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PHOTOGRAPH BY VALENTIN BIANCHI, AP IMAGES
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By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
Shocked but not surprised. That’s the reaction I suspect many people have had—at least people who take an interest in climate change—to the catastrophic weather events this summer.
No one who has been listening to climate scientists over the past 30 years could be surprised that temperature records would fall in western North America—every year now, they fall somewhere—but it was shocking to see some of them shattered, to have a town in Canada record 121 degrees Fahrenheit and then burn. No one should be surprised either by the idea that rain is falling harder in a warmer world, but it was still shocking to learn that flash floods had killed more than 180 people in Belgium (pictured above) and in western Germany, including 110 along the Ahr River in Germany. Twelve of those victims were people with disabilities who drowned in their group home.
Climate change fuels extreme rains and floods in two ways, my colleague Sarah Gibbens reminded us this week. First, warmer air holds more water vapor and so can dump more rain. Second, the poles are warming faster than the tropics, reducing the temperature differential that powers the jet stream—and thus causing weather systems, whether the high pressure that brings summer heat or the low pressure that brings rain, to stall in one place for days or weeks. Scientists haven’t had time yet to calculate how much climate change increased the odds of the European floods. But it would be surprising indeed if it hadn’t played a role.
The floods may increase political support for the European Union’s ambitious new plan, announced the day before the waters rose, to reduce greenhouse emissions by 55 percent by 2030. In the U.S., extreme weather has made climate change seem like a growing problem to nearly half the respondents to a recent poll done by National Geographic and Morning Consult (more on that below). The politics of the issue have changed dramatically since the election of President Joe Biden. But how much meaningful action will result is an open question.
“A funny thing happened on the way to decarbonization,” Joel Bourne writes for Nat Geo this week: The U.S. is still investing in fossil fuels as if the imperative for getting off them weren’t immediate, as even the formerly fossil-friendly International Energy Agency has said. The Biden administration has approved a new Conoco oil project on Alaska’s North Slope that will produce an estimated 600 million barrels of oil over the next 30 years. It has supported the expansion of liquefied natural gas exports. And it has dropped sanctions against a new pipeline from Russia to Germany that will increase the latter’s dependence on natural gas. (Pictured below, oil wells and storage tanks north of Bakersfield, California.)
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