In the words ofNASAclimatologist James Hansen, the globe is now playing with“loaded climate dice,”a term that basically means that the odds of certain extreme weather events have gone up. There’s a whole lot of randomness in weather, obviously, and global warming has tilted things a bit in favor of terrible, awful summers — which should be much more anomalous — like the one we’ve been dealing with for what feels like goddamn years already. In his controversial (even among level-headed, scientific minds)paperfrom earlier this month, Hansen points to 2011’s Texas and Oklahoma heat wave and 2010’s brutal Moscow summer, but 2012 might fit the planet Earth’s new math just as well. Which is all a long way of saying that, hey, global warming most likely made this summer suck. Yes, you’ve heard this before.
The weather over the past couple of weeks hasn’t actually been all that bad, at least on the East Coast, and suddenly it it gets a lot easier to not think about climate doom. That’s a big problem in the climate change information war — our considerations of climate change drastically based on what we’re experiencing around us right now. But extreme weather events don’t actually come and go as easily as you get hot and cold. Take West Nile virus, currently serving as one fine example of the outward rippling effect of weird weather, and something we can expect much more of as hot, dry weather gets more common. 2012 is going down as the worst-ever year for the disease in the 13 years it’s been in the country.The West Nile virus is typically spread to humans by mosquitos. Most people that get it don’t even know it; 80 percent of cases are asymptotic, and only about one in 150 develop serious illness. An even smaller number actually die. But that number isn’t so small this year. As of today, there have been 1,118 cases of West Nile reported in the United States, including 41 deaths. That’s up from 693 cases and 26 deaths last week, according to USA Today (thanks, Atlantic). According to Time, an average year should find about 300 cases of West Nile. About 75 percent of cases in this outbreak are concentrated in southern states, in particular Texas, where in Dallas health officials have declared a public health emergency.What causes a West Nile explosion is typically a mosquito explosion, which in this case is likely caused by 2012’s mild winter and subsequent heat explosion. "It is a complicated ecological cycle among people, animals and birds, but one observation is that in the U.S. and elsewhere, hot weather seems to promote West Nile virus outbreaks," the CDC’s Dr. Lyle Petersen told Time. Which is really just one of many less obvious consequences of hot weather outliers, but a particularly timely one as we finally give our air conditioners a rest and pretend, once again, that everything is totally OK.
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