Extreme heat is becoming the “new normal” for many areas of the world. The summer of 2023, for example, has seen some of the hottest days in modern history. Extreme heat is now a regular headline: How Extreme Heat Affects Workers and the Economy (New York Times) The heat index reached 152 degrees in the Middle East — nearly at the limit for human survival…
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Shuang-Ye Wu, University of Dayton (from The Conversation) The summer of 2022 started with a historic flood in Montana, brought on by heavy rain and melting snow, that tore up roads and caused large areas of Yellowstone National Park to be evacuated. It ended with a record-breaking heat wave in California and much of the West that pushed the power grid to the breaking point,…
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Mathew Barlow, UMass Lowell (from The Conservation) Powerful storm systems triggered flash flooding across the U.S. in late July 2022, killing at least 25 people in eastern Kentucky as floodwater engulfed homes and set off mudslides. Record rainfall also inundated St. Louis neighborhoods, and another deluge in Nevada flooded the Las Vegas strip. The impact of climate change on extreme water-related events like this is…
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Climate change is impacting agriculture around the world. The greater frequency of weather extremes including heatwaves, drought, and it’s opposite, torrential rainfall and flooding (and their consequences) are impacting crop yields and sometimes destroying harvests. The world’s population is growing; how do we feed more people when corporate agricultural practices and a changing climate are impacting the amount of food being grown and produced? One…
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“India has witnessed extraordinary spikes in temperatures. This year [2022], though, the heat is unrelenting across a vast swath of the country, and it’s raising an urgent question: Is it even possible to protect people for a future of such extreme heat?” Read the entire article — Sengupta, Somini (2022, May 3). An Extraordinary Heat Wave Exposes the Limits of Protecting People. New York Times….
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Mark J. Lara, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (from The Conversation) Across the Arctic, strange things are happening to the landscape. Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, leaving the landscape wavy where it once was flat, and in some locations creating vast fields of large, sunken polygons. It’s evidence that…
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