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New study confirms scientists’ warnings: Climate change has worsened extreme heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires in Australia over the last ten years. 

Climate Progress:

The report “makes clear that these weather events will only get worse in the coming years, and warns that health and emergency professionals as well as citizens must prepare for their impacts now.”

Colorado wildfires: This is what global warming feels like

At Reuters:

“What we’re seeing is a window into what global warming really looks like,” Princeton University’s Michael Oppenheimer said during a telephone press briefing. “It looks like heat, it looks like fires, it looks like this kind of environmental disaster… This provides vivid images of what we can expect to see more of in the future.” []

Fires cost about $1 billion or more a year, and exact a toll on human health, ranging from increased risk of heart, lung and kidney ailments to post-traumatic stress disorder, said Howard Frumkin, a public health expert at the University of Washington.

“Wildfire smoke is like intense air pollution,” Frumkin said. “Pollution levels can reach many times higher than a bad day in Mexico City or Beijing.”

The elderly, the very young and the ill are most vulnerable to the heat that adds to wildfire risk, he said. The strain of fleeing homes and living in communities in the path of a wildfire can trigger ailments like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.

On Twitter, Bill McKibben wrote: “Ever wonder what global warming is going to feel like? In its early stages, it feels like this week. This is it. It’s underway.”

Climate change-linked Colorado wildfires are most destructive in history

The most destructive wildfires in Colorado’s history are still raging in the Rocky Mountain state.

Ten separate fires are burning and threaten the communities of Boulder and Colorado Springs. At least 257 homes have been destroyed, report Elizabeth Weise and Trevor Hughes in USA Today.

Wildfires are also blazing in Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

Climate change is partly to blame, along with rising populations in formerly unsettled areas. Bark beetle infestations, spreading because of warmer winters, are leaving acres of tinder-dry dead forest.

This is an unequivocal example of the extreme danger global warming is bringing to our cities and towns.

Update: A new map released by NASA shows the massive scale of the wildfires, blazing across the US west and Mexico.

Update 2: Another map. This one, from June 23, shows severe drought conditions across the US West. Reports show this part of the country will be the worst hit by global warming impacts.