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From the Vault: It's Hot. It's Flooding. Is This the New Normal?

Slate News

Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.56K Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2022

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode originally aired in July 2021.


Last year, North Americans saw record-breaking heat, droughts, wildfires, and floods. The science is clear: we are living through the effects of climate change. Now scientists are trying to answer: is this the new normal?


Guest: Daniel Swain, climate scientist at UCLA 


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

It's hot. Too hot in many places across the planet.

0:03.6

With extreme heat comes extreme natural disasters.

0:07.3

In the U.S. alone, this year is poised to be the sixth warmest on record.

0:11.9

States in the south, such as Texas, are experiencing unusually high temperatures this early in the year.

0:19.4

In the triple-digit range,

0:21.8

south central Montana is currently experiencing unprecedented levels of flooding,

0:27.7

so much so that they had to shut down Yellowstone National Park.

0:31.9

And earlier this month, Fort Wayne, Indiana was hit with a severe storm

0:36.8

that had wind speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour,

0:40.3

decimating the city and leaving over 50,000 people without power.

0:45.5

So with Summer right around the corner, we thought it was the right time to revisit an episode

0:50.0

we did almost exactly one year ago.

0:53.1

I'm Cinerian Glinton in for Lizzie O'Leary,

0:55.8

and this is What Next, TBD.

1:03.1

Last week, I was sitting on my in-laws porch in coastal Georgia,

1:07.0

watching the rain and wind and lightning pummel the beach in front of us.

1:12.0

It was part of Tropical Storm Elsa, and as we were watching it, my husband and I started talking

1:17.0

about the strength of this storm, about the likelihood of more, about the heat that was roasting

1:22.6

the Pacific Northwest and Colorado and California.

1:26.5

And I wanted to know whether all these extreme events were caused by climate change.

1:32.7

It's a natural question, but it's also what climate scientists, like Daniel Swain, think, is the wrong one.

1:39.8

My reaction to the question of did climate change cause this, say, extreme weather event of some kind in some specific place is actually frustration with the way the question is being framed.

...

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