Steve Miller Band says extreme weather is so dangerous it’s canceling its tour

 

by Isabella O’Malley, AP

 Classic rocker Steve Miller has canceled his U.S. tour because he said severe weather including extreme heat and unpredictable flooding poses a danger to his band, its fans and crew.

The tour was set to kick off in August and run through early November, with nearly three dozen stops across the U.S. including cities in New York, Tennessee, Florida and California.

“The combination of extreme heat, unpredictable flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and massive forest fires make these risks for you our audience, the band and the crew unacceptable,” Miller, 81, said in a statement posted on the band’s social media accounts Wednesday. “You can blame it on the weather. … The tour is cancelled.”

The Steve Miller Band, formed in California in the 1960s, has hits including “The Joker” (1973) and “Abracadabra” (1982).

A band spokesperson declined to provide additional details about the cancellation.

Miller’s decision comes as a stretch of extreme weather in the U.S. has made headlines. A sweltering heat dome that baked much of the eastern half of the nation in June and deadly flash flooding in Texas are some of the recent rounds of extreme weather. 

 Scientists say climate change is fueling extreme weather, causing storms to unleash more rain and sending temperatures soaring to dangerous heights, making it harder to plan outdoor summer events. The atmosphere can hold higher amounts of moisture as it warms, resulting in storms dumping heavier amounts of rain compared with storms of the past. 

 

“Everyone wants to see their favorite artist, and that’s still possible. You just have to best mitigate weather risks,” said Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, a private weather company. “For example, the doors may open an hour late in order to ensure thunderstorms have moved sufficiently away from the venue so the show can go on safely.”

Music festivals have recently encountered extreme weather, resulting in cancellations or causing concertgoers to become ill. 

 

In June, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee was canceled partway through due to heavy rainfall. Last week, hundreds of people were treated for heat-related illnesses at the Rock the Country music festival in Kentucky, according to local officials.

In 2023, tens of thousands of Burning Man event attendees were stranded after heavy rain created thick mud in the Nevada desert and roads were temporarily closed.

A study published in 2020 reported climate change will increase the likelihood of extreme heat stress during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California.

Tropical storms and hurricanes will soon contribute to the turbulent weather as activity peaks between August and October, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Extreme weather cost $2tn globally over past decade, report finds. US suffered greatest economic losses, report commissioned by International Chamber of Commerce finds, followed by China and India.

 

A man cleans debris inside a gas station in Lakewood Park, Florida, in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. Photograph: Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images

 

Violent weather cost the world $2tn over the past decade, a report has found, as diplomats descend on the Cop29 climate summit for a tense fight over finance.

The analysis of 4,000 climate-related extreme weather events, from flash floods that wash away homes in an instant to slow-burning droughts that ruin farms over years, found economic damages hit $451bn across the past two years alone.

The figures reflect the full cost of extreme weather rather than the share scientists can attribute to climate breakdown. They come as world leaders argue over how much rich countries should pay to help poor countries clean up their economies, adapt to a hotter world and deal with the damage done by increasingly violent weather.

“The data from the past decade shows definitively that climate change is not a future problem,” said John Denton, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which commissioned the report. “Major productivity losses from extreme weather events are being felt in the here and now by the real economy.”

The report found a gradual upward trend in the cost of extreme weather events between 2014 and 2023, with a spike in 2017 when an active hurricane season battered North America. The US suffered the greatest economic losses over the 10-year period, at $935bn, followed by China at $268bn and India at $112bn. Germany, Australia, France and Brazil all made the top 10.

When measured a person, small islands such as Saint Martin and the Bahamas saw the greatest losses.

Fire, water, wind and heat have wiped more and more dollars off government balance sheets as the world has grown richer, people have settled in disaster-prone regions, and fossil fuel pollution has baked the planet.

But until recent years, scientists struggled to estimate the extent of the role that humans played by warping extreme weather events with planet-heating gas.

Climate breakdown was responsible for more than half of the 68,000 heat deaths during the scorching European summer of 2022, a study found last month, and doubled the chance of the extreme levels of rainfall that hammered central Europe this September, an early attribution study found. In some other cases, researchers found only mild effects or did not observe a climate link at all.

Ilan Noy, a disaster economist at Victoria University of Wellington, who was not involved in the ICC study, said its numbers align with previous research he had done but cautioned that the underlying data did not capture the full picture. “The main caveat is that these numbers actually miss the impact where it truly matters, in poor communities and in vulnerable countries.”

A study Noy co-wrote last year estimated the costs of extreme weather attributable to climate breakdown at $143bn a year, mostly due to loss of human life, but was limited by data gaps, particularly in Africa.