Climate Crisis Announces Its Presence With Authority

UPDATE 6/30: Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) reports 2.5 million customers are without power, the largest non-hurricane outage in Virginia history. Meanwhile in neighboring Tennessee, Nashville broke its all-time high - not its high for the day but its highest temperature ever recorded - by two full degrees.

After a record-melting day, we've had a night of extreme storms that have killed several people and left millions of people without power across the Mid-Atlantic region.

What's next? Forecast highs for Saturday & Sunday here in the DC area: 101 & 101. With yet another chance of strong storms each night.

And it's not even July yet.

To borrow a phrase from Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham, this is global warming announcing its presence with authority. We've spent the last 100+ years digging fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them as quickly as we can. We've added unfathomable amounts of energy to Earth's atmosphere in the blink of a geological eye.

Yet instead of acting at the first serious warnings of crisis back in 1988, we've spent another generation burning carbon-based fuels faster than ever. We've sat & listened to the CEO of Exxon Mobil ask if global warming will really be so bad - but now that it's here in full force, can we really comprehend how bad it might really be?

NBC4 Meteorologist Doug Kammerer explains how global warming is adding fuel to the atmospheric fire we've witnessed today:



Learn more about how global warming is causing extreme weather.