Summer starts with extreme weather, from record heat to severe flooding
In the last week, extreme weather has wreaked havoc in many parts of the U.S. and around the world. The events have brought climate change's threat into focus.
Summer is quickly becoming the season of grim extremes. In the last week alone, record heat across the Northeast shuttered schools and slowed some trains to a crawl, flooding in the Midwest caused a bridge to collapse and inundated towns across three states, and a tropical storm forced a disaster declaration for 51 Texas counties.
The specter of climate change lurks behind many of the recent events.
“Last year was, of course, the warmest year on record by a considerable margin. This year, to date, is now, again, the warmest on record for this point in June,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said at a briefing Monday.
It takes time for climate scientists to understand and calculate the role of global warming in individual weather events, but science shows clearly that the chances of temperature extremes are rising as the world warms. And because a warmer atmosphere can hold — and deliver — more moisture, the risk of intense downpours is likelier, too.
Because of that, the thumbprint of climate change is more recognizable in the summertime, Swain said.
Rating: 5