Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The past 12 months are the warmest ever recorded in the United States since record-keeping began in 1895. That word comes as a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says climate change, including human factors, has increased the odds of extreme weather.
The severe storms that finally broke the deadly heat wave in the United States blew in with their own set of dangers this week. In Greensboro, North Carolina, residents are struggling to recover from flooding and power outages brought on by slow-moving storms yesterday. In Fredericksburg, Va., violent thunderstorms pummeled a cheerleading facility.
GIRL: We were scared, and we were just, like, praying to God and hoping that we weren't going to die.
GIRL: And we saw it. It just came in on us.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And in Houston, Texas, they sent ball players scrambling for cover.
The scares come after high temperatures are being blamed for at least 46 deaths and loss of power for close to a million people last week. For over 11 consecutive days, temperatures exceeded 100 degrees across much of the country.
Meanwhile, out West, wildfires fueled by near-record droughts have raged for weeks in Colorado, forcing residents to leave their homes. Nationwide, fires burned 1.3 million acres in June alone, the second highest acreage burned in June of any year.
Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, is reporting the first half of this year was in fact the hottest on record, with 170 all-time heat records matched or broken.
NOAA has issued a report attempting to assess the role climate change, including human factors, played, if any, in six global extreme weather events in 2011. About one of those, the report asked if the human influence on climate made the 2011 Texas drought more probable. It concluded that it did.
The report also examined climate change's role in last year's drought in East Africa, heat wave across Europe and floods in Thailand. Regarding Thailand, the report said climate change cannot be shown to have played any role in the excess rain and flooding.
For more on all this, we turn to Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, which oversaw the studies.
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