2023: The Year Climate Change Became Real

I could try to write about every disaster that is happening, but they keep coming, faster and faster.

Here is a quote from the New York Times: “Catastrophic floods in the Hudson Valley. An unrelenting heat dome over Phoenix. Ocean temperatures hitting 90 degrees Fahrenheit off the coast of Miami. A surprising [raine] deluge in Vermont, a rare tornado in Delaware.” All this and it is happening right now, simultaneously. And, this is just here in the USA.

What does all this mean in emergency management terms? Another NYT quote: “Weather disasters that cost more than $1 billion in damage are on the upswing in the United States, according to a Climate Central analysis of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1980, the average time between billion-dollar disasters was 82 days. From 2018-22, the average time between these most extreme events, even
controlled for inflation, was just 18 days.”

In my latest Disaster Zone podcast with the state of Washington’s Emergency Management Director Robert Ezelle, he talks to the operations tempo that has a continual line of disasters happening one after the other, with no time for people to recover from constant surges in efforts at responding.

It is going to require more money and more people to keep up with the number of disasters that are coming one after another. That is the bottom line!