In recent years, hardly a day has gone by during the summer season without warnings of record-breaking heat, wildfire smoke, flash floods and disasters, or fast-escalating hurricanes. Air quality has declined, traditions have been suspended, and what has historically been a season of joy for millions of people has turned in a season of anxiety.
Extreme Summer: How climate change turned a season of joy into a season of disaster
The reason, in many cases: Climate change.
“Extreme Summer,” a series of stories that are publishing this summer by The Washington Post, will explore how this season is being fundamentally changing in the United States and abroad. Although temperatures are warming faster during other seasons in many places, it’s summer when the impact is often felt most strongly.
As temperatures rise, industries fight heat safeguards for workers
While places like California and Washington have adopted workplace rules to address heat exposure, many other states’ attempts to mandate these protections have been blocked or weakened following opposition from industry groups representing agriculture, construction and other business interests. Read the story
‘They are not slowing down’: The rise of billion-dollar disasters
The summer has become prone to some of the most costly annual disasters in the United States, with hurricanes, torrential rainstorms, droughts and wildfires. One battered N.C. community illustrates how summer, fueled in part by climate change, is proving an especially perilous and costly season. Read the story.
Yellowstone is this town’s golden ticket. Climate change risks that.
Extreme weather from climate change is putting the pressure on business owners in gateway towns around national parks that are increasingly vulnerable to wildfires, drought, rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, and more intense storms. Read the story.
As Europe’s heat wave melts roads, Tour de France races into an uncertain future
The Tour de France has long been a point of pride for the French, highlighting some of their most stunning landscapes. And yet it has also showcased some of the most alarming impacts of climate change, taking cyclists through farmland parched by drought, past melting glaciers, in proximity to raging wildfires and in direct collision with a historic heat wave that saw temperatures approach 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Read the story.
Summer in America is becoming hotter, longer and more dangerous
Climate change is altering the summer months — turning a time of joy into stretches of extreme heat, dangerously polluted air, anxiety, and lost traditions. Read the story.