Never such a hot day. Never such a hot week. Never such a hot month. World heat records keep falling – and by wide margins. The oceans are exceptionally hot, and the South Pole has never had so little sea ice. Big chance that 2023 will be the warmest year on record [1].

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are being warned. Drink plenty of water, and do not go out at the heat’s peak. In the US, there are calls to include “smoke forecasts” in the weather forecast as the smoke from unprecedentedly fierce Canadian wildfires returned. It already enveloped New York in June in a toxic orange glow [2].

In July, Italy reported a settimana infernale (a week from hell) [3]. Greece evacuated 19,000 people because of ongoing fires in Rhodes. Cities in China opened their shelters so people could find refreshments. On the news, we see floods in India, the US, Japan, South Korea, Afghanistan, and closer to home, in Slovenia. The weather phenomenon El Niño is driving temperatures up further this year. However, behind that natural variation is a global trend: extremes will increase as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases [1].

Because weather is inherently inconsistent, climate scientists used to be cautious about directly connecting individual weather extremes and overall warming. The world is too complex; therefore, you can never say extreme weather is entirely and solely caused by climate change. For example, a heat wave is not just caused by high temperatures (more likely due to climate warming), but there must also be a high-pressure area. If an area dries out, a heat wave becomes more likely. So does if there is a lot of asphalt [4].

Coincidence and local conditions also play an important role in heavy rains, floods, droughts and fires. Who is most vulnerable is not determined by climate but by policy and poverty [4]. Nowadays, climate scientists can calculate for each extreme weather event what the contribution of global warming was and what role natural variation played. Their findings show that the world would not have looked so battered in the summers if we had not stoked the planet 1.2 degrees warmer [5].

Fig. 1: Attributing extreme weather to climate change. Source: Carbon Brief

We also know that some recent temperatures would have been downright impossible without human-caused warming. The trend is inevitable: climate warming is making disruptive outliers more likely and severe. Climate scientists sometimes cannot believe the extremes we now see in summer, even though they predicted that more unprecedented extremes would occur [1].

We can expect more extreme heat, heavy rainfall and periods of unprecedented drought in the coming decades. When floods or droughts occur in the future, they will be more severe and damaging than today, thanks to climate change.

The summers of the future will resemble today’s, but more extreme and disruptive. People sheltering inside from heat and smoke or fleeing from water and fire, cities, fields and stables hit by floods. Outbreaks that are now expected once every three hundred years will be commonplace on 20 per cent of the earth’s surface by 2040 [1].

Humanity must adapt to the new climate reality, and we are already doing so. Better predictions, warnings, behavior modification, and air conditioning save lives but can never entirely remove the pain. Moreover, never forget poor communities that contributed least to the problem but are hit hardest. They cannot turn on the air conditioning. Neither can fish. Nor can crops. Without substantially reducing emissions and CO₂ in the atmosphere, we will continue mopping [1].

Hence, climate change is not an abstract or future problem – it is an accumulation of extremes and pulverized records, often with profound effects that continue for the coming years. Harvests become slimmer, and food supplies may be jeopardized. Care and education are disrupted, and people lose loved ones, homes, income and land. Not in the future, but now. Last summer in Europe, 61,000 people met an early death due to extreme heat [6]. In Pakistan, millions are still recovering from last year’s floods – while new floods and heat waves are already ravaging the country. And still, far from all the damage caused by warming is making the news [1].

With rapid, massive and far-reaching sustainability, we can ensure that warming does not get much further out of hand. Enough goals and ambitions have been set. What matters now is their implementation. And in the run-up to the next elections, voters can judge parties on this issue. We are not defenceless against global warming. Optimism about the sustainable revolution is justified, but warming only stops when emissions stop. Thus, no “new normal” for now. It will get worse before it gets better [1].

This article is part of the project “PILLOLE D’ACQUA PIANA: seminari itineranti, blog e podcast per una gestione sostenibile delle risorse idriche in Piana Rotaliana” carried out by ECONTROVERTIA APS and supported by Fondazione Caritro (Prot. no. U445.2023/SG.386 of April 23, 2023).

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References:

[1] Mommers, J. (2023, 23 July). Extreme hitte in de zomer het ‘nieuwe normaal’? Nee, weersextremen nemen toe tot de CO2-uitstoot stopt. Retrieved from https://decorrespondent.nl/14685/extreme-hitte-in-de-zomer-het-nieuwe-normaal-nee-weersextremen-nemen-toe-tot-de-co2-uitstoot-stopt/3ad9e499-4cad-032f-2c75-887013f3a713

[2] Gamio, L., Levitt, Z., Shao, E. & Khurana, M. (2023, 4 August). Tracking Heat Across the World. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/world/global-heat-map-tracker.html

[3] Bettiza, S. & Gregory, J. (2023, 19 July). Europe heatwave: Nearly all major Italian cities on red heat alert. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66242277\

[4] Otto, F. E., Zachariah, M., Saeed, F., Siddiqi, A., Kamil, S., Mushtaq, H., […] & Clarke, B. (2023). Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan. Environmental Research: Climate, 2(2), 025001. https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-5295/acbfd5

[5] Pearce, R., Prater, T. & Goodman, J. (2022, 4 August). Mapped: How climate change affects extreme weather around the world. Retrieved from https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affects-extreme-weather-around-the-world/

[6] Ballester, J., Quijal-Zamorano, M., Méndez Turrubiates, R. F., Pegenaute, F., Herrmann, F. R., Robine, J. M., […] & Achebak, H. (2023). Heat-related mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022. Nature medicine, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-023-02419-z

Cover- and preview image: Dramatic sunset. Free source picture by garten-gg on Pixabay.