Summer starts with extreme weather, from record heat to severe flooding

Original Article:

Source: Link

The Summary In the last week alone, extreme weather has wreaked havoc in many parts of the U.S. and around the world. Climate change makes temperature extremes and intense downpours like those seen recently more likely. This year so far is the warmest on record, and ocean temperatures have set new records for more than 15 months. Summer is quickly becoming the season of grim extremes. In the last week alone, record June 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 the University of California, Los Angeles, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in 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 more likely, too. Because of that, the thumbprint of climate change is more recognizable in the summertime, Swain said. “It’s not surprising we’re seeing another round of record-breaking heat and record-breaking precipitation. It is exhausting, but I think it’s really important not to put it out of sight and out of mind,” he said. “It usually raises its ugly head in the summer prominently because, of course, the summer in the Northern Hemisphere is the time of year when most people on Earth experience the hottest conditions.” In Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota over the weekend, extreme rainfall sent floodwaters roaring through communities in at least 80 counties and left the town of Spencer, Iowa — population 11,000 — temporarily cut off from the rest of the state. Nearly 2,000 properties, including hundreds of homes, were damaged in Iowa alone.