From a koala’s daring escape from an Australian river to the futuristic remake of the Volkswagen bus, here’s your wrap of travel news that has everyone talking this week.
‘Climate chaos’ blamed for Hurricane Harvey, floods in South Asia
With Houston and other parts of southeastern Texas left devastated by Hurricane Harvey this week, commentators have started pointing the finger at climate change. With many areas receiving over 40 inches of rain in just a four-day period, Harvey is the wettest tropical cyclone on record for the US, has left 30,000 people without homes, and has caused at least 45 deaths. “For large countries like the United States, we can expect further rainfall records—and not just for hurricanes,” Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford told The Guardian. “For the globe, we’ll see heat and extreme rainfall records fall for the foreseeable future.”
The United Nations reports that at least 41 million people in Nepal, Bangladesh and India have been directly affected by South Asia’s summer floods, and over 1,000 people have been killed. The monsoon rains that caused the floods were unprecedented for the region. “Climate scientists have been predicting for years that climate change would lead to more frequent and more extreme weather events; evidence now abounds that they were right,” lamented Kate Wheeling for the Pacific Standard. “The flooding in Texas and South Asia should be a wake-up call that forces officials to curtail climate change-causing carbon emissions enough to prevent its worst effects.”
