Washington Post (August 22)
“As a heat dome promises to smash more records this week across swaths of the Midwest, South and Southeast. The country can expect that extreme heat, which already kills more people than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined, will only worsen in the coming summers.” Cities can do little “to reduce the intensity of hurricanes” or change the path of tornadoes, but they can intervene to “reduce heat-wave intensity.” Almost “80 percent of the U.S. population lives” in cities where “the urban heat island effect can increase temperatures by 8 degrees.” Measures like requiring “reflective building materials, such as cool roofs;” and “increasing green spaces” can lower “peak temperatures by as much as 2 to 9 degrees Celsius.”
Tags: Cool roofs; Green spaces, Extreme, Floods, Heat dome, Heat wave, Hurricanes, Intensity, Intervene, Records, Reflective building materials, Summers, Temperatures, Tornadoes, U.S., Urban heat island
Bloomberg (April 1)
“Rarely has the consensus been more uniformly bearish than it is now. Investors are sitting with the lowest allocation to US stocks in almost two decades.” But this extreme is creating a phenomena not seen “during any bear market in the past four decades.” Since “everyone’s leaning one way, big swings are apt to break out in the other…. Small gains can snowball when the worry is missing out on the next big rally.” As a result, “the S&P 500 just finished the first three months of the year up 7%, rounding out back-to-back quarterly gains.”
Tags: Allocation, Bear market, Bearish, Big swings, Consensus, Extreme, Investors, Rally, S&P 500, Small gains, Snowball, Stocks, U.S.
Washington Post (August 3)
“If it seems like a barrage of extreme rain events has been wreaking havoc across the country over the past week, you’re not imagining things. The latest resulted from an overnight deluge in central and southeastern Illinois.” This was “the third 1-in-1,000-year rain event in the Lower 48 states in about a week,” with two of the events striking in just two days.
Tags: Barrage, Deluge, Extreme, Illinois, Overnight, Rain events, Week, Wreaking havoc
Washington Post (June 20)
“A punishing early-season heat wave… tormented large swaths of Europe over the weekend,” setting hundreds of record highs. “Temperatures between 104 and 110 degrees (40 to 43 Celsius) were common from Spain to Germany,” but France was hit hardest by extreme temperatures that peaked on Saturday “when more than a dozen all-time records were set.”
Tags: Early, Europe, Extreme, France, Germany, Heat wave, Punishing, Record highs, Spain, Temperatures, Tormented
USA Today (November 12)
An extreme “Arctic blast is affecting 200 million people from Chicago to Texas, and it isn’t over yet.”
Tags: Arctic blast, Chicago, Extreme, Texas, U.S.
Washington Post (December 11)
“Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric will live in infamy in U.S. history. He obviously doesn’t mind; his narcissistic personality is so extreme that every high-visibility outrage is for him a kind of validation.” Others should care. “Historians will look harshly on those who, for reasons of cowardice or opportunism, kept silent when Trump’s tirades put our constitutional values and the safety of Americans at risk.”