Events such as the deadly tornadoes that hit the U.S. midwest last weekend will become increasingly commonplace occurrences as climate change takes root, the leading U.S. emergency-management official said Sunday. Deanne Criswell, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), told CNN’s “State of the Union” that communities across the country must prepare for more, and more extreme, tornadoes as well as hurricanes, wildfires, and other dangerous weather occurrences in the coming years.
“This is going to be our new normal,” Criswell told her CNN hosts, as she did a round of news interviews before leaving on a plane to Kentucky to assess tornado damage there and help coordinate federal response efforts. “The effects that we’re seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation.”
Criswell added that communities and policymakers must work together to implement strategies to “start to reduce the impacts of these events.” FEMA debuted a new Climate Adaptation Enterprise Steering Group in October, which will aim to make communities and FEMA operations more resistant to hurricanes, floods, fires, and other natural disasters.
Although the scientific community has not conclusively linked these extreme-weather events to climate change, many researchers say that the evidence for it is growing. They include American Geophysical Union researchers who published a paper earlier this year in which they said that their organization’s analysis “suggests increasing global temperature will affect the occurrence of conditions favorable to severe weather.”
Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist, tweeted Saturday that there is “a growing body of research (including this late-breaking paper) suggesting that warming likely does increase such risks in many regions globally.”
But the issue of extreme weather hit home in midwestern U.S. states last Friday and Saturday, when more than two-dozen tornadoes ripped through the region and resulted in more than 90 people dead and dozens more missing.
One tornado made a pathway across the land for more than 200 miles, making it one of the longest in U.S. history. President Biden suggested that climate change could been a factor, saying Saturday that “we all know everything is more intense when the climate is warming—everything.”
Researchers are debating the evidence connecting tornadoes with climate activity. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data indicates that the United States averages 1,368 tornadoes a year and that this year’s number’s total is still below the average, with 1,230 tornadoes tallied up through Saturday.
Biden said that he will have the Environmental Protection Agency study the possibility of links between climate change and tornado activity.