![]() India didn’t have good meteorological luck in 2014. When the skies cleared, the two countries were left looking at devastation amounting to $18 billion or more, making these storms the most expensive natural disaster in India, ever. A steroidal September monsoon dropped more than a foot of water on the region, killing about 650 people and damaging 375,000 buildings. The year’s priciest weather was not a city-crumbling earthquake or roaring hurricane, but a stretch of bad rain on the border of India and Pakistan, according to Property Casualty 360. It was the most powerful quake to hit the Bay Area in a quarter-century scientists have predicted Napa’s next one will be even shakier and more devastating. The total damage is expected to top $2 billion. 25 near Napa, Calif., injured roughly 250 people, triggered a bad rash of gas fires and water breaks, and sent innumerable wine barrels and bottles crashing to the floor in sad, crimson cascades. It wasn’t the Big One, but a magnitude-6 earthquake on Aug. Researchers predicted the number of days with nuisance floods - ones that inconvenience the public with stuff like road closures and infrastructural damage - will rise by as much as 925 percent along the U.S. Waves lapping at boot soles could become a common occurrence in the coming decades, to believe a July NOAA report. This is, officially, the Weather Video of the Year the fact that these leathernecks are laughing makes it all the more surreal ( profanity ahoy): And in May, oil workers had an unbelievable brush with a monumental pillar of whirling debris that ripped through their camp in North Dakota, damaging more than a dozen trailers. Yet a couple incidents stood out as examples of these terrifying spinners’ power: A late-April outbreak dropped a bevy of tornadoes onto the nation’s midsection, killing nearly three-dozen people and leaving several chicken farms looking like they’d incurred a gas explosion. Tornado activity was anemic in the U.S., with about 400 fewer twisters than the annual average of 1,260, notes the Capital Weather Gang. “If there’s another severe drought, the face of farming is going to change.”įurther south, cities like São Paulo, Brazil, we should note, are in much the same boat. “The general mood is, ‘We’ll get through this year, but who knows about next year?'” said one irrigation-company worker. And food woes are likely to worsen if the West gets a repeat of 2014. If you’re wondering why hamburger was 20 percent more expensive this year (and next year, why produce costs so much), blame the pernicious dryness. (Scientists believe the changing climate will make the West even hotter and drier in the future.) A line of dismal milestones was passed in the descent into crisis: Officials begging people to ration water, reservoirs dropping to record-low levels, the physical mass of California itself shrinking due to disappearing H2O. The state just lived through its driest three-year period in at least 1,200 years, with agricultural pumping and natural causes to blame. Recent rains alleviated a little of the West’s thirstiness, but California remains in a mortal struggle with drought. The shivering and long-lasting cold snap helped the natural-gas market reach a five-year high, hitting $6.25 on Feb. What wasn’t in dispute is that things were horribly cold through much of North America, with temps as much as 35 degrees below average for the eastern two-thirds of the country. The winter of 2014 was stalked by a glacial presence the media dubbed the “Polar Vortex,” which in fact was probably located elsewhere on the planet. A post shared by Sarah Addis vortex that shall not be named
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