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      Wildfire Erupts in Orange County, Forcing Evacuations

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      A small brush fire in Southern California quickly grew into a nearly 2,000-acre blaze, threatening nearby suburban neighborhoods.A brush fire that erupted on Monday afternoon in the hills of Orange County in Southern California exploded to nearly 2,000 acres within a few hours, prompting evacuation orders for nearby communities as the blaze burned uncontrolled.Known as the Airport fire, it began just before 1:30 p.m. about 15 miles east of Irvine, Calif., near an airport for remote-controlled model airplanes. Officials have ordered evacuations in parts of Trabuco Canyon, a community in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, and have recommended evacuations for surrounding neighborhoods as well.The fire broke out during a prolonged heat wave that has pushed temperatures in many parts of Southern California into the triple digits in recent days. A fire in the San Bernardino Mountains that began on Thursday, about 55 miles northeast of Trabuco Canyon, has swelled to threaten more than 33,000 structures and is only 5 percent contained.In Trabuco Canyon, temperatures reached about 98 degrees on Monday, above normal for early September, said Samantha Zuber, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego. Wind speeds were about 15 miles per hour, she said.The winds are expected to slow into the evening, but overnight temperatures will remain unusually high, unlikely to drop below 70 degrees, she said. Similar conditions have been fueling wildfires in the state all summer. “Unfortunately, temperatures won’t cool that much,” Ms. Zuber said.She said that temperatures in the fire zone would begin to drop on Tuesday — a high of 95 is expected — before a significant cool down, which is forecast to start on Wednesday and continue for the rest of the week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      It’s Been the Hottest Summer on Record, European Officials Say

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      The excessive heat worldwide suggests the full year will also be a record-breaker, according to Copernicus, the E.U. agency that tracks global warming.The summer of “brat,” the Paris Olympics and political conventions may be winding down, but the heat in 2024 is still going strong.The southwestern United States’ sizzling triple-digit temperatures this week mark the tail end of the hottest summer on record, according to a new European climate report.“We know that the warming of the planet leads to more intense and extreme climate events, and what we’ve seen this summer has been no exception,” said Julien Nicolas, a climatologist with the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union agency that published the assessment on Wednesday.Since 2018, the agency has been combining data like weather observations from balloons and satellites with computer models that simulate temperature and precipitation to get a picture of what’s happening around the world. It pairs that picture with past weather conditions reconstructed back to 1940 to compute a global average temperature.June and August were the hottest June and August on record, according to the models, while July is not quite as clear.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based in the United States, found that this July was three-hundredths of a Celsius degree hotter than July 2023, while Copernicus determined it was a few hundredths of a degree cooler than last year. For all practical purposes, that created a virtual tie, according to Karin Gleason of NOAA, speaking recently about her department’s findings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Climate Change Can Cause Bridges to ‘Fall Apart Like Tinkertoys,’ Experts Say

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      Extreme heat and flooding are accelerating the deterioration of bridges, engineers say, posting a quiet but growing threat.On a 95-degree day this summer, New York City’s Third Avenue Bridge, connecting the Bronx and Manhattan, got stuck in the open position for hours. As heat and flooding scorched and scoured the Midwest, a steel railroad bridge connecting Iowa with South Dakota collapsed under surging waters. In Lewiston, Maine, a bridge closed after the pavement buckled from fluctuating temperatures.America’s bridges, a quarter of which were built before 1960, were already in need of repair. But now, extreme heat and increased flooding linked to climate change are accelerating the disintegration of the nation’s bridges, engineers say, essentially causing them to age prematurely.The result is a quiet but growing threat to the safe movement of people and goods around the country, and another example of how climate change is reshaping daily life in ways Americans may not realize.“We have a bridge crisis that is specifically tied to extreme weather events,” said Paul Chinowsky, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder who researches the effects of climate change on infrastructure. “These are not things that would happen under normal climate circumstances. These are not things that we’ve ever seen at this rate.”Bridges designed and built decades ago with materials not intended to withstand sharp temperature swings are now rapidly swelling and contracting, leaving them weakened.“It’s getting so hot that the pieces that hold the concrete and steel, those bridges can literally fall apart like Tinkertoys,” Dr. Chinowsky said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dangerous Heat Returns to Central and Eastern U.S. This Week

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      High heat and humidity could make it feel like 115 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the country this week, forecasters warned.Forecasters warned that “dangerous heat and humidity” will spread across the central and eastern United States this week, threatening to break records for high temperatures and ending a spell of fall-like weather.The heat wave will bring “unseasonably hot” temperatures to the Upper Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, said David Roth, a meteorologist at the Weather Prediction Center.The extreme heat and humidity could make it feel like 105 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the country.“In some places in the Midwest, it could be the hottest temperatures they’ve seen all summer,” Mr. Roth said. “Not only is it late, it’s the hottest, too. So that’s a little unusual.” More

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      Heat Contributed to 47,000 Deaths in Europe Last Year, but Relief Programs Helped

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      A new study shows that behavioral and social changes can reduce heat mortality. But challenges remain as temperatures continue to rise.More than 47,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes during 2023, the world’s hottest year on record, a new report in Nature Medicine has found.But the number could have been much higher.Without adaptations to rising temperatures over the past two decades — including advances in health care, more widespread air-conditioning and improved public information that kept people indoors and hydrated during extreme temperatures — the death toll for Europeans experiencing the same temperatures at the start of the 21st century could have been 80 percent higher, according to the new study. For people over 80 years old, the death toll could have doubled.“We need to consider climate change as a health issue,” said Elisa Gallo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, a nonprofit research center, and the lead author of the study. “We still have thousands of deaths caused by heat every year, so we still have to work a lot and we have to work faster.”Counting deaths from extreme heat is difficult, in part because death certificates don’t always reflect the role heat played in a person’s death. The study used publicly available death records in 35 countries, representing about 543 million Europeans and provided by Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union.The researchers used an epidemiological model to analyze the deaths alongside 2023 weekly temperature records to estimate what fraction of deaths could be attributable to heat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Close Are the Planet’s Climate Tipping Points?

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      Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us. We might also be changing the climate […] More