CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Ohio likes to think of itself as a place apart — a pocket of serenity in a country battered by hurricanes, wildfires and drought.

Our summers can be muggy and our winters long, but the world’s most headline-grabbing climate catastrophes happen elsewhere. People in Phoenix bake in triple-digit heat for weeks on end. Californians flee firestorms. Coastal towns brace for the next monster hurricane.

That sense of insulation is comforting in our comparably temperate oasis. It’s also dangerously misleading. Climate change is finding us here — in flooded basements, sweltering classrooms, buckling roads, sewage warnings at Edgewater Beach after an overnight deluge. The damage may not roar in all at once, but it’s arriving in steady and costly waves.

Cleveland.com reporter Pet

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