US expert says extreme weather events are ‘new norm’

The director of the US Crisis Management Agency (FEMA) warned Sunday that the United States faces a “new standard” as devastating weather events spread, at a time when the country is in shock from Friday’s devastation caused by the weather crisis. A series of hurricanes that hit several states.

“This is going to be our new standard,” Diane Cresswell told CNN. “The effects we are seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation,” he added.

The FEMA director highlighted the “incredibly unusual” and “historic” dimension of these hurricanes at this time of year.

December is usually quite free from this kind of phenomenon in the United States.

He noted that “even the gravity and the amount of time they have traveled on land is unprecedented.”

“We’re seeing more severe storms and more severe weather, whether it’s hurricanes, tornadoes or wildfires,” Cresswell told ABC.

However, some experts are calling for caution, as tornadoes remain a relatively inexplicable phenomenon.

“Sadly, hurricanes are one such extreme event in which we cannot attribute specific events (or even long-term trends) to climate change,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, commented on Twitter.

“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but some caution is warranted,” he added.

Daniel Swain, a climate researcher at UCLA, explained in a tweet that the effects of climate change on certain meteorological phenomena such as hurricanes are “not well established at the moment.”

“But there is a body of research … that indicates that global warming may increase risks in many parts of the world,” he said.

And meteorological phenomena are “more severe” with rising temperatures, President Joe Biden confirmed on Saturday after denouncing dozens of victims who caused Friday night “one of the worst series of hurricanes in the history” of the United States.

“Everything is more severe when the weather warms,” ​​the president said, but he did not prove a direct causal relationship between climate change and the disaster that killed at least 94 people, the majority of them in Kentucky.

rle / hr / dg / dga