For the second time in 90 days, Mother Nature battered the electricity infrastructure of the region, and people were left without electricity for days. Whether the thunderstorms that ripped through the area were tornadoes or straight-line winds, it is clear that they were strong enough to snap rows of mature trees like twigs and leave them tossed about like some perverse, gigantic game of pick-up sticks.

For a couple of hours on May 15, people in Narrowsburg could not leave the hamlet in their cars because all the roads out on the New York side were blocked by trees and/or wires. The bridge to Pennsylvania was open, but River Road on the other side was impassible and without communication; for a time it was unknowable whether the route to Honesdale was clear.

This is about 10 weeks after thousands in the region lost power—some for up to 10 days—to the double-barreled snowstorms of March.

Welcome to the new and still evolving normal. Climate scientists are hesitant to link any particular weather event to global climate change, but almost all of them say that global climate change will produce more “extreme” weather events. The storms in the spring of 2018 are the very picture of extreme.

The recognition by climate scientists that earth’s climate is changing are not new. A 2014 report from the National Climate Assessment, which was produced by climate experts and a Federal Advisory Committee and federal agencies, found that heavy downpours and increased precipitation could be expected in the Northeast, a region that includes New York and Pennsylvania.

And that’s just one of several impacts that climate change will bring. The report says, “Heat waves, coastal flooding, and river flooding will pose a growing challenge to the region’s environmental, social, and economic systems. This will increase the vulnerability of the region’s residents, especially its most disadvantaged populations.

“Infrastructure will be increasingly compromised by climate-related hazards, including sea level rise, coastal flooding, and intense precipitation events.”

The electricity infrastructure needed to operate modern homes and businesses has twice been taken down by “intense precipitation events,” and we have a federal report, paid for by taxpayer dollars that says we should have expected this, and we should expect more in the future.

And there’s something in the report for the agriculture sector, too. “Agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised over the next century by climate change impacts. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity, which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate.”

As it turns out, there is a general consensus that the Northeast will experience the most rapid temperature rise of any region in the lower 48 states. According to a study by two researchers at the Northeast Climate Science Center, the rest of the planet will see an average two-degree Celsius temperature rise sometime between 2040 and 2050, and by that time temperatures in the Northeast will have risen three degrees Celsius.

Yes, cold records are still being set. This spring saw the coldest April in 20 years in this region, but the warm records beat the cold records by a margin of two to one, and that disparity is expected to grow.

Many local officials are committed to helping to mitigate the most serious impacts of global climate change, and officials at the state level in both New York and Pennsylvania are taking steps in that direction. It would be very helpful if President Donald Trump would read some of the federal publications available on the subject, and revisit his oft-stated claim that climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese.

Of course, there is some reason to think that he doesn’t really believe what he says, and only adopted his current position on climate change because he believes it’s politically useful. According to the fact-checking site Snopes.com (tinyurl.com/y7z9nbm9), before he started pushing the hoax theory of climate change in 2012, Trump signed onto a “2009 letter urging the U.S. government to invest in a ‘clean energy economy’ and pass legislation addressing the ‘immediate challenge’ of climate change.” But if that’s the case, it could even be good news. If the general population—that’s all of us—can persuade him that calling climate change a hoax is a political mistake, maybe we can persuade him to shift his position back. Try some phone calls, some snail mails—or maybe even some tweets.