Much of the country spent the summer teetering on the edge of disaster and uncertainty, as we navigated a tightrope between bad news and could-be-worse news. Hurricane Ida pummeled New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in late August—making landfall on the same day as Katrina did 16 years ago. Two dozen people died, but the levees held, and the storm was not as catastrophic as feared. Then Ida took a swerve to the Northeast and brought such torrential rainfall and epic flooding—a record-setting 3.15 inches in one hour in New York’s Central Park—that more than 50 people drowned in their cars on New Jersey roads and in basement apartments across New York City.
Add to that the raging California wildfires and the extraordinary heat dome over the Pacific Northwest, which baked about 100 people in their own homes, and we can see that the calamities brought about by the climate crisis are no longer rare. According to an article in TheWashington Post in early September, one in three Americans live in a county “hit by a weather disaster in the last three months.” A report just released by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization leaves no doubt that extreme weather has increased around the globe over the last 50 years—with the silver lining that advanced warning systems have led to fewer deaths than in the past (but property and economic damage are far more severe).
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