(OPINION) ETH – This is a summer that none of us will ever forget. There has been one apocalyptic disaster after another, and we haven’t even reached the halfway point yet. At the same time, that historic flooding has been absolutely devastating parts of Europe and China, unprecedented heat, drought, and wildfires have been hitting portions of North and South America extremely hard.
On top of all that, countless numbers of birds are suddenly dropping dead, hundreds of millions of sea creatures have been wiped out, the COVID pandemic is experiencing a major resurgence and we are starting to see famine break out in parts of Africa. What’s next? Should we be expecting a plague of grasshoppers to be unleashed soon? Actually, that has already happened, and I’ve included it in this article too. The following are 10 plagues that our world has had to deal with so far this summer…
#1 Historic Flooding In Western Europe
Just 10 days after record flooding killed 37 people in western Europe, Belgium was hit by a flood that was so powerful that it literally picked up vehicles and carried them along like little toys… In Dinant, within Belgium’s Walloon region, a two-hour thunderstorm turned streets into torrential rivers. Footage on social media showed cars and pavements being swept away by a powerful stream of rainwater. “I have been living in Dinant for 57 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Richard Fournaux, the town’s former mayor, told the AP news agency.
#2 “Once-In-A-Thousand-Year” Flooding In China
Last week, more than a million people were forced from their homes by flooding in China that was so extreme that it is only supposed to happen one time in a thousand years… Starting last Tuesday, storms dropped the equivalent of one year’s worth of water on the city in a 72 hour period before moving northward, flooding large swathes of Henan province in China. Authorities say the rains have displaced more than a million people and at least 63 people dead in what should have been – in theory – once-in-a-thousand-year floods.
#3 Countless Numbers Of Birds Are Dropping Dead
This is something that I have written about before. Thousands upon thousands of birds are suddenly dropping dead in the eastern half of the United States, and authorities still don’t understand why this is happening…
Thousands of cases of mysteriously ill songbirds have now been reported in at least 10 Eastern and Midwestern states. Scientists from federal and state agencies and wildlife health centers are collaborating diligently to determine the cause, and perhaps find a treatment for what has so far proved to be an untreatable malady.
Hopefully scientists will be able to figure out what is causing this, because once a bird catches the disease death can come very, very rapidly… Death seems to descend quickly once birds start showing obvious neurological symptoms, says Evans. A neighbor brought him a sick crow and “literally within minutes, it had gone between being living and standing on the street and looking normal but acting confused, to a dead bird in a box.” Other accounts from wildlife centers tell of birds deteriorating and dying within 48 hours.
#4 A Billion Dead Sea Creatures
A few weeks ago, we witnessed the worst heatwave that the Northwest has ever experienced. Personally, I know how bad that it was, because I was right in the middle of it. CBS News Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli explained that there was only a “1/10,000+ chance” that a heatwave of this magnitude could happen in the region, and it ended up killing at least a billion sea creatures…
More than 1 billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast are likely to have died from last week’s record heatwave, experts warn, highlighting the vulnerability of ecosystems unaccustomed to extreme temperatures. The “heat dome” that settled over western Canada and the north-western US for five days pushed temperatures in communities along the coast to 40C (104F) – shattering longstanding records and offering little respite for days.
#5 Megadrought
The western half of the United States is in the midst of a multi-year “megadrought”, and 2021 has been the worst year of that “megadrought” so far by a very wide margin. As I discussed the other day, about 20 percent of the West was considered to be experiencing “severe drought” at this time in 2020, but today that number is up to 80 percent. In California, conditions have been so dry and water levels have gotten so low that the drinking water is literally starting to taste like dirt…
Something is off about Sacramento’s water. It smells and tastes a little “earthy,” residents are saying — an effect of compounding climate change crises: extreme heat, little to no precipitation, and a historic drought that has gripped the region for the better part of a decade.
Up and down the state of California, rivers, streams, and reservoirs are drying up. In Sacramento, that has led to an increase in the concentration of geosmin in its drinking water, one of two organic compounds that give soil its characteristic smell.
#6 A Plague Of Grasshoppers?
The extremely hot and extremely dry conditions in the western half of the country have created ideal conditions for grasshoppers to multiply. Now millions of these voracious little creatures are gobbling up fields everywhere they go, and the National Weather Service is telling us that some of the grasshopper swarms are so massive that they are actually showing up on radar…
The National Weather Service (NWS) Glasgow says the radar is lighting up, but not with rain. Instead, the radar is picking up “countless” grasshoppers in the area according to a post from the NWS. The grasshoppers are flying as high as 10,000 feet above the ground and are being picked up by the radar the NWS said. CONTINUE
