The extreme weather comes as a federal court has temporarily blocked oil and gas drilling on 300,000 acres of federal land in Wyoming, saying the Interior Department failed to take the impact of climate change into consideration when issuing leases. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras of Washington, D.C., wrote, “Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land before irretrievably committing to that drilling.”