience heavier rainfall.

Famiglietti says this creates a self-reinforcing cycle where people who live closer to the equator pump more water from aquifers due to drier conditions. But, once that water is removed from the ground, it evaporates and is redistributed as rainfall to areas farther north and south, meaning the aquifers that are hurting for groundwater cannot get replenished. 

SEE ALSO: California isn’t the only state with water problems

DON'T MISS: Devastating photos of California show how bad the drought really is

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NOW WATCH: Scientists have discovered the biggest threat to the avocado industry — and it's not the drought

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration will propose on Friday new standards for big trucks designed to cut carbon emissions and lower fuel costs, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Citing an unnamed person familiar with the proposal, the newspaper said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department would announce draft standards for big trucks, including garbage trucks, 18-wheelers and heavy-duty pickup trucks.

Trucking industry executives and lobbyists familiar with the process had said earlier that proposed rules, part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to curb greenhouse gas emissions, would probably call for boosting fuel efficiency nearly 40 percent by 2027 from 2010 levels.

The Wall Street Journal said the proposals would apply to big trucks built after 2018, and follow up on standards announced by the Obama administration in 2011 for models built between 2014 and 2018.

"The standards will also, for the first time ever, regulate trailers that are part of 18-wheelers and other big hauling trucks and issue tougher limits on the part of the truck hauling the trailer, called the tractor, according to multiple industry officials," it said.

The standards are expected to be completed next year after a public comment period, the Journal said.

Truckers say the industry is willing to accept tighter federal standards, since motor fuel accounts for about a third of its costs, but various segments of the trucking industry disagree about how federal rules should be structured and implemented.

(Reporting by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Eric Beech and Peter Cooney)

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The American West, not just California, is experiencing a long-term drought.

As drought conditions drag on, the region's water reservoirs are getting drained.

Dean Farrell of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill made a stunning (and frightening) interactive graphic illustrating how empty the West's water reservoirs are becoming. The reservoirs at less than 50% of their capacity are represented by the red dots in this map (the larger the dot, the bigger the reservoir):

The huge red dot straddling the Utah and Arizona border is Lake Powell, which was 45.4% full in May. The other big red dot at the southern tip of Nevada, Lake Mead, was only 37.6% full.

On Farrell's website you can click reservoirs and see how their water level has changed over time.

Take, for example, Trinity Lake, California's third-largest reservoir, which has been low since the summer of 2014.

Trinity Lake's water level has fluctuated pretty wildly, presumably because of scheduled water releases, Farrell says.

But you can clearly see a major dip from 2008 to 2010, and water levels haven't recovered from their tumble in 2013:

In May, Trinity Lake was only 41.8% full, coming down from a peak of 48.4% in March after heavy December rains recharged it.

Overall, in May California's reservoirs were at only 46% of their full capacity, and 72% of their historical average.

Surface water reservoirs aren't the only source of water in the West — people also take water from underground aquifers, rivers, and desalination plants — but as they dwindle less and less water is available for people to use.

Check out and play with the graphic on Dean Farrell's website.

SEE ALSO: California isn’t the only state with water problems

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NOW WATCH: Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted

Close to half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of this century, and humans will be the cause.

This is the sixth mass extinction— a loss of life that could rival the die-out that caused the dinosaurs to disappear 65 millions years ago after an asteroid hit the planet. 

This time, though, we’re the asteroid.

At least that's the finding of a recent study in the journal Science Advances.

The study found that animals are disappearing about 100 times faster than they used to and, ironically, humans could be among the first to go for good.

Not since the age of the dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago has the planet been losing species at this rapid a rate, said a study led by experts at Stanford University, Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley.

The research, which comes on the heels of another similar study done last year, "shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," said co-author Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University professor of biology.

"There are examples of species all over the world that are essentially the walking dead," Ehrlich said.

Humans may be one of them.

"If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover and our species itself would likely disappear early on," said lead author Gerardo Ceballos of the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico.

In her 2014 book, "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History," science writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of the same phenomenon. She'd been inspired to write the book after visiting Panama and reporting on the rapid decline of several frog species there.

"We are deciding," Kolbert writes, "without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy."

The new analysis, which comes to some of the same conclusions Kolbert did last year, is based on documented extinctions of vertebrates, or animals with internal skeletons such as frogs, reptiles and tigers, from fossil records and other historical data. 

Its authors described it as "conservative."

Nevertheless, they found that the "average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 114 times higher than it would be without human activity, even when relying on the most conservative estimates of species extinction," said the study.

"We emphasize that our calculations very likely underestimate the severity of the extinction crisis because our aim was to place a realistic lower bound on humanity's impact on biodiversity."

The causes of species loss range from climate change to pollution to deforestation and more.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, about 41% of all amphibian species and 26% of all mammals are threatened with extinction.

"There are examples of species all over the world that are essentially the walking dead," Ehrlich said.

The study called for "rapid, greatly intensified efforts to conserve already threatened species, and to alleviate pressures on their populations — notably habitat loss, over-exploitation for economic gain and climate change."

READ MORE: Earth is on the edge of a 'Sixth Extinction'

SEE ALSO: International travel is turning the world into one giant supercontinent — and that's a very dangerous thing

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NOW WATCH: Researchers tested a rat’s empathy by giving it a choice between chocolate and a drowning friend

Years after the release of his scathing documentary, "You've Been Trumped," filmmaker Anthony Baxter finally got his audience with Donald Trump. 

"I can't do interviews with everybody because I don't have enough time," Trump said in his interview for Baxter's new film, "A Dangerous Game," which is being released on iTunes June 23. 

"Your documentary ['You've Been Trumped'] got carried by BBC and others, so you've become a much more important person, in terms of doing an interview," Trump reasoned. 

In his sophomore documentary, Baxter takes aim at luxury golf courses that "just pound water," as actor Alec Baldwin put it, and have unforeseen social and ecological costs. It's a kind of sequel to his first film, which focused squarely on Trump and his pummeling of the Scottish coastline to build a $1.5 billion golf course ("the world's greatest," as Trump called it) that promised to generate 6,000 jobs.

As the film illustrated, the course, Trump International Golf Course, Aberdeen, created less than 200 jobs and left nearby residents — including a 90-year-old woman — without proper water supply for years. 

While "A Dangerous Game" takes a global look at the eco-impact of luxury golf courses, citing similarly reckless developers in Croatia, China, and even New York's East Hampton (which Baldwin speaks on), it never loses track of Trump and the prolonged effects of his course on Aberdeen locals.

In this exclusive clip from the film, Baxter questions Trump about his "bullying" of Scottish locals, including the aforementioned 90-year-old and Michael Forbes, a farmer who refused to sell his land to Trump. The billionaire later called Forbes "an embarrassment to Scotland" who "lives like a pig." 

In addition to the sit-down with Trump, Baxter was also given access to Donald Trump, Jr., who describes himself as "environmentally conscious" but quickly pivots when asked about photographs of him holding the tail of a dead elephant and standing next to his brother, Eric, cradling the carcass of a leopard during a big game hunt in Africa.  

The interview took place at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, which, as Baxter noted in a 2014 blog post for The Guardian, has been accused of "using up hundreds of millions of gallons of much-needed water" in a drought-prone area. 

The iTunes release of "A Dangerous Game" marks the film's US premiere. It aired previously in UK.    

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NOW WATCH: Here are all the best moments from Donald Trump's presidential announcement

Like something straight out of "The Twilight Zone", a swirling vortex has opened up in a giant lake on the border of Oklahoma and Texas.

The gaping hole — which appeared recently in Lake Texoma — alarmed everyone from Twitter users to the Tulsa District US Army Corps of Engineers, who posted a YouTube video of the vortex. Below the video, they describe the hole as being "8 feet in diameter and capable of sucking in a full-sized boat."

But despite how crazy it looks, there's a perfectly normal explanation for the spooky hole:

The water is being drained.

"Just like in your house when you fill a bathtub full of water and [open] the drain, it will develop a vortex or whirlpool," BJ Parkey, assistant lake manager at Lake Texoma, told Business Insider.

One of the largest reservoirs in the US, Lake Texoma lies on the border of Oklahoma and Texas and is formed by the buildup of water at Denison Dam on the Red River. When the water levels get too high, as they have in recent weeks, the Army Corps opens sluices, called floodgates, at the bottom of the lake to drain the water into the river. The flowing water creates cyclonic action, much like a tornado, which is widest at the top and tapers down at its tip, said Parkey.

Could it really swallow a boat?

If the whirlpool were large enough, it would be easy for a boat to be caught up in it, Parkey said. To avert a watery disaster, the Army Corps has marked the area with buoys and signs to keep people away. He said the entire area is off-limits for boats.

The size of the vortex depends on a number of factors, including the lake's elevation and how wide the floodgates are opened. Although the video description says the hole was 8 feet wide, right now it's probably more like 2.5 to 3 feet, said Parkey.

The lake's vortex is rotating counterclockwise, which may lead some people to think is due to the "Coriolis effect" caused by the Earth's rotation. (This is the same logic some people have used to explain why toilets flush counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.) As the Earth spins, it causes winds in the Northern Hemisphere to bend to the right and winds in the Southern Hemisphere bend to the left. But the effect happens on a much larger scale than toilets, or even tornadoes. It usually comes into play with storms that are about three times larger than the ones that typically generate tornadoes.

The vortex is especially dramatic right now because of the deluge of rain the region has received over the past few weeks, which has caused massive flooding. Lake Texoma's waters reached a record-high elevation a few weeks ago of nearly 646 feet above sea level.

NEXT UP: This is what it's like to be inside a tornado

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Climate change is real, and it's coming.

A new report from the British medical journal The Lancet finds that the effects of climate change will be more severe than we thought: Compared with 1990s levels, as many as four times as many people will be exposed to extreme rains and the number of people who experience drought will most likely triple, the New York Times says of the report's findings.

Of course, all of us will be affected in different ways. How will your country fare?

The folks at Eco Experts put together a great infographic based on data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation (ND-Gain) Index, an annual ranking of which countries are best poised to adapt to a warming world.

While the maps provide a great zoomed-out perspective of what will happen globally as the earth warms, there are a few caveats to keep in mind when checking it out:

• The map is based on rankings, not comprehensive evaluations of each country. In other words, the best-ranked countries are only as great as they seem compared against the countries that aren't performing so well.
• The map looks only at the country-level. All of the state-specific, region-specific, or city-specific data is somewhat lost in this zoomed-out perspective. While the US gets a green light on this map, for example, specific parts of the country are far less equipped to handle climate change, including Miami and New York City.
• Developed countries as a whole have far more infrastructure to adapt to a warming planet. The government can force people in coastal cities such as Miami Beach to move inland; we can also build new airports and transit hubs closer to the center of the country. The map reflects countries' abilities to do just that.

Here's the full graphic:

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We've severely underestimated the health impacts of climate change.

So much so, in fact, that we could be on track to undo the last 50 years of gains in development and global health.

That's all according to a report published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet.

A commission led by researchers at University College London (UCL) estimates that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will dramatically increase and that the number of people exposed to extreme rainfall will be four times higher than it was in the 1990s. Some people's exposure to droughts will triple.

The direct health impacts will come from heat waves, floods, droughts and storms, but the indirect impacts, such as changes in infectious disease patterns, pollution, malnutrition, mass migrations, and conflicts will be just as impactful.

Fast action is needed

The report also states politicians who fail to act to implement changes and tackle those issues is at the core of the problem, and that the technologies and financing methods to address the problem exist.

"In essence, whether we respond to “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century" is no longer a technical or economic question — it is political," the report says.

Commission Co-Chair Professor Hugh Montgomery, director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance, told UCL News that that climate change was a "medical emergency" and that "It thus demands an emergency response, using the technologies available right now."

Montgomery continued the analogy by saying that during a medical emergency, no doctor would just have annual case discussions on it, but that exactly that approach was used in climate change proceedings.

Combatting climate change would improve health...

Global efforts to tackle climate change would present a great opportunity to improve public health around the world.

Improving air quality and burning less fossil fuel could reduce respiratory diseases, the report found, while walking and cycling instead of relying on cars or public transport could cut traffic accidents and reduce obesity, diabetes, stroke, and coronary heart disease rates.

"Our analysis clearly shows that by tackling climate change, we can also benefit health, and tackling climate change in fact represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come," Commission co-Chair Professor Anthony Costello, Director of the UCL Institute for Global Health told UCL News.

...but human nature could stand in the way of global change

But in order to achieve those goals much more needs to be done, whether at international and national levels and also need to include actions from governments and from individual groups and people. "An effective international agreement will be one that supports stronger efforts everywhere and at every level," the report states.

This commission pointed out though, that the low-carbon future a healthy earth would need, is intricately linked to whether human societies can provide it.

"The difficulty, essentially, is ourselves: the tendency of humans to ignore or discount unpleasant facts or difficult choices, the nature of companies and countries to defend their own rather than collective interests and the narrow, short term horizons of most human institutions, which feed into the difficulties of global negotiations," the report states.

SEE ALSO: Protesters just blocked the construction of a revolutionary scientific instrument — again

SEE ALSO: There's a giant hole in this Texas lake and now it's draining like a bathtub

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Ask anyone to name the most polluted city in the world and chances are the immediate response will be Beijing.

In truth, the Chinese capital is only half as polluted as the city in the top spot — Delhi.

In fact, 13 of the top-20 most polluted cities in the world, according a World Health Organization (WHO) report from last year, are in India.

This has led to fears for the health of children living in Asia’s third-largest economy.

The report ranked almost 1600 cities in 91 countries for the quality of their air, which is measured for concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5, i.e. particles smaller than 10 or 2.5 microns. These harmful pollutants cling to the lungs and can cause disease.

In Delhi, the annual average is 153 ug/m3 (micrograms per cubic metre of air), which is six times the WHO’s recommended maximum. At various times of the year, this number spikes to much higher levels.

Here’s the list of the most polluted cities in the world:

SEE ALSO: Take this quiz to figure out what you should be eating on a daily basis

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NOW WATCH: China banned smoking meat on the street because of air pollution, but people do it anyway

So far in June, Alaska has seen 391 wildfires, with 152 of these starting up on the weekend of June 21-22, totaling more than 1.1 million acres of scorched earth, according to the Alaska Division of Forestry (DOF).

Alaska is no stranger to wildfires. The Alaska Division of Air Quality reports that in 2004, the state saw 701 fires which consumed more than 6.5 million acres of land, but they are on track to break that record before long.

Alaska DOF official, Tim Mowry, told NBC News that the fires were caused by a relatively dry spring which left plains vulnerable to ignition via lightning, but what was unusual was the volume and variety of the fires.

"We have almost 300 fires going right now," said Mowry.

Fires actually serve a purpose in nature, as the charred vegetation returns minerals to soil, and makes way for young shoots to surface and provide food for animals like moose, but these fires are above and beyond the course of nature. The concentration and location of the fires make them a particular threat to people and structures.

The Alaska DOF tweeted the following to illustrate just how much these fires have gotten out of control:

Below is a map of wildfires nationwide from the National Interagency Fire Center. Alaska (bottom left) is a clear outlier:

NBC reports that "The state [of Alaska] has sent 2,700 firefighters to combat the blazes, with hundreds of firefighters sometimes battling a single fire. Many fires are so far from populated areas that the state simply monitors them or leaves them alone entirely"

The Washington Post pointed out that these fires are troubling not only in their immediate impact on the landscape, but also in their potential to contribute to global warming:

"A major climate fear is that thawing permafrost will unleash massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air as this plant life decomposes. Intense wildfires can burn not only trees but upper soil layers, which can hasten the thawing of permafrost (and also expose the ground more directly to the sun’s heat, which can also contribute to thawing)."

The National Weather Service in the Alaska region made the following tweet illustrating just how bad this year has already been for wildfires:

So the crisis of wildfires in Alaska seems to be burning on both ends of the candle, with the loss of millions of acres of forest also contributing to the release of carbon and potential warming of the climate.

The problem in Alaska is so widespread that there is little else to do besides hope that the remained er of the year brings rain and relief from the inferno.

SEE ALSO: Devastating photos of California show how bad the drought really is

DON'T MISS: New York is facing its biggest threat ever, and people are still in denial

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NOW WATCH: Incredible Video Of An Explosion At A Warehouse With 10 Tons Of Fireworks Inside

Summer just started but wildfires are already ravaging the dried-out West coast.

Since the beginning of June, nearly 300 fires have burned in Alaska, with a total of 1.1 million acres already destroyed just one month into the fire season. Right now, a fire in the Galena Zone area of Alaska has burned through 100,000 acres.

Alaska isn't alone.

Active wildfires are consuming approximately 31,559 acres in the San Bernardino National Forest in California, 17,787 acres in Nevada, and another 15,401 acres in New Mexico, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.

That's a total of 100 square miles of wildfires currently burning, and that's just three examples.

In a trend that's set to continue for decades, this year's fire season is expected to be a long, difficult, and expensive ordeal, fueled by California's four-year long drought, according to Time Magazine.

Former firefighter Nicky Sundt warns that it's a sign of what's to come in the years ahead as climate change warms temperatures, leads to more droughts, and causes more erratic annual precipitation rates.

"In the 70s and 80s, the fires weren't as big, they weren't as intense and the fire seasons were shorter," Sundt, now the director of climate change science and policy integration for the World Wildlife Fund, said in a video for the Weather Channel. "As the climate has warmed fires have gotten a lot bigger, and they're burning hotter, and their behavior is more erratic and more extreme."

Many experts and government officials agree with him. A 2014 report, written as part of an ongoing project by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law and the Natural Resources Defense Council, warned against the looming danger of wildfires.

"The current scientific consensus is that wildfire risk will increase in many regions of the world as climate change leads to warmer temperatures, more frequent droughts, and changing precipitation patterns," the study said. "Fires are expected to become more frequent and intense, and fire seasons are projected to last longer."

Fire seasons are usually expected to last between June and September. Wildfires typically burn through the west coast and the arid deserts of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, according to this National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) map, based on data from 1999 to 2010.

NIFC data dating back to 1985 showed that the average number of acres burned by wildfires in a 10 year period went up from 3.2 million in 1985 to 1995 to 7.6 million in 2005 to 2014. The number of acres burned in wildfires since 1985 has steadily increased, almost tripling by 2005.

The worst year for wildfires in 30 years came just nine years ago, in 2006, when a total of 9.9 million acres burned across the United States. While the last few years have been less devastating, there's still an extreme upward trend at work:

"I've seen pictures of this season, the 2014 fire season, of people wandering through what used to be their neighborhoods with basically all they escaped with is the clothes on their backs," Sundt said. "This is the really human cost of the changes that we're seeing. It isn't simply burning trees."

Not only is this dangerous for firefighters and civilians alike, Sundt said, it's also costing the government more. The 2014 study noted the increasing costs of preventing and putting out wildfires. The 31,559-acre wildfire burning in San Bernardino Park, for example, has cost about $27 million since it started two weeks ago, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The report estimated that "climate change-induced wildfires will cost the United States between $10 billion and $62.5 billion annually by 2050, with a middle estimate of $22.5 billion."

That's a huge difference from what the United States Forest Service and the Department of the Interior spends now. Time reports that "the Forest Service anticipates spending as much as $1.7 billion" to fight wildfires this year, already anticipating a devastating year from the West-coast drought.

According to the report, that means wildfire season will likely be ten times worse, very soon.

According to data from the NIFC, the federal government spent $1.5 billion fighting wildfires nationwide in 2014. The most the government has spent fighting fires in the past 30 years was $1.9 billion in 2006, coinciding with the worst year for fires.

"When I started fighting fire, I think the forest service spent about 17% of its budget on fire suppression," Sundt said in the video. "Now it's closer to half, or more than half, of the forest service budget. Essentially the US forest service now is a fire suppression agency."

The Forest Service's budget proposal for 2015 attests to their ballooning costs. The proposal states that the costs of fighting fires grew from 13% of the total budget just 10 years ago.

"It is clear that the cost of wildland fire suppression is subsuming the agency's budget and jeopardizing its ability to implement its full mission," the proposal said.

Part of the increase in costs come from "the complexities of fighting fires in modern times," U.S. Forest Service safety manager Kent Hamilton told the Los Angeles Times. Firefighters are increasingly using technology like planes and helicopters. It's more expensive, Hamilton said, but also safer and more effective than sending men out into a burning forest.

As for climate change, experts won't say that it is the sole culprit for the current state of out-of-control wildfires. Some experts told the Los Angeles Times that decades of aggressive fire prevention has lead to now "overcrowded forests that will continue to spark more intense wildfires" in the years to come, coinciding with one of the worst droughts California has seen in 1,200 years.

There are few options to prevent wildfires. For now the main preventive measure, called prescribed fires, involves lighting underbrush on fire during small, controlled sessions to prevent them from becoming fuel during the fire season.

"Firefighters always have an escape route or a fire shelter, they have something that they can rely on when things don’t go right,"Sundt says in the video. "We don’t have that as a society when it comes to climate change. This is our shelter, the planet is our shelter."

SEE ALSO: Fires are spreading like crazy in Alaska and scientists are concerned

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Everything James Cameron does is big.

Eighty-five years after the world's largest ship sank, the famed Hollywood director turned the RMS Titanic's fatal voyage into a movie that set records for longevity at the box office.

"Avatar," meanwhile, needs its own Wikipedia page to list all the records it has set.

Now Cameron is bringing his love of magnitude to solar energy with the Sun Flower, a large solar structure that's actually pleasant to look at. 

Composed of one central panel surrounded by 14 smaller "petals," each Sun Flower is designed to provide an alternative to traditional solar panels that, while functional, strike many people as eyesores.

“The idea was to unify form and function with this life-affirming image that anyone looking at it would instantly get,” explained Cameron, who first launched the Sun Flower grid near Malibu's MUSE School, to Gizmodo's Alissa Walker.  

Sun Flowers, like their yellow-petaled counterparts, track the sun over the course of the day to catch the maximum amount of rays.

This is both an artistic choice and a functional one.

Traditional solar panels sit idly on a hillside, roof, or angled platform. This causes them to miss out on valuable hours of solar energy as the sun moves across the sky, reducing their efficiency.

Total Sun Flower output can reach 260 kilowatt hours per day, or enough to satisfy 75 to 90% of the school's total energy needs, Gizmodo reports.

Cameron says the project will be patented, but released on an open-source platform. 

The designs follow Cameron's earlier work developing a set of retractable solar panels with FEMA. The panels are designed for emergency situations when the power goes out.

His other environmentally-conscious missions have included making the "Avatar" series the first film production entirely powered by the sun, and eliminating the need for helicopters in aerial shots, since drones can accomplish many of the same tasks without the heavy footprint.

Cameron has even launched a contest in New Zealand to find the optimal drone-based camera rigging.

But act fast: The deadline to enter is July 5.

SEE ALSO: Solar energy is on the verge of a 'global boom'

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Nicky Sundt spent his summers from 1976 to 1990 in the West — fighting fires for the United States Forest Service. For six of these years, he parachuted into remote areas to combat fires.

Now he warns that massive wildfires will soon become a huge problem, as climate change warms temperatures, leads to more droughts, and causes more erratic annual precipitation rates.

"In the 70s and 80s, the fires weren't as big, they weren't as intense and the fire seasons were shorter," Sundt, now the director of climate change science and policy integration for the World Wildlife Fund, said in a video for the Weather Channel. "As the climate has warmed fires have gotten a lot bigger, and they're burning hotter, and their behavior is more erratic and more extreme."

We are already seeing extended fire seasons. Since the beginning of June nearly 300 fires have destroyed a total of 1.1 million acres in Alaska, and Alaska isn't alone.

Active wildfires are currently burning through 31,559 acres in the San Bernardino National Forest in California, 17,787 acres in Nevada, and another 15,401 acres in New Mexico, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.

In a trend that's set to continue for decades, this year's fire season is expected to be a long, difficult, and expensive ordeal, fueled by California's four-year long drought, according to Time Magazine.

Sundt claimes that climate change is causing bigger and more frequent fires, and many experts and officials agree with him. A 2014 report, written as part of an ongoing project by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law and the Natural Resources Defense Council, warned against the looming danger of wildfires.

"The current scientific consensus is that wildfire risk will increase in many regions of the world as climate change leads to warmer temperatures, more frequent droughts, and changing precipitation patterns," the study said. "Fires are expected to become more frequent and intense, and fire seasons are projected to last longer."

Fire seasons are usually expected to last between June and September. Wildfires typically burn through the west coast and the arid deserts of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, according to this National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) map, based on data from 1999 to 2010.

NIFC data dating back to 1985 showed that the average number of acres burned by wildfires in a 10 year period went up from 3.2 million in 1985 to 1995 to 7.6 million in 2005 to 2014. The number of acres burned in wildfires since 1985 has steadily increased, almost tripling by 2005.

The worst year for wildfires in 30 years came just nine years ago, in 2006, when a total of 9.9 million acres burned across the United States. While the last few years have been less devastating, there's still an extreme upward trend at work:

"I've seen pictures of this season, the 2014 fire season, of people wandering through what used to be their neighborhoods with basically all they escaped with is the clothes on their backs," Sundt said. "This is the really human cost of the changes that we're seeing. It isn't simply burning trees."

Not only is this dangerous for firefighters and civilians alike, Sundt said, it's also costing the government more. The 2014 study noted the increasing costs of preventing and putting out wildfires. The 31,559-acre wildfire burning in San Bernardino Park, for example, has cost about $27 million since it started two weeks ago, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The report estimated that "climate change-induced wildfires will cost the United States between $10 billion and $62.5 billion annually by 2050, with a middle estimate of $22.5 billion."

That's a huge difference from what the United States Forest Service and the Department of the Interior spends now. Time reports that "the Forest Service anticipates spending as much as $1.7 billion" to fight wildfires this year, already anticipating a devastating year from the West-coast drought.

According to the report, that means wildfire season will likely be ten times worse, very soon.

Data from the NIFC shows the federal government spent $1.5 billion fighting wildfires nationwide in 2014. The most the government has spent fighting fires in the past 30 years was $1.9 billion in 2006, coinciding with the worst year for fires.

"When I started fighting fire, I think the forest service spent about 17% of its budget on fire suppression," Sundt said in the video. "Now it's closer to half, or more than half, of the forest service budget. Essentially the U.S. Forest Service now is a fire suppression agency."

The Forest Service's budget proposal for 2015 attests to their ballooning costs. The proposal states that the costs of fighting fires grew from 13% of the total budget just 10 years ago.

"It is clear that the cost of wildland fire suppression is subsuming the agency's budget and jeopardizing its ability to implement its full mission," the proposal said.

Part of the increase in costs come from "the complexities of fighting fires in modern times," U.S. Forest Service safety manager Kent Hamilton told the Los Angeles Times. Firefighters are increasingly using technology like planes and helicopters. It's more expensive, Hamilton said, but also safer and more effective than sending men out into a burning forest.

As for climate change, experts won't say that it is the sole culprit for the current state of out-of-control wildfires. Some experts told the Los Angeles Times that decades of aggressive fire prevention has lead to now "overcrowded forests that will continue to spark more intense wildfires" in the years to come, coinciding with one of the worst droughts California has seen in 1,200 years.

There are few options to prevent wildfires. For now the main preventive measure, called prescribed fires, involves lighting underbrush on fire during small, controlled sessions to prevent them from becoming fuel during the fire season.

"Firefighters always have an escape route or a fire shelter, they have something that they can rely on when things don't go right,"Sundt says in the video. "We don't have that as a society when it comes to climate change. This is our shelter, the planet is our shelter."

Watch Sundt talk about how climate change is making wildfires worse in the Weather Channel video below.

SEE ALSO: Fires are spreading like crazy in Alaska and scientists are concerned

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's why eggs are so good for you

Unusual circumstances led to the premature death of one of the world's largest species of snakes, the African rock python, on June 20. (Warning: graphic images of the snake's insides below.)

Six days earlier, the snake had swallowed something big, indicated by the giant bulge in its belly.

A biker first came across the snake shortly after the reptile's meal. Word quickly got out, and people were soon flocking to the Eland Game Reserve in South Africa to see the snake slowly digest its prey.

That's when things took a turn for the worse. 

"We think that maybe with so many people viewing it, [that] put it under stress," Jennifer Fuller, who works at the reserve, told the news agency Agence France-Presse. "And when a snake is under stress, it normally regurgitates and brings up its meal so that it can get away."

Normally, regurgitating a meal shouldn't have been a problem for the snake. But this was no ordinary meal. An autopsy of the snake showed that the animal inside was a 30-pound porcupine decked out with thousands of needle-sharp quills.

As Africa's largest species of snake, the African rock python will eat just about anything, including goats (hooves and all) and antelopes, which can reach well over 100 pounds. Porcupines are also a regular dish on the snake's menu, Fuller told AFP.

So despite its quills, the porcupine shouldn't have been the snake's final, fatal meal. A problem arose when the snake got stressed and tried to regurgitate the porcupine.

The quills seem to have punctured the snake's digestive tract, according to CNN. And these puncture wounds could have led to the snake's death, though Fuller and other experts are not certain this is the primary reason the snake died.

"Sadly it did die, which is unusual because it should have been fine," Fuller told AFP.

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