We knew this was coming. The snowless winter and the sloppy spring were inevitably the opening acts for the ruthlessly, brutally hot summer that we’re currently suffering through. Now, as global warming experts mutter “I told you so” under their breath, we’re starting to see the grizzly consequences of all those triple digit temperature days pan out, and it’s not pretty.On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture named over 1,000 counties in 26 states as natural disaster areas due to drought and extreme weather like wildfires. Affecting over half of the entire country, it’s the largest declaration of its kind in American history. The area affected includes all of Florida, Delaware, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah and Nevada as well as the vast majority of the land in California, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. The declaration means that farmers are eligible for low interest loans to help them make it through the summer heat and reduces the penalties for ranchers who let their livestock graze on protected lands.A natural disaster of historic proportions almost seems like overkill in the context of this summer’s weather. According to data from the National Climatic Data Center, 2,284 temperature records were broken and another 998 were tied nationwide in June alone. And this was all during the time of year that the sun is farthest away from the Earth. Partially due to the resultant droughts, over 2.1 million acres of land have burned in wildfires this year, leaving thousands of Americans homeless. Of course, extreme weather creates both extremes. Up north, the polar ice caps are melting at a record rate leading to record-breaking rainfalls and flooding in the United Kingdom.In February, the canals of Amsterdam froze solid for the first time in over a decade.Many experts agree that this is all a daunting manifestation of the effects of global warming. In a bundle of peer-reviewed studies this month, climate scientists were able to link recent instances of extreme weather to man-made climate change and found, for instance, that events like the heat wave that destroyed crop yields in Texas last year are 20 times more likely to have occurred because of global warming rather than natural fluctuations of weather.
“What we’re seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like,” Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer told the Associated Press this week. “It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters.” But don’t call these natural disasters. Based on what we now know, they’re almost certainly manmade.
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