Fire, Flood, Smoke, Cyclones: The Climate Crisis Is Everywhere

With the deadly coronavirus pandemic raging into its seventh month, communities across the country now find themselves unable to escape the rapidly worsening effects of global climate change .

In the last two weeks, wildfires fueled by extreme heat and drought have consumed a combined 5 million acres in California, Oregon and Washington, killing at least 33 people and displacing tens of thousands. Residents in cities coast to coast, from San Francisco to Chicago to New York City, found themselves under hazy orange skies this week as smoke from the West Coast blazes stretched for thousands of miles.

Off the Atlantic coast, a record-tying five tropical cyclones swirled simultaneously on Tuesday the latest in what federal forecasters say is an extremely active hurricane season. One of those systems, Hurricane Sally, made landfall in Alabama early Wednesday as a slow-moving Category 2 storm that is dumping as much as 20 inches of rain on parts of the Florida panhandle and causing widespread flooding.

#GOESEast view of Hurricanes Sally and Paulette, as well as the smoke from the western US fires being transported across the country by the upper level winds. pic.twitter.com/q7soyDef1q

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#GOESEast view of Hurricanes Sally and Paulette, as well as the smoke from the western US fires being transported across the country by the upper level winds. pic.twitter.com/q7soyDef1q
NWS Eastern Region (@NWSEastern) September 14, 2020

All this comes before what is typically peak wildfire season in the West and with 2 months left in the official Atlantic hurricane season.

Climate and ecological breakdown are impossible to ignore at this point, Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and author, told HuffPost. The reason its seemed so bad over the last few weeks is because its getting that bad. And the thing thats really terrifying to me is that its going to keep getting worse.

The simultaneous disasters highlight the many faces of the growing crisis, Kalmus added.

They have also exposed the stark divide between President Donald Trumps and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Bidens views on climate and science in general.

During a visit Monday to fire-scorched California, Trump once again dismissed the role climate change plays in extreme wildfires. It will start getting cooler. You just watch, Trump said, tossing aside decades of climate science.

He painted the infernos as simply the result of the states poor forest management, even though the federal government controls 57% of Californias 33 million forested acres, compared with just 3% under state management. And many of the recent blazes in California burned shrublands and grasslands , not forest.

You can knock this down to nothing, Trump said of the fires, ignoring the complexity of the problem and painting fire as an evil that must be eradicated. In fact, fire is a natural and critical part of many forest ecosystems. Todays catastrophic blazes are due to a combination of factors, including decades of fire suppression that left Americas forests overgrown; climate change driving up temperatures, fueling drought and drying out vegetation; and increased development in and around wildland areas.