On July 27, Northern News Now reported that Duluth had a heat index of 101 degrees, with Eveleth hitting 104 and Two Harbors reaching 106. Three days earlier, the lead story on NNN was about Minnesota having another air-quality alert due to the Canadian wildfires. It was also the 27th day that Duluth had been under an air-quality alert since May.

And then three days before that, on July 21, Wisconsin Public Radio ran a story about the Great Lakes region warming up about 3 degrees and precipitation increasing by 15%. A study by the Environmental Law and Policy Center showed that summer water temperatures on Lake Superior warmed up by 4.8 degrees between 1979 and 2023. Also, the region would likely see more extreme weather patterns, including 30 to 60 days of temperatures over 90 degrees.

Also, on July 21, there was an article in the New York Times headlined “Climate change is making fire weather worse for world’s forests.” According to a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the area of forests lost to fire in 2023 and 2024 was at least two times greater than the annual average of the previous two decades. It reported that climate change is making severe fire weather more common around the world. …

These Summer DaysRead more

In the introduction to their book The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, the authors wrote, “The world is on fire, from the Amazon to California, from Australia to the Siberian Arctic. The hour is late, and the moment of consequence, so long delayed, is now upon us. Do we watch the world burn, or do we choose to do what is necessary to achieve a different future? Who we understand ourselves to be determines the choice we will make. That choice determines what will become of us. The choice is both simple and complex, but above all it is urgent.”

Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac talk about the various climate events that have contributed to a more fragile planet over the past fifty years. The populations of mammals, fish, reptiles and birds have declined by 60%. Half of the world’s coral reefs have disappeared. Also, the Arctic summer sea ice is rapidly shrinking.

Over the past several months, we’ve been reading about the extensive wildfires in California and Canada as well as the ever rising temperatures in Phoenix and other parts of the Southwest. And now, we’re watching wildfires in Oklahoma, historic heat records in the central region of the United States, new hottest night records in Indonesia and Thailand, and a year’s worth of rain fell in 8 hours in Valencia, Spain. …

These Extraordinary DaysRead more