Weather

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green says 53 people were killed in the devastating Maui wildfires, and the death toll will likely continue to rise. Green says search and rescue operations are continuing, and officials expect it will become the state’s deadliest natural disaster since a 1961 tsunami killed 61 people on the Big Island. More than 1,000 structures were destroyed by fires that are still burning in Lahaina and surrounding areas. Green told The Associated Press that “Lahaina, with a few rare exceptions, has been burned down.”

A dangerous mix of conditions appear to have combined to make the wildfires blazing a path of destruction in Hawaii particularly damaging, including flash drought, high winds, low humidity and dry vegetation. Experts say climate change is increasing the likelihood of more extreme weather events like what’s playing out on the island of Maui, where dozens of people have been killed and a historic tourist town was devastated. Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia’s faculty of forestry. She says climate change is leading to “these unpredictable or unforeseen combinations that we’re seeing right now and that are fueling this extreme fire weather.”

Now that July’s sizzling numbers are all in, the European climate monitoring organization made it official: July 2023 was Earth’s hottest month on record by a wide margin. July’s global average temperature of 16.95 degrees Celsius was a third of a degree Celsius (six tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) higher than the previous record set in 2019. That's according to Tuesday's calculations by Copernicus Climate Change Service, a division of the European Union’s space program. Normally global temperature records are broken by hundredths or a tenth of a degree, so this margin is unusual.