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If it seems like the weather has been all sort of unhinged in your corner of the world in recent years , you in all probability are n’t just imagining things .

So says the September 2012 edition of National Geographic Magazine . The storied publication take a hard look at the extreme weather events that have at time flash-frozen , bake or drowned various parts of the human race over the last several long time .

Our amazing planet.

A monster dust storm barrels toward Phoenix, Ariz.

In acover story titled " Weather Gone Wild,“the magazine publisher offer firsthand accounts of the devastating floods that strike Nashville in 2011 , stories of prolonged droughts in Texas , and a laundry list of other weather disasters across the globe .

" What ’s going on ? " writes writer Peter Miller . " Are these utmost events signal of a dangerous , homo - made shift in Earth ’s climate ? Or are we just going through a natural stretchability of bad luck ? The short answer is : plausibly both . "

The story is accompanied bya gallery of sensational exposure of the utmost conditions , such as a shot of a towering dust storm engulfing Phoenix and an up - closelipped look-alike of a tornado tear across a landscape painting .

weather extremes, extreme weather

A monster dust storm barrels toward Phoenix, Ariz.

Miller explains some of the large - scale of measurement climatical players behind the recent spate of extreme weather , such as El Niño and La Niña , but also bespeak to ball-shaped heating as a factor .

This twelvemonth the United States has certainly seen its middling share of uttermost weather .

Gulf Coast residents are still reeling afterslow - moving Hurricane Isaacinundated the region with sheet of rain and send ocean water hasten ashore .

The September edition of National Geographic Magazine is available on the iPad.

The September edition of National Geographic Magazine is available on the iPad.

And although that storm certainly dropped vast amounts of rain , it ’s not absolved whether the sudden waterspout will heal the utmost drouth that has gripped the Midwest .

In the face of some scarey statistics about the cost — both in life and in dollar sign — of extreme weather , Miller holds out some hope for the future . He writes that if humans rein in in fossil fuel use to slow the pace of global warming , and make sound option about where to build , utmost conditions does n’t have to take such a dense cost .

A photograph of the flooding in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on April 4.

A pedestrial runs down a sidewalk in New York City during a bout of torrential rain.

Volunteers and residents clear up wreckage after mobile home was hit by a tornado on March 16, 2025 in Calera, Alabama.

a satellite image of a hurricane cloud

a firefighter wearing gear stands on a hill looking out at a large wildfire

an image of the stars with many red dots on it and one large yellow dot

A lightning "mapper" on the GOES-16 satellite captured images of the megaflash lightning bolt on April 29, 2020, over the southeastern U.S.

In this illustration, men are enthralled by ball lightning, observed at the Hotel Georges du Loup, near Nice. To this day, ball lightning remains mysterious.

The "wildfires" in this image are actually Orion�s Flame Nebula and its surroundings captured in radio waves. The image was taken with the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), located in Chile�s Atacama Desert.

In this aerial view of Mayfield, Kentucky, homes are shown badly destroyed after a tornado ripped through the area overnight Friday, Dec. 10, 2021.

Caught on high-speed video, lightning streamers of opposite polarity approach and connect in this sequence of video frames, slowed by more than 10,000-fold. The common streamer zone appears in the last two frames before the whiteout of the lightning flash. This lasted about 0.00003 seconds at full speed

Tropical Storm Theta

An image comparing the relative sizes of our solar system�s known dwarf planets, including the newly discovered 2017 OF201

an illustration showing a large disk of material around a star

a person holds a GLP-1 injector

A man with light skin and dark hair and beard leans back in a wooden boat, rowing with oars into the sea

an MRI scan of a brain

A photograph of two of Colossal�s genetically engineered wolves as pups.

An illustration of a hand that transforms into a strand of DNA