Too Hot, Too Wet, Too On Fire: Climate Changed Summer Bares Its Teeth

 On Sunday and into Monday, a heat wave covering basically the entire eastern half of the US remained in place. National Weather Service heat advisories and extreme heat warnings stretched from the Dakotas to Florida, from Texas to Virginia and Michigan. Part of New England got in the game as well. Tampa, Florida, broke 100 degrees for the first time in its history over the weekend, setting an all-time temperature record for a place where sea breeze and afternoon thunderstorms have long worked to keep triple digit temperatures at bay. The warnings cover hundreds of millions of people, and forecasters warned that high overnight temperatures will not offer much in the way of relief.

A similar scene is playing out in southern Europe and Turkey, where extreme temperatures have spawned a series of wildfires. The Turkish city of Silopi, not far from the borders of Iraq and Syria, recorded an obscene 50.5 degrees Celsius (122.9 degrees Fahrenheit) on Friday, the highest temperature ever seen across Turkey. To the northwest, enormous wildfires have caused the evacuation of thousands of people and have killed at least 17. Other wildfires are burning in Greece, Albania, Spain, and elsewhere. In the western US, the National Interagency Fire Center warned over the weekend that the “landscape is bone-dry and temperatures are high.”

On the other side of the world, relentless rain flooded more than 40 rivers in China, contributing to landslides and killing at least four people. Thousands of people in and around the Beijing area have been forced to evacuate, and images of cars floating down flood roads circulated widely. Officials there said the heavy rain is expected to continue for days.

This is, of course, just How Things Are Now. Summer doesn’t mean what it used to.