World Climate Roundup: Jet Stream's Stall Over Asia Causes Chaos, Heat Builds in the West

The world is experiencing the climate in stark, unforgiving and eye opening ways. The jet stream has locked in place over Asia, producing extreme weather, day after day, while a dome of high pressure over the middle of the U.S. drives temperatures up in the Western hemisphere.

Russia is fighting smog from over 900 forest and peat bog fires that now threaten to go radioactive due to the dust leftover from the Chernobyl disaster. Pakistan is experiencing record flooding along the Indus River that has destroyed a significant number of crops and has left whole populations homeless with many dead. China's floods have presented themselves as massive slides of mud and rock. In Portugal, it's fires again. In Spain, it's jellyfish washing on shore in such massive numbers that over seven hundred beach goers were stung.

Long hot summer of fire and floods fit predictions

Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.

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