By Christopher J. White
A succession of record-breaking natural disasters have swept the globe in recent weeks. There have been serious floods in China and western Europe, heatwaves and drought in North America and wildfires in the sub-Arctic.
An annual report on the UK’s weather indicates extreme events are becoming commonplace in the country’s once mild climate. August 2020 saw temperatures hit 34°C on six consecutive days across southern England, including five sticky nights where the mercury stayed above 20°C. In the future, British summers are likely to see temperatures greater than 40°C regularly, even if global warming is limited to 1.5°C.
The Canadian national temperature record was shattered in June 2021 meanwhile, with 49.6°C recorded in Lytton, British Columbia – a town that was all but destroyed by wildfires a few days later.
Many of these events have shocked climate scientists. The Lytton temperature record, for example, was head-and-shoulders above those set during previous heatwaves in the region. Some scientists are beginning to worry they might have underestimated how quickly the climate will change. Or have we just misunderstood extreme weather events and how our warming climate will influence them?
Everything is connected
Floods and wildfires are not discrete events: they are the result of numerous interconnections and feedback loops in the climate system. Take the mid-July flash floods in London. These were caused by summer rainstorms, which were in turn driven by warm air rising from the Earth’s surface that built up during the preceding heatwave, stacking the deck for the downpours that were to follow. The wildfires raging in the western US, meanwhile, are a catastrophe whose stage was set by long-term drought.
The Earth’s climate is complex, dynamic and chaotic, involving interactions and energy fluxes between the land, ocean and atmosphere. The idea that scientists can study one part of this system in relative isolation is flawed. But it was not always possible to model or understand all of these complexities, so scientists had to break them into manageable pieces in order to fit them into linear systems and models. These were often split across the scientific disciplines that most of us are still somewhat confined to today, such as atmospheric sciences, hydrology, Earth systems sciences, or engineering.
As a result, we are used to treating each natural hazard independently from another. But it takes more than rain to create a flood, and more than a spark to start a wildfire. All of the elements of our climate system – and the hazards it produces – are connected in one way or another.
It’s not that these interactions and combinations are new, it’s just that we haven’t always thought about them in such a joined-up way. It may seem shocking when disaster follows disaster, seemingly in increasingly quick succession. This is because we are trained to think about weather hazards singularly, focused on one type – a drought or flood, for example – at a time. Just about all risk assessments underestimate the risks associated with interconnected events.
But as our climate continues to warm, its baseline is shifting. How these hazards and their causes interact is therefore also changing fast, challenging the very definition of extreme weather events.
The interconnections between extreme weather events have, until recently, been largely overlooked by the science community. But there is now growing international research tasked with mapping these complex relationships.
Compound events – a term only adopted by the IPCC in 2012 – describe the outcomes of a combination of causes that ultimately surpass the capacity of an underlying system to cope. These include events where a hazard like a wildfire was made worse by something which had preconditioned the environment, like drought.
Wariness of these compound events should influence the way we live our lives in a warmer world. More research across disciplines is needed, as well as new approaches to disaster risk assessment and climate change adaptation that look across all weather-driven hazards and their complex and changing interactions. Improvements in climate modelling mean we can do more of this type of science – the climate crisis dictates that we must.
Christopher J White is head of the Centre for Water, Environment, Sustainability & Public Health at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.
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C’mon man says
Natural disasters both here and worldwide, collapsing buildings, disease plaguing the world. I think we’re getting close.
Matthew 3:2.
Repent- for the kingdom of heaven is near.
Jimbo99 says
Exactly, I can’t afford a beachfront condo in Surfside, FL on what my mismanaged poverty has been (and I lived in Miami-Dade for 20 years of that misery too), not that I would want to be stacked on top of my neighbors. So that building collapse is not my problem. They didn’t want me living among them anyway. But I’ll bet they find a way to share the loss with the rest of us in a rate hike. If they aren’t closing the borders to illegals, more people means more problems & higher costs, and I doubt my income would ever increase enough to offset that. The experts aren’t experts, it’s an ongoing study/grant that the majority of us will never get paid for as participants, just like the Covid pandemic. That’s just the way the system works.
James M. Mejuto says
Amazing, the entire planet going through dramatic changes in weather patterns, entirely because our
insensitivity and lack of conviction . This economic/political run-away capitalism is the driver of
all these changes, yet those in power in gov’t , the ‘decision makers’ couldn’t care less.
The Republicans in Congress, both Houses will not lift a finger to work with our President , worrying
instead, their next election bid. Money in politics has to be eliminated !
Unless this nation works together on infrastructure, ridding this planet of mining and oil interests, we
will no longer have a place to live.
Jimbo99 says
Wow, 2016-2021 D’s expended quite a bit of effort to impeach & overthrow a sitting POTUS and the R’s aren’t working with Biden-Harris ? Boo hoo ?
The summer here in Palm Coast/Flagler county has actually been milder because of the rainier June & July we’ve had. We had the threat of a storm as a hurricane that went thru the Gulf in 2021, then again, July 2020 there was that same threat of a storm. We’ve been getting these for decades and the timing of it year on year has been about the same time frame, yet not to the exact date.
Here’s my scientific take on it. The planet Earth does not care about the parasites on it called the human race. It really doesn’t need us or any form of life for that matter, so it will continue to evolve. Spending more money will not solve any of these problems. We have too many folks that want a guarantee in life that nobody has or will ever extend as a warranty. FPL wants to schedule solar panels on the neighborhood roofing. If they’re coming around with a proposal, it’s not worth the fantasy of a solar rebate they offer that they determine the benefit for anyone. If they want to use my 1,700 sq ft of roofing on this property, I’ll lease that space to them & they can maintain the roof, maintain their infrastructure & pay me additionally to profit from a solar program. Maybe I’m learning a bit late in life, but if Elon Musk can become & remain a billionaire building Tesla electric cars that I’ll never be able to afford in my lifetime, then I think I should also be a billionaire for the sun rising & setting for sunlight hours every day too.
I just looked at the year on year FPL billing for the last bill I had at FPL. The average daily high for the same billing period last year was 89* F, My most recent bill period that same average daily high is 87* F. June 9th thru July 9th for 2020 & 2021, the global warming wasn’t supported by these Chicken Little/Sky is falling down theories. Imagine that the 3rd hottest month of the year and average daily highs in June were 2* F cooler. FPL provides these graphs with labels to analyze. I used fewer kWh’s this year than in 2020 & paid more. Tells me they raised the electric rate. See this is exactly what I’m relaying here. You conserve power, use less and they still find a way to charge you more for that lower power consumption use. I’m done with liars telling me they’re saving us money, that ends up costing us more money to implement and get the same service we’ve always had. We have always done it their way, start doing it the right way, that way we won’t live in mismanaged poverty.
deb says
Interesting climate changes have been taking place even when Democrats were in the white house. Its Congress in total. Until term limits take place , this country will die a death caused by lame stupidity and old age thinking all while protecting their egos.