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This is Fresh Air.

I'm Terry Gross.

Today marks the end of summer, another summer of extreme weather.

This one ended with the catastrophic hurricane Fionna.

August brought extreme rain and flooding in eastern Kentucky and St. Louis.

Flooding caused a drinking water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi.

In many places, rainfall amounts that previously would have taken days poured down in a matter of hours.

Parts of the West have been experiencing the opposite extreme, drought, and massive fires.

The principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists says,

some scientists have started to refer to the warm season as danger season.

My guest Brady Dennis has been writing about the dangers we're already facing from climate change,

and ones we're likely to face in the near future.

He's a national environmental reporter for the Washington Post,

and was part of a team of reporters at the post that won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2020

for quote, a groundbreaking series that showed with scientific clarity

the dire effects of extreme temperatures on the planet.

Brady Dennis, welcome to Fresh Air.

I want to start by just talking about extreme rain.

And let's use, you know, the storm that became a hurricane Fionna,

which dumped around 30 inches of rain in parts of Puerto Rico.

...