| It is always comforting to believe disasters are far away, unfolding elsewhere, but increasingly doing so means defining ever smaller increments of space as distant. In this case, New Yorkers drew comfort from the fickle path of a single local storm system. The rains had pulled just a few miles west, on Sunday, sparing New York City and instead pummeling Vermont, where government buildings acquired new moats, Main Streets became canal towns, and ski resorts were flattened by brown by muddy rubble. People were kayaking through Montpelier, and the Winooski River rose to levels not seen since catastrophic flooding in 1927. The governor had to hike his way to an open road. |
| It didn’t even seem that freakish, all things considered — we see so many more climate-fueled disasters now, with global average temperatures breaking records every day recently. There were terrifying floods this week in Himachal Pradesh, in India, where several bridges collapsed and others carrying dozens of cars and trucks seemed about to. Japan experienced the “heaviest rain ever,” and in Spain, floodwaters carried cars backward through traffic at rapid speeds, their drivers simply watching powerless from the roof, where they’d taken refuge when the water began filling the cabin. A monthslong heat wave centered on Texas and Mexico and spread outward as far as Miami, which, as of Monday, had reached heat indexes north of 100 degrees for 30 straight days. In Death Valley in California, this week temperatures may reach or surpass the global record of 130 degrees Fahrenheit, set just in 2021. In El Paso, there hasn’t been a day that didn’t hit 100 for weeks. |
| Off the coast of Florida, the water was nearly as warm as a hot tub — 95 degrees according to one buoy, 97 degrees according to another. It was just last month when life-threatening heat indexes as high as 125 simply parked in Puerto Rico for days on end. According to a coral bleaching forecast published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there is likely to be bleaching across the entire Caribbean this summer. It’s not clear how much will survive. According to some estimates, as much as 50 percent of the world’s oceans will experience marine heat wave conditions this summer; normally the figure is about 10 percent. |
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Floods, Heat, Smoke: The Weather Will Never Be Normal Again
Global warming is accelerating, and it’s starting to show.
By David Wallace-Wells https://t.co/QBhqZoInnW— Stuart Falk (@stufalk) July 13, 2023