Planet Earth's average temperature has risen about one degree Fahrenheit in the last fifty years. By the end of this century it will be several degrees higher, according to the latest climate research. But global warming is doing more than simply making things a little warmer.Â
Revisiting the Paris Heat Wave
Published August 18, 2010
In August 2003, Europeans suffered the worst heat wave in at least 500 years. Many weather records were set that month. Great Britain reported its hottest day ever. Forest fires raged in much of southern Europe, themselves causing deaths. Crops withered and trees died. One of the cities hit hardest was Paris. Although the high heat started in early August, it was nearly mid-month, after hundreds of people had been killed, before the French government realized that the heat wave had turned deadly in Paris. Before the heat wave was over, the city's morgues had to requisition refrigerator trucks just to hold the excessive number of dead bodies. More than 1,000 Parisians had died of dehydration, heat stroke and other ailments caused by high heat, a disproportionate fraction of which were single, elderly women.
Producer Dan Grossman tells us the story of the Paris Heat Wave, and the signs that other parts of the world, including parts of the U.S. Midwest, could soon face significantly increased climate extremes. Listen to the story at the link provided below.
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Mongolia has warmed roughly four degrees Fahrenheit—more than almost anywhere else on Earth. The resulting erratic weather threatens the nomadic, pastoral lifestyle of half of Mongolia's population.
Dust storms that have blown across Korea with rising intensity have prompted activists to plant "living windbreaks" of salt cedars and Siberian elms in southern Gobi desert.
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Daniel Grossman has been a print journalist and radio and web producer for 20 years. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and a B.S. in physics, both from MIT. He is a 2008 Alicia Patterson...
