Impacts Of Climate Change Being Felt Across America Right Now

The massive "heat dome" that has currently sent temperatures skyrocketing in the Pacific Northwest is a prime example of the kinds of extreme weather events we can expect to see more of as climate change worsens. The increase in "extremes" is what scientists have been warning us about for decades now, and there is little doubt that events like this will become more and more frequent if we don't get a handle on this problem soon. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The Pacific Northwest right now is under what they're calling a heat dome. We're seeing triple digit temperatures in areas of the Pacific Northwest that have never seen temperatures in recorded history, hitting this high. And yes, according to the scientists out there, the people who know what's taking place, this is 100% what we can expect to see more of as climate change continues to get worse. This is it folks. This is climate change showing us its ugly face here in the United States. And it's done it plenty of times in the past. Don't get me wrong. But here it is, again, it's not just knocking on our door. It's burst into our home at this point, showing us I am here, this is what I can do. What are you going to do about it? And just as a point of order here, I've seen several, right-wingers on social media sites try to point out the fact that, oh, we can't use extreme cold temperatures to disprove climate change. So you can't use extreme temperatures to prove climate change.

Now you see that's where you're actually wrong. And the scientists actually, you know, explain this much better than I can, but I'm going to try to paraphrase them here. What we're witnessing are new extremes. Right. We're not saying that the temperature in Seattle is going to stay 108 degrees, which is what it hit earlier this week, forever. We're not saying that. What we're saying is that the extremes are going to continue to get more extreme. That's why we are able to use this data right now, which is a temporary, you know, timeframe and say that, yes, this is climate change. Just like winter storms, winter storms get worse under climate change, heat waves get worse under climate change. And Dr. Michael Mann, along with Susan joy Hassell, wrote for the New York Times, and this is what they had to say. Heat waves now occur three times as often as they did in the 1960s. On average, at least six times a year in the United States in the 2010s. Record-breaking hot months are occurring five times more often than would be expected without global warming.

And heat waves have become larger, affecting 25% more land area in the Northern hemisphere than they did in 1980, including ocean areas, heat waves grew 50%. These changes matter because extreme heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather in the United States causing more deaths on average than hurricanes and floods combined over the past 30 years. Recent research projects, the heat stress will triple in the Pacific Northwest by 2100 unless aggression, aggressive action, is taken to reduce heat trapping greenhouse gas emissions. We're already seeing it, folks. We're seeing the heat waves. We're seeing the extreme winter storms. We're seeing increasingly active hurricane seasons, droughts, floods, all of this taking place throughout the United States over the years and this is climate change. We still have time. We can prevent these things from getting worse and if we put all of our efforts towards it, perhaps we can even reverse them, move the clock back. But that clock is ticking right now and so far, we're not making a ton of progress.