![]() Photograph: Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images Wildfires burn over the town of Lahaina on 8 August 2023. More than 1,000 people are still missing following the blaze, which razed much of the town, with search teams combing through the rubble often only finding bones or fragments of bodies. The disaster, the deadliest of its kind in at least a century, claimed at least 115 lives when flames tore through Lahaina, a historic town that was formerly located in a wetland, on 8 August. “I’ve been to too many disaster areas,” the US president muttered shortly before departing for Hawaii, where he toured the devastation wrought by fires upon the island of Maui. The jarring, sometimes surreal, nature of the summer has vexed Joe Biden, who has been keen to tout an upbeat election message of surging clean energy investment, new jobs for former fossil fuel workers and an electric vehicle in every driveway. Parts of the desert turned into rapids, with Death Valley pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a day, just a month after tourists, some jokingly wearing fur coats, posed by a giant thermometer at the national park that read 128F (53C), a near-world record temperature. Photograph: Mario Tama/GettyĬalifornia, typically the scene of drought and ever-larger wildfires, faced the unusual threat of a tropical storm last week, with Hilary, the first such storm to ravage the state in decades, causing record rainfall in Los Angeles, felling trees and triggering mudslides. Inset: Noaa data shows heavy rain across the west from the storm. Mud and flooding clog the streets of Cathedral City, California, on 21 August 2023, after Tropical Storm Hilary inundated the area. ![]() Meanwhile, Vermont, seen as a safe, temperate haven from such disasters, saw its state capital, Montpelier, resemble a giant swimming pool after disastrous flooding in July. In Juneau, Alaska, melting glaciers caused a torrent of water to wash buildings away. Even the state’s saguaro cacti, a symbol of the US west, started to collapse in the extreme heat. In Arizona, it got so hot that the state’s specialist burns center was at full capacity from people who had burned themselves just by falling on to the scorching ground. Visibility shrank, asthmatics wheezed and people reached for masks not worn since the height of the Covid pandemic.Ī freakish tone for the summer was set. In June, smoke from record wildfires in Canada – an area the size of Greece has so far burned in its vast forests – billowed south, smothering New York and Washington DC in an ochre haze that brought with it the worst air quality in the world. ![]() Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Imagesīut while extreme conditions could be expected, the events of this summer have still at times seemed otherworldly. “It’s like an overloaded camel with an extra bale of hay and then some additional weight on top,” she said.įlooding in downtown Montpelier, Vermont, on 11 July 2023. Hayhoe said high temperatures, El Niño and natural variability have all combined to create the sort of conditions not seen before by humans. “We have seen an unusual summer and these ‘unusual’ summers will become more and more frequent in the future,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at the Nature Conservancy. The record temperatures are being driven not only by global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels but also by the onset of El Niño, a periodic climate event that heats up part of the Pacific Ocean, causing temperatures to spike around the world. Records are not just being broken, they are being shattered by wide margins.” “We know most of this is happening because of long-term warming of the climate system so it’s not surprising, sadly, but you still get shocked by these extremes. “It’s been a shocking summer,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. In Miami, which had a record 46 days in a row with a heat index above 100F (37C), there was no respite even in the nearby ocean, with a raging marine heatwave turning the seawater to a temperature more normally seen in hot tubs, raising fears that Florida’s coral reef will be turned to mush. Inset: Noaa data shows 90 and 100F maximum heat in the US on the same day. A firefighter lifts a woman suffering from heat exhaustion on to a stretcher in Eagle Pass, Texas on 26 June 2023.
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