Travel guides tell the millions of people who visit Paris every year that the spring season there offers warm weather, flowers, and local produce\u2014a great time to ascend the Eiffel Tower, visit the Louvre\u2019s art treasures, and stroll along the Seine River.<\/p>\n
Not so in the spring of 2016. Three days of heavy, almost nonstop rain in May swelled the Seine, which winds through central Paris, raising the water level in early June to 20 feet\/6.1 meters above normal. Streets and riverside expressways flooded and became impassable, swamped subway and rail lines shut down, tourist boats were cancelled, schools closed, as did the Eiffel Tower and other popular tourist sites. Employees in the palatial Louvre moved artwork in threatened rooms to higher floors. The disaster made headlines internationally.<\/p>\n
Parisian officials had never seen an inundation like it. There had been floods before, of course, but they had to look back more than a century for a comparable disaster. In 1910 the Great Flood of Paris engulfed tunnels, sewers, and drains, leaving parts of the city submerged for five weeks. But the 2016 flood was different. It threatened modern-city systems that barely existed in 1910. The city\u2019s electricity grid, Metro network, and telephone lines\u2014systems that millions of people depend on every day\u2014are underground and, therefore, extremely vulnerable to being damaged by water getting into the wrong places. Another difference was the flood\u2019s origin. Blame it on global warming, which has increased moisture in the air and the frequency and severity of downpours in Europe and elsewhere. During the last century, most Seine flooding came in the winter, but the 2016 flood arrived in the spring due to the wettest May in 124 years. Even before the flood had receded, weather and climate scientists using computer models calculated that changes in climate had doubled the usual chance of such an extreme flooding event.<\/p>\n
A few months later, climate calamity struck Paris again. A five-day heat wave in August, with temperatures reaching 100\u00b0 <\/strong>Fahrenheit\/38\u00b0<\/strong> Celsius, put half of France under high alert for health risks and caused air pollution in Paris to soar. It recalled the two weeks of extreme heat in 2003 that killed more than 3,000 people nationwide and caused Parisian undertakers to work overtime. Two years later, flooding returned to Paris.<\/p>\n More than 50 years ago, decades before global warming was acknowledged, Frank Sinatra first sang \u201cI Love Paris in the Spring.\u201d But today the city\u2019s weather may be less enchanting, and the change can\u2019t be dismissed as a freak storm or hot spell. \u201cHeatwaves, heavy rains, droughts, more limited water resources\u201d are the new normal for the 21st<\/sup> century, says the City of Light\u2019s award-winning plan for how it will adapt to a changing climate.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n Should travel guides for cities revise their weather forecasts for voyagers, which are based on historical trends, and start reporting scientifically forecastr changes in the climate?<\/p>\n Should they report that Washington, D.C. expects to have 70 to 80 dangerously hot days every year?<\/p>\n That Miami believes that rising sea levels due to global warming will, in the words of the city\u2019s mayor, \u201cmake large areas of South Florida uninhabitable\u201d?<\/p>\n That Boston anticipates summers that may be as hot as those of Birmingham, Alabama, roughly 1,000 miles\/1,700 kilometers to the south, and that rising oceans could regularly inundate parts of the city?<\/p>\n That Berlin and Venice, favorite destinations for tourists from China, now the world\u2019s largest market of travelers, will be getting much wetter and hotter?<\/p>\n That the peach blossom festival in Shanghai and cherry blossom festival in Washington, D.C., rites of spring cherished by millions of people, will have to be celebrated weeks earlier than usual due to global warming?<\/p>\n That Mexico City is heating up and this has increased the city\u2019s notorious air pollution that causes hospitalizations and even death?<\/p>\n That Las Vegas, a major U.S. destination, is becoming hotter, with summer temperatures predicted to reach 123\u00b0 <\/strong>Fahrenheit\/50\u00b0<\/strong> Celsius and droughts are expected to last longer?<\/p>\n That sea-level rise could leave large sections of coastal cities\u2014Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans, New York City, Ho Chi Minh City, Mumbai, Shanghai, and many others\u2014below the water line?<\/p>\n Or that Cairo, Dubai, and other cities in the Middle East and North Africa face extreme heat and drought that could render them uninhabitable?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Travel guides tell the millions of people who visit Paris every year that the spring season there offers warm weather, flowers, and local produce\u2014a great time to ascend the Eiffel Tower, visit the Louvre\u2019s art treasures, and stroll along the Seine River. Not so in the spring of 2016. Three days of heavy, almost nonstop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cities","category-adaptation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1756"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1757,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1756\/revisions\/1757"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}