Almost every day now there is an extreme, "unprecedented" weather event or disaster happening somewhere in the globe, and many of these record breaking events are related to our warming climate.
In an effort to track and inform the public of these global events, I will be writing a weekly article highlighting these news events and providing links for more in-depth reading. Although most of the world does not dispute the fact of climate change, a small minority still do not believe that we are in a period of climate change. That disbelief does not change the fact that we are now having almost daily "record breaking" weather events.
This weekly news update will help track these weather events since the mainstream media does not always reach the people it needs to, nor does the mainstream media always report on these events either.
On July 9, 2013 there was a record 3.5" rainfall in Toronto, Canada. The daily rainfall was a record breaker and called "unprecedented" by Toronto's mayor Rob Ford. The record rain caused over 50,000 to be without power and at one point over 300,000 were without power. The storm caused widespread flooding in parts of the city. The 3.5" of rain is the amount that the Toronto area would normally receive over a months time, not just one day.
On July 10 a factory was washed away by torrential rain and mudslides in China's Sichuan province. Over 40 people were believed to be buried in the landslide. Days of torrential rain have also caused major flooding in parts of China. Video here: Factory washed away.
On July 11 mudslides caused by heavy rain picked up a car and swept it downstream in a deluge of water after the Waldo Canyon, Colorado fires of last year left large areas of land without ground cover or vegetation. Video here: Car swept downstream
On July 11 the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote about the increased risks of hurricanes with the 2013 hurricane system upon us. After once in a 700 year storm event Hurricane Sandy last year, Erika Spanger-Siegfried, senior analyst of the Climate & Energy Program says, "The hurricanes and Nor’easters we face along the East Coast may be growing stronger".
Siegfried writes about hurricanes caused by climate change in the series: "A Summer of Extremes: Confronting the Realities of Climate Change".
(Dorsi Diaz is a freelance writer and art educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. With over 1 million online readers, Dorsi's passion is to help adults and children unlock their creativity and imagination and to also spread the word about the effects of world-wide climate change)
You can follow Dorsi Diaz on Twitter here and also here at HubPages where she publishes articles about climate change and art education.
