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Aug 5 • 35 tweets • 10 min read
This week, I wrote about what it means and what it tells us—about normalization and about resilience—that we are living through a "summer of disasters" in which extreme weather is becoming mere wallpaper. But I left out an awful lot. A thread (1/x). nytimes.com/2022/08/03/opi…
In China, there have been eight straight weeks of "relentless heat."
We heard a lot about the European heat wave of a few weeks ago, when several thousand people died in the U.K., Spain and Portugal. But very little about the one unfolding now, where 55 temperature records were just set in Germany.
36 were set in France.
In India, when monsoons followed months of heat, road connections were destroyed, stranding 200,000, and more than 2,500 villages and a million hectares of agricultural land were damaged. Forty-four villages are still underwater. insideclimatenews.org/news/02082022/…
In Sydney, two separate monthly rainfall records have been recently broken, making the year-to-date totals the worst since record keeping began in 1859.
The Greenland ice sheet lost 18 billion tons to melt over just three days in July. severe-weather.eu/global-weather…
In New Mexico, a planned “controlled burn” grew out of control and into the largest wildfire in state history, leaving a “burn scar” so denuded of plant life that heavy rains meant deadly flooding. krqe.com/news/new-mexic…
Across the E.U., crop forecasts have been substantially reduced, with an estimated continent-wide effect of 8% or 9%. agricensus.com/Article/EU-spr…
In Italy, where yields of corn and animal fodder have fallen by as much as 45%, the agriculture minister has warned that 30% of the country’s production is at risk. ansa.it/english/news/g…
In Hungary, wheat yields are down 25%. reuters.com/markets/commod…
France is brown by satellite.
"Water restrictions are already in place in almost all of mainland France, and officials have been on patrol in the past few weeks to ensure that residents and businesses comply." nytimes.com/2022/08/05/wor…
In Spain, it is drier than it has been in a thousand years. itv.com/news/2022-07-2…
40 U.S. states are experiencing some form of drought. In late June, a third of the corn crop in Texas was rated in “poor” or “very poor condition,” as was 78% of its oat crop; 60% of its winter wheat was rated “very poor.” gizmodo.com/why-texas-has-…
In Kansas, a heatwave in June killed so many cattle that ranchers sent their thousand-pound carcasses to landfills, where they were flattened and mixed with trash—the usual repositories, where dead cows are turned into pet food and fertilizer, were overwhelmed by the volume.
In Oklahoma, cattle farmers are culling their herds, drought having stripped their lands of food for grazing.
There are not just water restrictions in the west, where “we are 150 feet from 25 million Americans losing access to Colorado River water," but in places like Attleboro, Massachusetts. usatoday.com/story/news/nat…
Yesterday, a new heat wave began on the East Coast.
In Basra, temperatures hit 50C (122F) and the power was cut. independent.co.uk/news/world/ira…
"Running low on water is becoming an odd concern for a city where drizzly weather used to be as much of an emblem as Big Ben. It’s also another indicator that the UK’s climate is changing after thermometers exceeded 40C for the first time in July." bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
"Outside the capital, water restrictions are being put into effect. Southern Water will enforce the first hosepipe ban in southeast England on Friday in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight."
In Japan, temperature records were broken in multiple locations across the country....
...and less than a week later...
In California, flooding followed on the footsteps of wildfire.
In Europe, it was the driest July on record. france24.com/en/europe/2022…
"In Mexico, an extreme drought has seen taps run dry across the country, with nearly two-thirds of all municipalities facing a water shortage that is forcing people in some places to line up for hours for government water deliveries." nytimes.com/2022/08/03/wor…
The U.S. was hit by three "thousand year" rainstorms in a single week in a single region of the country.
In Iran, today, temperatures hit 53C (127F).
In the American heartland…
"China's northwest region was covered in thick brown dust as heavy winds swept through the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai province last week." indiatimes.com/trending/envir…
In Baghdad in May:
"At least six people were killed Friday afternoon after strong wind gusts fueled a dust storm and caused a massive pileup on Interstate 90 in Montana. Over 20 vehicles collided about 45 miles east of Billings." nypost.com/2022/07/16/mon…

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More from @dwallacewells

David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
Aug 5
"25 million more people in Africa are living without electricity today compared with before the pandemic." iea.org/news/global-en…
“The immediate and absolute priority for Africa and the international community is to bring modern and affordable energy to all Africans. This can be achieved this decade through annual investment of $25 billion, the same amount needed to build just one new LNG terminal a year."
“It is morally unacceptable that the ongoing injustice of energy poverty in Africa isn’t being resolved when it is so clearly well within our means to do so.”
Read 4 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
Aug 4
According to @JesseJenkins and REPEAT, the IRA would reduce cumulative American emissions by 6.3 gigatons by 2032—meaning this compromise bill preserves about 80% of the projected emissions cuts from the much larger Build Back Better act. (1/x)
The bill would, according to this analysis, reduce U.S. emissions by 42% compared to 2005 levels. Since "frozen policy" would result in a 26% reduction by 2030, this gets the country a little more than halfway from current policies to the stated goal of 50-52% reduction.
Of course, the U.S. is fudging a bit by using that 2005 baseline, rather than the 1990 one that is more common elsewhere in the world, since U.S. emissions grew almost 20% between 1990 and 2005.
Read 7 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
Jul 27
Why did we even do fracking? A thread on the "shale revolution," which transformed the global energy landscape while losing many billions every single year (and what it might say about the green energy transition we can hope might succeed it). (1/x) nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opi…
"Today, two-thirds of American oil and even more of its gas comes from hydraulic fracturing, which has made the country the world's largest producer of both oil and gas and allowed the U.S. to finally secure what is often described as 'energy independence.'"
"Trump preferred 'energy dominance,' and it hasn’t proved quite as useful as you might think: Because energy prices are set on global markets, domestic production doesn’t necessarily mean Americans pay less at the pump."
Read 19 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
Jul 21
"For most of the pandemic, it has been hard to see other than through the lens of partisanship and policy. But where once we saw morality plays, we may now more clearly see the underlying landscape of a perhaps once-in-a-century pandemic event." (1/x) nytimes.com/2022/07/20/opi…
"Each of the first two years of the pandemic had, for all their brutality and human suffering, an intuitive narrative form. In 2020, the story was, below the death and panic, one of state capacity and behavioral response."
"You could plausibly have blamed local leadership and lack of community vigilance for the level of infection and dying around you, even if those narratives often overstated national differences in pandemic outcomes."
Read 22 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
Jul 21
The pandemic, year three: the country is much better protected against severe disease, with a ten-fold drop in fatality rates, and yet rampant spread continues to produce a serious ongoing burden with no end in sight. A thread about where we are now. (1/x) nytimes.com/2022/07/20/opi…
"It may surprise you to learn, given the pandemic mood of the country and indeed the world, that probably half of all Covid-19 infections have happened this calendar year — and it’s only July."
"The gap between cases and severe outcomes is bigger than it has ever been, but simply in terms of infection, this year towers over each of the previous two."
Read 20 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
Jul 19
“Here, we show models project not only more intense extremes but also events that break previous records by much larger margins. These record-shattering extremes, nearly impossible in the absence of warming, are likely to occur in the coming decades.” (1/3)
“We demonstrate that their probability of occurrence depends on warming rate, rather than global warming level, and is thus pathway-dependent.”
“In high-emission scenarios, week-long heat extremes that break records by three or more standard deviations are two to seven times more probable in 2021–2050 and three to 21 times more probable in 2051–2080, compared to the last three decades.”
Read 4 tweets

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