Twelve straight nights of raging storms have produced 365 reported tornadoes across 22 states. Where the total for May averages 276, this year has seen that number almost doubled … and May isn’t over yet. CNN had a word for this. They called it “unprecedented.”
Those storms have brought record floods to Oklahoma and Texas, but those aren’t the first states to suffer floods this year. The Midwest, from Minnesota to Missouri, has spent much of the spring fighting other record floods after parts of the Mississippi Basin received more than 200% of the normal levels of rain and snow and a “bomb cyclone” exploded like a cold hurricane over the center of the nation. Some of those towns that went under back in March or April are still underwater today. Time had a word for it. They said it was “unprecedented.”
The fire season that began last spring in California had already earned an “unprecedented” from The New York Times by August after the normal seasons of rain and drought in the West seemed almost flipped … but the 600,000 acres that had been burned by summer was far from the end. Record-setting fires continued through the fall and into the start of winter.
While those fires were burning in the west, the opposite coast suffered a hurricane season in which Hurricane Florence dumped unprecedented rainfall. And Hurricane Michael plowed into the Florida panhandle with unprecedented strength, destroying homes and doing billions of dollars of damage to a military base.
That’s just one year. It’s not counting the massive damage of the 2017 hurricane season. Or all the “unprecedented” storms, floods, and fires that year delivered. Why does it seem that every single day brings a forecast with the word “record” or “unprecedented?” Because it really is unorcedented.
Because this is the climate crisis. It’s not something that will happen at some unspecified time in the future. It’s not something that will happen to unfortunate people somewhere far away. The climate crisis is here and now. It’s driving tornadoes through American towns. Drowning American farms under floods. Battering American coasts with storms. And destroying the homes, businesses, and lives of Americans across the country.
The warming world
The sea cuts into the Yupik Eskimo village of Quinhagak on the Yukon Delta in Alaska
Tribal elder Walter Nelson visits a mass grave that is all that remains after the cemetery at Napakiak was washed away.
With melting permafrost and the disappearance of the sea ice that previously protected against spring storms, 2019 could be the last year for the villages of Quinhagak and Napakiak as the waves destroy roads, homes, and everything else. With an average temperature increase in Alaska of 4.7 degrees, these villages can no longer hold out against the changes of the climate crisis. Quinhagak and Napakiak are just two of more than 200 native villages critically threatened by erosion and flooding as the ice retreats and the permafrost … isn’t.
Tornadoes
An overturned truck on the ruins of a home in Jefferson City, Missouri, in May
Drone image of tornado destruction in Dayton, Ohio, in May
Perri Hovey writes on the wooden cross for tornado victim Taylor Thornton, one of 23 who died in Opelika, Alabama
The tornadoes that swept through southern Missouri on May 23 missed the state capitol building by a block, but not every state office or state worker was so lucky. Two people died in Missouri that night, but across the country at least 38 people are dead and thousands are homeless after an assault of tornadoes that is still ongoing.
Floods
Hamburg, Iowa, is just one of dozens of Midwest towns flooded after a "bomb cyclone" inundated rivers and streams.
Not another image of Hamburg. This flooded town is Craig, Missouri, in March
Floods grip the evacuated town of Guerneville, California, in February
Inundated by rushing brown water, the image above might not look too different from those drowned towns in the Midwest. But Guerneville, California, got an early start on the year’s floods when an “atmospheric river” bringing record rains and mudslides washed across the area.
Fire
A wall at an elementary school is covered with pictures of pets missing after California fires in February
Three months after the fire, a memorial of wooden crosses line the side of Skyway near Paradise, California.
If you have never watched the footage of these people trying to escape last year’s California wildfires, here’s a warning: This is very, very intense footage and not easy to watch. Image what it would have been like to live through it.
Hurricane
Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida following Hurricane Michael in October
Volunteers rescue residents of New Bern, North Carolina, from homes flooded by Hurricane Florence in September
The storm that slammed into the Florida panhandle in November was the most powerful storm ever to hit land so far north. The one that hit the East Coast two months earlier was the wettest storm ever to strike the region. Both of them followed behind the “hyperactive” storm season of 2017 that brought devastation to Puerto Rico and generated almost $300 billion in property damage across the nation.
How can all of this have happened in such a short time?
The weather is extraordinary because the climate is extraordinary. We are living in a world with conditions that no human being has experienced in the entire history of the species. In fact, the last time carbon dioxide levels were this high, there were no mammoths or mastodons or saber-toothed Smilodons … not because it was too warm, but because they hadn’t evolved yet.
The climate crisis is stealing lives, destroying homes, crushing businesses, and driving farmers off their land right here, in the United States. There is no “preventing” the climate crisis: It’s already begun, but it can be addressed. It can be made less deadly and destructive by mitigating greenhouse gases and the effect they’re already having on our nation and our world.
