The Crunch: A Deep Dive into Wildfires, AI-Loving Executives, and Trump’s Piles of Cash

Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!

We have charts about it in this week’s newsletter more frequent heat wavesAmerica extraordinary exceptionalism And Weather comparisons across the cities.

But first…a deep dive into the Australian bushfires

Months before the start of the bushfire season, hundreds of thousands of hectares of land and hundreds of homes have already burned across the state of Victoria. We took a look at the devastating fires that broke out in the first week of January:

Click through to see the animated version of this wind/temperature map (based on one of our favorite visualizations), as well as additional maps and photos showing the spread of the fire and the extent of the devastation.

While we’re talking about fires, our colleagues in the UK have a series of maps showing how wildfires are destroying more and more of the world’s forests (thanks to climate change). The ABC also had an interesting article about the different data sources they deal with…