Buenas tardes, estimada familia IPEP #inglésipep #ingléspagsypau (en Twitter).
Bueno, pues hoy día 22 de diciembre, recién 'modernizados' químicamente en un museo tristemente vacío junto al tranvía inexistente de Jaén, vamos a por la última traducción del trimestre. De nuevo, vamos a usar para la clase de hoy un texto del periódico The Washtington Post.
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| The Washington Post. Democracy dies in Darkness |
Cold, heat, fires, hurricanes and tornadoes: The year in weather disasters.
Vicious wind and tornadoes put a deadly exclamation point on the end of an extraordinary year for extreme weather in the United States.
Earlier in 2021, Texas froze and Seattle roasted. Parts of California flooded, burned, then flooded again. A hurricane that slammed Louisiana was so waterlogged that its remnants inundated New York City. A blizzard hit Hawaii.
The weather was wilder than usual this year, and the reasons vary, climate experts say.
Crazy cold snap? Giant hail? December tornadoes? Those happen now and then on a planet with natural variations in weather patterns.
But evidence increasingly shows that historic heat waves, monster rain events and ultra-intense storms are exacerbated by the warmer air and water of our overheating planet.
“The only two truisms when it comes to extremes in climate change are that almost everywhere: The hot hots are getting hotter and more frequent, and the wet wets are getting wetter and more frequent,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA who specializes in the relationship between climate change and weather.
The year began with what Swain might call a “wetter wet” against the backdrop of a year-long drought, and it just got weirder from there.
JANUARY
California floods amid drought
For five days late in late January, California had water thrown at its mouth.
Much of the West’s water comes from atmospheric rivers, which are like fast-moving, airborne conveyor belts that shuttle moisture from the Pacific to the West Coast about a dozen times a year. They are notoriously unpredictable and are often described as giant fire hoses in the sky.
FEBRUARY
Deadly cold in Texas
It was strolling-around-the-neighborhood weather in much of Texas for the first week of February. Then the next week, frigid Arctic air stretched drastically far south and obliterated low-temperature records from North Dakota to Mexico.
MARCH, APRIL AND MAY
Supersized storms
In spring, violently rotating thunderstorms called supercells are common across the country as cold and warm air masses meet and dance around each other.
But the three supercells that struck Alabama and Georgia in late March were notable for their power and endurance. All three spun out tornadoes and lasted several hours. One cell traveled more than 400 miles through four states.
JUNE
Otherworldly heat
Beginning in mid-June, a blanket of unprecedented hot air spread over the typically mild Pacific Northwest, an event scientists say was “virtually impossible” without climate change.
The culprit was an alarmingly strong heat dome, a sprawling mass of high pressure and hot air that muscles out any cooling systems that come near it. And its sheer power rattled experts who study heat waves all the time.
AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER
Smoke and a string of hurricanes
As Dixie and other large fires across the West continued to belch smoke into the atmosphere, plenty of precipitation was on its way to the other side of the country.
By mid-August, tropical storms and hurricanes had queued up in the Atlantic.
Tropical Storm Fred was first in line of the August storms, rolling through the Florida Panhandle and causing deadly flooding in North Carolina.
Then came three days during which Tropical Storm Henri made a rare Rhode Island landfall and drenched New England while unrelated storms caused catastrophic flooding in North Carolina and a freak deluge in Tennessee.
Hurricanes have always occurred, but models indicate that warmer temperatures combined with unchecked greenhouse emissions may make hurricanes wetter, stronger and more likely to veer toward North America.
To be continued.
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