Disastrous environmental events are converging like never before. This has been the West’s summer of extremes. In every direction, the consequences of climate change across the region have become more tangible, immediate, inescapable. Greenhouse-gas pollution from cars, power plants, deforestation … have increased temperature as much as 2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, in the Southwest U.S.! Combined with a period of lower precipitation (a natural cycle that so far scientists have not definitively linked to the changing climate), that excess heat caused a drought across the Southwest since 2000 that has been the most severe since the 1500s.” Fueled in turn by the heat and drought, forest fires are now annually burning twice as much acreage as the “natural” level recorded through history.
At www.theatlantic.com
