As world heats up, ‘historic’ weather events will increase and overlap, testing the limits of nation’s resiliency and recovery
that an event like this was increasingly likely, publishing a report last year on how the climate crisis could threaten the park. Noting that average temperatures could increase by up to 10 degrees in the coming decades, they concluded that the region should expect intense dry conditions peppered with dangerous downpours.
The unprecedented and sudden flooding earlier this week toppled telephone poles, knocked over fences, wiped out roads and bridges, and threatened to cut off fresh drinking water supplies to the state’s largest city, after officials in Billings, Montana, were forced to shut down its water treatment plant.
has been categorized in extreme drought, according to the US drought monitor. Once-lush hillsides have grown brown, waterways have receded into the cracked earth and the agricultural, ecological and industrial impacts are expected to mount, and swaths of the west will go without hope of precipitation through the summer and into autumn.