A flooded New York City subway system; cars submerged to their windshields on the East Side of Manhattan... Before Hurricane Sandy last fall, we needed dystopian fiction writers to conjure these images. Now, global warming is taking over.
Too many factors influence any individual weather event to attribute it directly to human-made climate change. Nevertheless, the trends are mounting. Repeat years of record-breaking temperatures, a spike in severe storms, and droughts in the American southwest and Great Plains that grow ever closer to conditions that produced massive dust clouds in the 1930s – all this tells us that a climate crisis has arrived in the natural world.
