Record-breaking heat. Floods. Droughts. Tornadoes. Don’t believe the skeptics—the evidence of climate change is all around us. An interview with climatologist Heidi Cullen.
Record-breaking heat. Floods. Droughts. Tornadoes. Don’t believe the skeptics—the evidence of climate change is all around us. An interview with climatologist Heidi Cullen.
Cullen is in the habit of keeping a close eye on the weather: Climate Central is a nonprofit science research organization headquartered in Princeton, N.J. Before she joined them, Cullen, who holds a doctorate from Columbia University, was the Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert.
We had just been through a March of record-shattering heat, and we were roasting through mid-April days. On top of that, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, most of the U.S. is experiencing an unusually dry period, with southern Florida bone dry. More than 63 percent of Georgia is in the worst two levels of drought, the highest of any state.
Because of the dry, windy conditions, wildfires and brush fires have been raging along the East Coast from New England to Florida; billowing black clouds from New Jersey Meadowlands fires have been visible from midtown Manhattan. And in much of New England, stream flow levels were at record lows—with Vermont, though still reeling from last summer’s disastrous floods, abnormally dry.
“We may have just broken another record,” Cullen says of the recent heat wave. “That’s what we do these days. We break records.”
Cullen noted that her phone didn’t stop ringing during the March heat wave. Whenever there is an unusual weather event, journalists want to know if it is caused by climate change. “In fact, I was just talking to someone at NPR who facetiously asked, ‘How’s your summer going so far?’”
It seemed an appropriate atmosphere in which to ask a climate scientist what’s going on with the weather. And what weather has to do with climate change. Read More
