Climate Change: Scientists warned, said- Drought, record heat, fire, and now California may face the grip of floods

Californians sweated their 10th day on Friday amid a record-breaking heat wave that helped spark deadly wildfires and pushed energy supplies to the brink of daily power outages. “This is probably the most unusual and extreme weather week in California and that is saying something"The state was on the verge of a blackout for the 10th day in a row," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote on his Western Weather blog. 

"We're going to see these heat waves getting worse," said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability In fact the chances of intense rain are increasing. And so we are concerned about the flooding associated with this remaining stormCalifornia is the latest casualty in a year of sometimes-deadly heat waves that began in Pakistan and India this spring and spread to parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including China, Europe and other regions of the Americas. 

Climate change has also increased droughts

Climate change has also increased droughts, dried up rivers, made wildfires more intense, and vice versa, causing widespread flooding around the world. Bill Patzert, a retired climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said of the inventor of the air conditioner, "If we're going to make an idol for someone in the West, it's going to be a Willis Carrier." "Really large areas of Southern California would essentially not be habitable without air conditioning."

State urged to shut down non-essential electricity

The state averted a repeat of the rolling outage two years ago by sending out text alerts for the first time. In which 27 million phone calls were made urging Californians to "take action" and to turn off non-essential electricity. , The West is in the grip of a massive 23-year drought that has almost dried up reservoirs and threatened water supplies. In turn, there was a sharp decrease in the hydropower on which California depends. 

It is a global poster child for the climate crisis. And this year, this summer, it's really just the Northern Hemisphere being an unusually hot and wildfire-stricken hemisphere. Overpeck said the extreme heat helped spark deadly wildfires on both ends of the state, as the flames on the grass, brush and wood were already "predestined to burn." Firefighters struggle to control major wildfires in Southern California and the Sierra Nevada.