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The official first day of summer has not even arrived and already the country is overheated, waterlogged, and suffering from catastrophic wildfires. Extreme weather is proving, once again, that overlapping climate disasters are now becoming more frequent and disrupting Americans’ lives.
Just this week, Montana and Wyoming have suffered massive flooding that has destroyed bridges, swept away homes, and forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 visitors from Yellowstone National Park. Half a million households in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley lost power following violent thunderstorms. A record-setting heat wave pushed temperatures into the triple digits from Nebraska to South Carolina, leaving more than 100 million Americans under heat warnings and killing at least 2,000 cattle in Kansas.
Experts say these types of simultaneously occurring disasters reveal the extent to which America remains unprepared for the worsening impacts of climate change. “Summer has become the danger season where you see these kinds of events happening earlier, more frequently, and co-occurring,” said Rachel Licker, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It just shows you how vulnerable our infrastructure is and that this is just going to get increasingly problematic.”
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There’s no good news for the foreseeable future, for the next few decades. Fundamentally addressing climate change is the ultimate answer. If we don’t, then what we’re really seeing is just preamble to an even more extreme and catastrophic set of conditions.”
