Unfamiliar Ground: Bracing for Climate Impacts in the American Midwest

 

By Steve Otto

For the last five or six years, we have never had more than 6 inches of snow. It was not always like that. When I move to Wichita, KS, when I was 13 years old, we often had more than a foot of snow. We often had large drifts of three feet or more. I had to be careful driving because I could get stuck in a snow drift. NO MORE. With climate change —global warming, whatever people want to call it, we don't get deep snow anymore. At least we haven't in many years.

I have read where cities creat bubbles of their own heat. I'm sure Wichita does that. All around this city, there are deep snows —but not here. Here we don't get much snow. The school kids haven't had a "snow day" off school in more than five years. They may not get one in the next five years.

There are still politicians as Donald Trump, who refuse to believe in global warming or climate change. I'd like to know how they explain the weather changes I have seen in my lifetime. I have read of people who are moving away from Western states because the increasing fires are making it hard for them to breath the air. They are moving away because they don't believe it will ever get better. And yet there are still politicians who try to tell us that these changes are a myth.

For those of us who see the changes and watch them happening before our eyes —there is no myth about it.

 

Yes...winter. But during the day it is so warm the streets melt all the snow.

 

From Inside Climate News:

Reporters from across the Midwest explore the climate risks and the strategies communities are using to adapt.

 

By Dan Gearino

November 11, 2019

Think of a Minnesota with almost no ice fishing. A Missouri that is as hot and dry as Texas. River and lake communities where catastrophic flooding happens almost every year, rather than every few generations.

This, scientists warn, is the future of the Midwest if emissions continue at a high rate, threatening the very core of the region’s identity.

With extreme heat waves and flooding increasingly making that future feel more real, city leaders have started looking for ways to adapt.

......For the rest click here.