They are screaming from the scorching streets of Texas, Florida, Spain and China, with a severe heat wave also building in Phoenix and the Southwest in the coming days.
They flow from the oceans, where temperatures have risen to levels considered “extreme.”
And they’re showing unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in Canada that are sending plumes of dangerous smoke into the United States.
Scientists say there is no question that this cacophony is caused by climate change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, have raised the Earth’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Unless humanity radically changes the way people travel, generate energy and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to rise by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which lays out the disasters that can make it happen. the calamities of the year seem mild.
The only question, scientists say, is when the alarms will finally be loud enough to wake people up.
“This is not the new normal,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “We don’t know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we stop burning fossil fuels…
The arrival of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the return of the El Niño weather pattern, which tends to raise global temperatures, contributed to this season of simultaneous extremes, Otto said. But the fact that these phenomena are occurring against a backdrop of human-caused climate change makes these disasters even worse than before.
What could have been a good day without climate change is now a deadly heat wave, he said. What was once a typical summer thunderstorm is now the cause of a catastrophic flood.
And a day that is usually warm for the planet – July 4 – this year was the hottest on record. The earth’s global average temperature of more than 17 degrees Celsius (62.6 Fahrenheit) is probably the warmest it has been in the last 125,000 years.
Otto is the co-leader of the World Weather Attribution network — a coalition of scientists who conduct rapid analysis to determine how climate change influences extreme weather events. Since 2015, the group has identified several heat waves, hurricanes, droughts and floods that have become more likely or worse due to human warming. Many events, including the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave that killed more than 1,000 people, were found to be “virtually impossible” in a world untouched by human greenhouse gas emissions.
At this point, the researchers say, the links between climate change and weather disasters are very clear. If the average temperature of the planet were higher, heat waves could reach unprecedented extremes. This is what happened in recent heat waves in southeast Asia, southern Europe and North Africa, researchers at the World Weather Attribution found.
When the temperature rises above about 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), or when it is accompanied by extreme humidity, it becomes more difficult for people’s bodies to stay cool through sweat. Children and the elderly, as well as outdoor workers and people with pre-existing medical conditions, are particularly vulnerable.
This week, as more than 100 million people in the southern United States face those exact conditions, climate researchers like Jennifer Francis fear that rising temperatures could be deadly.
“We’re seeing temperatures above what can support life,” said Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “Some places are becoming uninhabitable.”
“All these records are being broken left and right, and my hope is that people will start putting it in their heads,” he continued. “These things should not happen. All of this is connected to the fact that we are warming the planet.”
The warmer the air, the more water it can hold — turning the atmosphere into a thirsty sponge that absorbs moisture from plants and soil. This exacerbates the drought and sets the stage for wildfires like those that ravaged Canada this summer. Temperatures in the Northwest Territories soared to 100 degrees over the weekend, fueling wildfires that were already out of control.
The flip side of this phenomenon is that a warmer, wetter atmosphere also increases the amount of rain that can fall during a storm. In Vermont and New York this week, about two months’ worth of rain fell in just two days — much faster than it could be absorbed by the region’s saturated soil and mountainous terrain.
The effects of extreme rainfall are especially devastating in poorer countries, where people and governments have fewer resources to cope. Rachel Bezner Kerr, a sociologist at Cornell University who works in farming communities in Malawi, lost two close friends this spring when torrential floods hit the north of the country.
Penjani Kanyimbo and Godfrey Mbizi drowned while conducting surveys for a sustainable agriculture nonprofit, Soils, Food and Healthy Communities.
“It’s one of those bitter ironies,” Bezner Kerr said. “They are trying to work on a solution. … But these parts of the world that contribute least to the problem face many of the worst effects.
The severity of recent extremes on land is matched only by scorching conditions in the world’s oceans. The global average sea surface temperature hit a record high this spring, and it remains about one degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) higher than average for this part of the summer.
“In a way it’s more worrisome” than the record-warm atmosphere, said Ted Scambos, a polar researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While the land – and the air above it – warms and cools quickly, the oceans warm more slowly.
“This means we’re storing a lot of heat in the ocean,” Scambos said. “While we wait [to act on climate change]it will take longer for ocean temperatures to return to anything normal.”
In the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, warmer ocean temperatures will likely add fuel to this year’s hurricane season, making storms wetter and stronger.
And near the South Pole, where Scambos works, the warmer oceans seem to disrupt the flow of cold water that normally surrounds Antarctica. This February, for the second year in a row, sea ice extent around the continent hit a record low. Today, although Antarctica is plunged into the bitter cold of the polar night months, the ice is recovering very slowly. That’s bad news for Antarctica’s glaciers, which need sea ice as a protective buffer from battering ocean waves.
“This is unlike any behavior we’ve seen before in the Antarctic sea ice world,” Scambos said.
He struggled to find words to express what it felt like to watch the planet drift into such uncharted territory. “This…” he began. “Ahh…”
He shook his head. “This is more or less the picture we’ve been portraying for decades,” he said. “And as long as we put up with it, we’re going to be in this kind of climate and it’s going to get worse, until we address the problem.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which includes hundreds of the world’s leading climate experts — has called for countries to roughly halve emissions by the end of the decade and eliminate global warming pollution by mid century. Humans can only emit about 500 more gigatons of carbon dioxide to have a warming rate below a manageable threshold.
But global carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high last year, and governments continue to approve new fossil fuel projects that make it nearly impossible for the world to meet its climate goals. , the scientists said.
Bezner Kerr recalled his dismay at seeing President Biden approve the Willow Project — an oil development in Alaska designed to generate 239 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over its 30-year life — shortly after on the death of his Malawian comrades.
“It’s just like, what does it take for people to see that we’re making an unlivable planet?” he said. “I feel that there is no political will in this country to face the reality of what is happening.”
Then smoke from wildfires in Canada descended on his hometown of Ithaca, NY, staining the sky orange, and Bezner Kerr’s friends and colleagues began asking him for help processing their fear.
Perhaps, he thought, this was a turning point. Maybe people are finally realizing: The alarm bells are ringing for us.
Scott Dance contributed to this report.
