“Wicked weather coast-to-coast” was the opening remark on Good Morning America on Wednesday, August 8, 2018. The same day, DW TV revealed it’s really like that from continent to continent.
New South Wales, Australia’s most populated state, and her neighbor to the north, Queensland, are desperate for rain.
In Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ABC Rural article titled, The big dry: ‘See us, hear us, help us’, stock (agricultural) agent Simon Bourke assessed the magnitude of the drought.
“We’re selling livestock we don’t want to sell … down the track there’s really not going to be too many cattle or sheep left.”
Summer, Hot and Hotter
On the other side of the world, Germany is struggling with severe to extreme drought. Farmers fear possibly the worst harvest on record.
In the places hit by weather temperatures over 38°C/100°F, food sources are not the only things affected. At Hannover’s airport a runway was damaged by the extreme heat. Train tracks buckled in Bavaria.
Across all of America, as large as it is, people sweltered in prolonged high heat.
Floods to Fires
In the eastern USA and in the province of Ontario Canada, summer was also punctuated by flash floods due to torrential rains.
In Western Canada as well as directly south of there, tinder dry forests and brush fueled numerous fires big and small.
As of August 9th, Northern California’s Mendocino twin fires had raced through an area four times the size of Sacramento, the state’s capital — breaking the record for California’s ‘Largest Fire Ever’ set the previous year.
Reporting on the newer Southern California Holy Fire, the Los Angeles Daily News posted,
“Fire officials were keeping an eye on the fire as it approached Santiago Peak, where communications towers for cell phones, two-way radios such as those used by law enforcement and airliner internet service are located.”
According to Ranker.com, Amalie Orme, a Cal State professor of geography and environmental studies, was astonished by the level of destruction. She stated,
“We have not seen this number and this size of fires at least within our memories.”
Many homes have been lost to the flames.
Greece, Portugal, Spain and Sweden battled their own significant fires this summer.
The list goes on and on.
UPDATE 8/22/18: DW TV told viewers that the world will produce less food this year than consumed, because of global drought, causing it to dip into food reserves.
Photo Credits: Grain photo by abendstimmung, Map, and Firefighter courtesy of Pixabay; Licenses: CCZero.
