By Oliver Milman, Photo: Davidovich Mikhail/Alamy, The Guardian, August 1, 2022
The climate crisis risks pushing many Americans into entirely new climatic realities, with a new analysis finding there are 16 US cities at risk of having summer temperatures on a par with locations in the Middle East by the end of the century.
Heatwaves have roiled huge swaths of the US this summer, placing nearly a third of the population under some sort of heat advisory and driving temperatures to as high as 115F (46C) in parts of the Great Plains. Hundreds of heat records have tumbled, from Boston, Massachusetts, which hit 100F (37C), to Portland, Oregon, which reached 102F (38.9C) on Tuesday.
But global heating may plunge many places in the US into the sort of heat extremes previously considered unthinkable, shifting their climates long-term into conditions now common in places far farther south, or even far overseas.
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