"Human-caused climate change has made the world warmer than it used to be, and the consequences have started to show."
"As Hurricane Laura pounds the U.S. Gulf Coast with nearly 150 mile-per-hour winds, causing water levels to rise almost 10 feet above normal, wildfires in California are still raging across more than a million acres, the result of a heatwave that spiked as high as 130° Fahrenheit (54.4° Celsius)—possibly the hottest temperature ever sustained on Earth. In the middle of the country, an inland hurricane flattened a large part of Iowa and darkened Chicago homes. And a tropical storm left thousands in New York without electricity for a week or more.
That was just some of the extreme weather the U.S. suffered this month.
Scientists hesitate to blame any particular storm solely on climate change. But the extreme weather conditions now testing the country, one disaster overlapping with the next, are exactly what they’ve long warned us to expect in a warming world. “As all of these things become more likely, it's more likely we're going to have these coincidences where we have all kinds of weather events that are extreme occurring at once,” said Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University.
At times like this, he said, “it feels like the climate has it in for us.”"
David R Baker, Eric Roston, and Brian Eckhouse report for Bloomberg August 27, 2020.
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