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\n A woman uses a portable fan to cool herself in Tokyo on Tuesday as Japan suffers from a heat wave. Scientists say extreme weather events will likely happen more often as the planet gets warmer.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n Martin Bureau\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n A woman uses a portable fan to cool herself in Tokyo on Tuesday as Japan suffers from a heat wave. Scientists say extreme weather events will likely happen more often as the planet gets warmer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Martin Bureau\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Dramatic weather events happened this past week in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere. There were wildfires in Greece, Scandinavia, and the Western U.S.<\/a> Flooding followed record rainfalls in the Northeast. And dangerous heat waves settled over the Southwest, Japan, and the U.K.<\/p>\n If it continues like this, 2018 could end up being one of the hottest years on record<\/a>.<\/p>\n When the news is full of stories on extreme weather, it’s hard not to wonder: Is this what climate change looks like?<\/p>\n Climate scientists say yes \u2014 though it’s complicated.<\/p>\n Take wildfires, for example.<\/p>\n “We see five times more large fires today than we did in the 1970s,” says Jennifer Balch, professor in geography and director of Earth Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wildfires are part of the ecosystem of the American West, and scientists expect a certain number of them under normal average conditions. But what global warming does, says Balch, is change the backdrop against which they happen.<\/p>\n “Fire season is about three months longer than it was just a few decades ago,” she says. “We’ve seen a 2-degree Fahrenheit increase across the Western U.S. Snowpack is melting earlier, and what that’s doing is essentially opening up the window for fires to happen over a much longer period of time.”<\/p>\n Last year was the costliest fire season ever, with damages exceeding $18 billion dollars<\/a>.<\/p>\n Overall, weather and climate disasters in the U.S. caused more than $300 billion in damages<\/a> in 2017, shattering previous records. Though that’s not all climate \u2014 those increased costs are partly the result of development and sprawl.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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