BANGOR DAILY NEWS • October 8, 2020
Extreme weather events are now among the most destructive ever experienced. Climate and weather disasters in the United States since 2010 have averaged $80.2 billion in economic damage with 521 lives lost per year. But that number is going up. Between 2015 and 2019, annual damages averaged $106.3 billion with 772 lives lost. None of this is news to people who have been impacted by extreme weather and to scientists like me who have been paying close attention to these troubling trends. The climate pendulums are no longer returning to equilibrium at their lowest points in their arcs. Their pivot points are moving and accelerating in a dangerous direction (the long-term trends) so that the swinging weights of the pendulums are blowing by their historical limits into some very dark extremes. ~ Gary Yohe, Wesleyan University