In India and Bangladesh, millions braced for Cyclone Amphan, which meteorologists described as the most powerful storm on record to hit the Bay of Bengal.

The southeastern United States, meanwhile, faced Tropical Storm Arthur, the eighth storm this decade to form before June 1, the historic start of hurricane season. Scientists say this is a symptom of warming oceans and a preview of what’s to come as temperatures increase globally. 

In the South Pacific, the island nations of Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu are struggling to recover after the powerful Cyclone Harold destroyed homes in April and the pandemic hampered rebuilding efforts.   

The storms were hardly the only global warming-linked events to stir panic as public health officials struggled to contain the virus and prepare for another wave of infections.

The worst flooding in three generations displaced 100,000 Kenyans earlier this month as hundreds of billions of locusts swamped East Africa, threatening severe food shortages across the region.

Last week, an unusual heat wave settled over the Arctic, elevating temperatures to the highest levels for this time of year since record keeping began in 1958. That could jump-start Greenland’s melt season by two weeks, according to two reports in the Washington Post. One climate scientist in Denmark called the warming “quite extraordinary.” 

Extreme droughts parched parts of Northern California, Oregon, South Texas, some Great Plains states and the Northern Mariana Island, a US territory in the Pacific, as of last week, according to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln national drought tracker. 

In Siberia, where flames charred the world’s largest forest for months last summer, the hottest April on record once again reduced the northern Russian region to a tinderbox.

In Canada, images of a wildfire spreading quickly across farmland showed a horizon glowing orange with flames and black with smoke.

Wildfires torched parts of the United States, too. In the Florida Panhandle, several fires forced hundreds to evacuate earlier this month. In Southern Utah, a fire sparked by a vehicle and spread by high winds forced the evacuation of nearly two dozen homes. 

It’s difficult to establish causal relationships between climate change and individual storms, heat waves and fires. But a study published Monday by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Wisconsin at Madison found that planetary warming over the last 40 years increased the likelihood of tropical cyclones becoming major hurricanes by 8 percent per decade.

NOAA’s annual Arctic report card, meanwhile, confirmed that the northern polar region is warming year after year roughly twice as fast as the rest of the world. And a growing body of research shows that fires are likely to be worse and more frequent as the planet heats up and governments fail to curb homebuilding near at-risk woodlands.