America Could Be in for a Rough Fall
On Labor Day, you could drive from Minnesota’s border with Canada all the way to where Louisiana hits the Gulf of Mexico and not encounter a high under 90 degrees. The heat hasn’t broken: Today, nearly a third of Americans are sweltering under heat alerts.
Such weather is a fitting end to a devastating season, the kind you run out of superlatives for. This summer, climate extremes suddenly seemed to be everywhere, all at once. It was the world’s hottest June since humans started keeping track. July was even worse. Phoenix—which averaged 102 degrees in July—got so hot that people received third-degree burns from touching doorknobs. In Iowa, livestock dropped dead in their pens. The disasters weren’t limited to heat: Canadian wildfires blanketed large swaths of the United States in smoke, flash floods thundered through Vermont, and wildfires reduced parts of Maui to rubble.
Pumpkin spice is already back on the Starbucks menu, but fall isn’t poised that can wreak havoc on global weather patterns, has —and it’s predicted to be a . The southern U.S. will likely be wetter, while forecasts are for a warm winter in the North. These cycles always have some variability, but experts say that the climate crisis has now raised temperatures to the extent that they may also El Niño. This summer has shown starkly how climate change can supercharge the weather. This fall, El Niño could further magnify the problem.
