Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Deanne Criswell blamed climate change for the deadly tornadoes that devastated several states over the weekend.
“This is going to be our new normal,” Criswell said during an appearance on CNN on Sunday. “The effects we are seeing of climate change are the crisis of our generation.”
“We’re taking a lot of efforts at FEMA to work with communities to help reduce the impacts that we’re seeing from these severe weather events and help to develop system-wide projects that can help protect communities,” Criswell said without providing any details on how these kind of storms can be prevented.
So far, the death toll is expected to reach or surpass 100 in the six states hit by the storm, including Kentucky where people perished in a candle factory and workers who died at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois.
Fox News reported on Criswell’s remarks:
The nation’s top emergency management official said such a severe and sustained outbreak of deadly storms this late in the year is “unprecedented,” but she noted that FEMA is doing everything it can to help people impacted by the storms.
“I think there is still hope, right?” she said. “We sent one of our federal urban search and rescue teams down to Kentucky. They arrived yesterday. They’ll be able to assist the localities with their ongoing rescue efforts. I think there is still hope, and we should continue to try to find as many people as we can.”
A CNN report said connecting tornadoes with climate change is “very difficult”:
Scientific research on the role that climate change is playing in the formation and intensity of tornadoes is not as robust as for other types of extreme weather like droughts, floods and even hurricanes. The short and small scale of tornadoes, along with an extremely spotty and unreliable historical record for them, makes assessing their relationships to long-term, human-caused climate change very difficult.
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