Effects of Climate Change Hit Home

More than 400,000 people are still without power in the Washington, D.C. area after one of the region’s most bizarre and damaging storms in history.

I am one of them.

The lights and air conditioning went out at my place around 10 p.m. three days ago, just as a half-dozen little girls were settling down in sleeping bags as part of my 7-year-old daughter’s sleepover birthday party. Cleanup from the storms that toppled 50-foot oak trees and ripped down power lines throughout my neighborhood will keep us without electricity perhaps for a week, we’re told, while the region continues to swelter in near 100-degree heat – about 10 degrees higher than average for this time of year and hovering around historical records.

Those of us in Washington, however, are lucky compared to the people of Colorado, where at least 350 families have lost their homes so far to the state’s worst wildfires on record. About 100,000 acres of some of our nation’s prettiest forests have already gone up in smoke, and the state is still on fire. The effects of climate change, once viewed as some far-off abstraction that could be denied or debated, are beginning to be felt here and now.

According to meteorologists, it is a historic record-setting heat wave in Washington that caused the powerful storm known as a “derecho” that left at least 18 people dead and our nation’s capital battered, bruised and sweltering in the dark.

Out in Colorado, climate change has led to drought, abnormally low snowfall and warmer winters. These events are far reaching: Warmer winters, for example, have resulted in an explosion in white pine bark beetles that kill trees and turn them in to ready-to-burn tinder.

There’s not always a direct link between weather disasters, a warming planet and the heat-trapping carbon emissions that have been rising since the advent of the Industrial Age and our dependence on burning fossil fuels.

But increasingly, there is a connection between climate change and extreme weather. Those who want to deny it – or irresponsibly try to convince the public that they too should deny it – should do some research and some reading before they turn their heads the other way. More