It is not a good indicator of things to come. With heat comes failing infrastructure, injuries and deaths.
See this CBS story:
“Earth sees third straight hottest day on record, though it’s unofficial: ‘Brutally hot.’”Remember, emergency management’s role is “climate adaption,” which means we look for ways to deal with the consequences of increasing air and sea temperatures.
I’ll predict something for the future. Hurricane season is going to expand on both ends of the calendar. Instead of starting on June 1 and extending to Nov. 30, we should watch for storms to develop earlier and later on the calendar. It is the warm water/ocean temperatures that will drive this — not to mention more frequent and violent storms. It won’t be just the wind, but storm surge and then rainfall that will require us to re-categorize how we measure hurricanes.
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.
