Climate Extremes Becoming a Fact of Life Across US

It’s been a year.
Emergency Alerts are no longer a rarity, and for some regions, are becoming a way of life. Welcome to the rest of your life.

Bloomberg:

Last Sunday, my cousin told me her church service was rudely interrupted — not by an unruly parishioner, but by a choir of phones going off simultaneously with an ill-timed flood warning. While floods are called “acts of God” for a reason, I doubt the priest appreciated the push alerts during his prayer.

Really, there’s no escaping them these days: “With the planet heating up and nature growing more deadly and destructive, new tools to help people gauge their climate risks are landing faster than DVD-sized hail in Texas,” Mark Gongloff says. “Nearly the entire US population — 99% of the country — has been subject to at least one National Weather Service extreme-weather alert since May.”

More often than not, these alerts have us seeking shelter. A tornado evacuation in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin recently forced some newlyweds into a hotel basement, where they did their first dancein the dark. In Massachusetts, a mosquito-borne virus called eastern equine encephalitis (not to be confused with the West Nile virus that hospitalized Dr. Anthony Fauci) has authorities encouraging residents to stay inside after 6 p.m. until Sep. 30 — a climate curfew of sorts. And residents of California, Oregon and Washington have spent much of the summer indoors, not by choice, but out of necessity.

Although wildfire smoke can be deadly, Lisa Jarvis says “more of us experience milder but still serious consequences,” which include everything from asthma and headaches to pregnancy complicationsand an increased risk of dementia. “Wearing a high quality mask can greatly reduce your exposure outside,” she writes. “But we also need to pay much more attention to air quality where we spend most of our time: indoors. Investing in HEPA filtration for schools, workplaces and homes may be our best chance to give our lungs respite from the smoke.”