US southern states suffer unprecedented heatwave • Balkan storms kill five

US correspondent Thomas Rueb traveled to Miami to report on a historic heat wave, which you can read here. Now he has been stuck there for days, as his flight to New York is constantly canceled due to extreme weather conditions both at the place of departure and arrival. We call it.

Can you still see the humor in the situation or have you lost your laughter?

‘Yes, of course, there’s a certain poetic synchrony in the fact that I’m doing a story about extreme weather, and now I’m stuck because of… extreme weather. You are part of what you write. I was supposed to leave on Sunday, but at the moment there are pretty severe weather systems all over the United States. And in the New York area, where I live, as well as surrounding states like Massachusetts and Delaware, there have been tropical storms with massive rainfall.

“And just as it cleared up in New York, it started to storm here in Miami with lightning like I’ve never seen. At least hundreds of travelers were stranded, including many many journalists.

Are you still coming home?

“My flight was supposed to be in a few hours, but the second you called there was the deep bass of a thunderstorm. We’ll see, there was a warning about that too. Lots of water s It’s evaporated from the sea, so it’s hiding. Somehow it doesn’t seem more than logical.

“What is really troubling is that you see, in each place in a different form, how vulnerable the country is to climate change.”

Is this extreme climate already politicized?

‘It wasn’t so bad. Even the conservative Fox News channel, which should know absolutely nothing about climate action, can only conclude that something extreme is going on. The extremes are so clear that the politicization isn’t too bad.

“The question is whether this will actually lead to a different policy. It’s true that 70% of Americans experience temperatures above 33 degrees and one in three are now warned of the consequences of extreme weather. Southern and Southwestern states have been hardest hit, such as California, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. In these desert states, temperatures are rising so high they are becoming deadly and water is becoming scarcer. In Las Vegas, the temperature rises to 50 degrees.

Dylan van Bekum